The right to education has an established legacy in international agreements and debates, but has nonetheless proved difficult to achieve across the countries of the world. This paper explores why this might be so. It begins by locating the current architecture of rights in Enlightenment philosophy and the political and legal formations of…

The end of the Cold War ushered in a paradigmatic shift in international development discourse whereby a human rights-based approach to development was generated. This shift has stimulated the pegging of international development policy to the objectives of the human rights regime. However, in attempting to unify development and human rights…

I use Ian Hacking's views to explore ways of classifying people, exploiting his distinction between indifferent kinds and interactive kinds, and his accounts of how we "make up" people. The natural kind/essentialist approach to indifferent kinds is explored in some depth. I relate this to debates in psychiatry about the existence of mental…

The aim of this article is to outline the basis for a comprehensive account of educational rights. It begins by acknowledging the difficulties posed by diversity, and defends a conception of universal human rights that limits parental educational discretion. Against the backdrop of the literature of public reason and fair equality of opportunity,…

Harry Brighouse has advanced an intriguing set of arguments about the place of human flourishing in liberal educational theory. In his book "On Education", Brighouse argues that autonomy can be justified instrumentally because it promotes flourishing. He links flourishing to the psychological concept of "subjective wellbeing" and he spells out the…

This article discusses the contributions to this special issue of "Teacher Education Quarterly." At the core of all the contributions is the compellingly urgent realization that humanity is facing, and must deal with, enormous ecological and social problems and challenges. This situation has created an urgent and compelling need centered…

Building a strategic direction for education ultimately rests on the extent, to which we resolve the key issue addressed by UNESCO's International Commission on Education for the 21st Century (the Delors Report): what kind of education is needed to create the kind of world, we want to emerge in the future? Certainly, globalisation brings with it…

This article has four sections. First, the author presents a theoretical discussion of the different explanations regarding the explosion of education after World War II. She explains how the actor-network theory--a theory of knowledge and of agency--enables people to understand the formation of the education-economic growth black box. The…

This paper uses the device of imagining Education personnel at the World Bank engaging in study and discussion that causes them to rethink their 1999 Education Sector Strategy document. The Bank's educators discuss issues that lead them to see that the World Bank's assumptions of human capital theory are deficient. Having studied the severe…