A recent article on education in China succeeded in giving a fresh tweak to the arguments concerning whether aptitude or achievement testing is more likely to promote equality of educational opportunity. In 'The Diploma Disease' Ronald Dore expounded the view that aptitude testing is to be preferred for selection purposes on the grounds that it gives more weight to 'innate potential' (his term) than does achievement testing which produces results more affected by quality of schooling, an influence which is all (...) too variable, especially in emerging countries. Although shot through with considerable ambivalence, Dore's view could still be instrumental in persuading educational and political authorities in those countries that aptitude testing will do what he says it will do - 'make for greater equality of educational opportunity and be more effective in mobilizing all available talent'. And even if these authorities have never set eyes on Dore's book, there is sufficient evidence that some of them are acting as if they had taken Dore's view on board for it to be worth re-opening the question. It is argued here that Dore's position cannot be supported. (shrink)

A recent article on education in China succeeded in giving a fresh tweak to the arguments concerning whether aptitude or achievement testing is more likely to promote equality of educational opportunity. In ‘The Diploma Disease’ Ronald Dore expounded the view that aptitude testing is to be preferred for selection purposes on the grounds that it gives more weight to ‘innate potential’ (his term) than does achievement testing which produces results more affected by quality of schooling, an influence which is all (...) too variable, especially in emerging countries. Although shot through with considerable ambivalence, Dore's view could still be instrumental in persuading educational and political authorities in those countries that aptitude testing will do what he says it will do ‐ ‘make for greater equality of educational opportunity and be more effective in mobilizing all available talent’. And even if these authorities have never set eyes on Dore's book, there is sufficient evidence that some of them are acting as if they had taken Dore's view on board for it to be worth re‐opening the question. It is argued here that Dore's position cannot be supported. (shrink)

This paper examines three propositions: “First to arise within intellectual awareness is the notion of Being”; the human being is defined as “the rational animal”; and knowing involves “the complete return of the subject into itself.” Its starting point is an examination of what seems trivial: the letter ‘F’ in ‘First.’ It involves eidetic recognition of the alphabet and is identically the same, not only in different times and places and in different type-faces or hand-written form, but in differing media: (...) visual, audile, tactual. And eidetic recognition is also involved in the terms into which the letters or sounds or embossings enter, each of which is definable in terms of other terms which, in turn, are definable in other terms until we see that the whole itself is articulated in terms of the interlacing of meanings. What grounds such recognition is the openness to the whole introduced by the notion of being. The unrestrictedness of the openness is paralleled by the coemergence of the principle of noncontradiction which governs coherent discourse. In both sensory presentation and intellectual apprehension we are outside our spatial inside, with the things manifest in the environment and in terms of the world of public meaning expressed in language. The second part of the paper traces the various options for understanding the notion of being in the history of Western thought: Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Scotus, Spinoza, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. (shrink)

Philosophy develops the direction towards the Whole opened up by the Notion of Being that makes the mind to be a mind. It isgrounded in awe that can increase as inquiry continues, though it tends to fall back into the routines of its exercise, like every otherhuman activity. In a time when it is common to think of ourselves as just another combination of elements in the evolutionary universe,reflection upon our own awareness turns the tables on materialists by re-minding the (...) earliest phases called “mere matter” and setting the cosmos back into the encompassing realm of absolute Mystery. (shrink)