Murphy, Elysia Government funds should not be used to endorse religion in state schools. The presence of chaplains and scripture teachers in public schools diminishes the secularity of the state school system. Given the plethora of faith-based schools for families seeking a religious education, it is not unreasonable for non-religious families to expect a secular education from the government sector.

Analyses of market-based reforms of state schooling have occasionally acknowledged positional elements in parental demand, but none has fully examined their nature and implications. Contrary to the normal predictions of orthodox economic analysis, competition in positional markets can result in inefficient outcomes. Predominantly relying upon recent British experience, we examine the extent to which compulsory schooling can be viewed as a positional good and explore its implications for policy. In particular, we consider whether policies targeting increases in parental choice assist (...) a rise in the overall level of educational attainment. (shrink)

This paper reports the findings of a study comparing the public examination results at GCE advanced and advanced supplementary levels of pupils with assisted places in the independent sector and pupils in the state sector of similar ability. The examination entries and results of pupils with APs were compared with those of pupils who had gained an AP at the same school but had not attended that school; they had, instead, taken their A levels in the state sector. (...) After controlling for ability it was found that the AP pupils achieved a significantly higher total point score in their A/AS levels than the pupils in the state sector and that the average point score per examination entry was higher for AP than state pupils. The results suggest that there is an advantage in taking up an AP but the possibility cannot be ruled out that the advantage for AP pupils arises from factors other than their education in the independent sector. (shrink)

States commonly employ education policy to build a strong sense of citizenship within young people and to create types of citizens appropriate to the country. In Singapore the government created a policy to build citizenship through both policy statements and social studies in the school curriculum. In the context of a tightly controlled state regulating schooling through a highly controlled educational system, the government expected teachers to obey these policy documents, political statements and the prescribed curriculum. What do teachers (...) understand about citizenship in this context? In schools do teachers demonstrate independence of thought on citizenship education or do they acquiesce to government policy? This article reports on a small group of social studies teachers' understandings of citizenship and explores the nature of these understandings in the context of government policy. The study showed an unexpected diversity of conceptualization amongst Singaporean teachers with their understandings of citizenship located in four themes, namely a sense of identity, rights and responsibilities, participation, and national history. This response was unintended by government and reflects an independence of citizenship education landscape in schools, despite the tight policy and bureaucratic controls over teachers by the Singapore state. (shrink)

In arguing for government withdrawal from funding and regulating schooling, James Tooley claims that equality of opportunity in education implies only that all deserve an adequate minimum education. However, he concedes the 'abstract egalitarian thesis' that all should be treated with equal concern and respect. I show that this thesis indeed implies educational equality, and that Tooley's arguments against educational equality rest on a misunderstanding of the foundations of egalitarianism.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Walking the Bodhisattva Path/Walking the Christ PathU.S. Conference of Catholic BishopsCatholics and Buddhists brought together by Dharma Realm Buddhist Association, the San Francisco Zen Center, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) met 20-23 March 2003 in the first of an anticipated series of four annual dialogues. Abbot Heng Lyu, the monks and nuns, and members of the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association hosted the dialogue at the (...) City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Talmage, California. The community had transformed their Confucius Hall into a chapel, with a large, newly constructed wooden cross on a wall above an altar facing out from a raised platform, so the Catholic delegation would have a space for worship. A special poster announcing the theme of the conference, "Walking the Bodhisattva Path/Walking the Christ Path," showing a Buddhist dharma wheel at one foot of a bridge and a Celtic cross at the other foot, had been created by the hosting community.The daily schedule for the dialogue did not interfere with the monastic routine at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, which included early morning chanting (4:00-5:00 am), daily rituals in the Buddha Hall, and the single large meal for monastics before noon to which all participants were invited. Catholics and Buddhists meeting in the dialogue began each day with an optional forty-five minutes of quiet sitting together in the monastery meditation hall, each following their own form of meditation and prayer. There was a Eucharist on Friday and Saturday evenings for the Catholics and to which the Buddhists were invited, and additional meals of breakfast and supper throughout the meeting at the City's Jyun Kang Restaurant.Fourteen Buddhists and fourteen Catholics participated in the formal discussions. Each participant spoke on what it means to them to follow Christ or the way of the Bodhisattvas or enlightened beings. In addition to speaking, each participant distributed a short passage, usually from a traditional text, on this topic. Several passages from Master Dogen's Shobogenzo and the Gospel of John were among those shared by the group. Other passages shared were taken from the Avatamsaka Sutra and the Shurangama Sutra and from the other gospels and the writings of Zen master HakuinZenji, the Dalai Lama, Korean Zen Master I-sahn Hye-yeon, the teachings of Master [End Page 247] Hsuan Hua, Shantideva, Origen, St. Ignatius, St. Benedict, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, St. John of the Cross, and Chiara Lubich. A minute of silence separated the fifteen-minute segments for each presentation. With so large a group, most of the time in the formal sessions involved listening to series of presentations; however, during discussion periods the participants asked several challenging questions of one another.Some participants noted the tension they felt between belonging to a particular religious group and the need to let go of any consequential narrowness. The goal of the discussion was to promote understanding of the differences and similarities between Christianity and Buddhism. At one point, the participants noted several concerns about mutual enrichment: whether Buddhist methods can be separated from Buddhism and Christian methods from Christianity, and what specific aspects of Christian practice truly enrich Buddhists and which Buddhist practices likewise enrich Christians. Several times participants discussed their understanding of terms such as transformation, grace, the incarnation and the passion of Jesus, discernment of spirits, prayer, Buddha-nature, and related terms. There was consensus that Buddhists and Catholics can practically help one another regarding mental cultivation and religious precepts. They expressed this consensus in their choice of the topic forthe next dialogue, "Transformation of Hearts and Minds: Chan/Zen-Catholic Approaches to Precepts."The group agreed to reconvene in 2004 to respond to six presentations, three from each side, on different aspects of this topic.Chairing the sessions were Rev. Heng Sure for the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association, Rev. Taigen Dan Leighton for the San Francisco Zen Center, and Bishop John Webster for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Their three organizations are the sponsors of the Northern California Chan/Zen-Catholic Dialogue. Chan and Zen are respectively the Chinese and Japanese terms for the meditation school... (shrink)

In this article, I make a philosophical case for the state to fund religious schools. Ultimately, I shall argue that the state has an obligation to fund and provide oversight of all schools irrespective of their religious or non-religious character. The education of children is in the public interest and therefore the state must assume its responsibility to its future citizens to ensure that they receive a quality education. Still, while both religious schools and the polity have much to be (...) gained from direct funding, I will show that parents and administrators of these schools may have reasons to be diffident toward the state and its hypothetical interference. While the focus of the paper is primarily on the American educational context, the philosophical questions related to state funding and oversight of religious schools transcend any one national context . (shrink)

Examining in detail the work of consecration carried out by elite education systems, Bourdieu analyzes the distinctive forms of power—political, intellectual, bureaucratic, and economic—by means of which contemporary societies are governed.

A new explanation of the relation between schooling and work in the democratic, advanced industrial state emerges from this study that rejects both traditional views and the more recent Marxian perspective. Traditional views consider schools as autonomous institutions that are able to pursue the goals of equality and social mobility irrespective of the inequalities of capitalist society; the Marxian perspective views schools as serving the role of producing wage-labor for capitalistic exploitation. The authors suggest that the shortcomings of both views (...) are rooted in the fact that they do not recognize the true functions of the democratic, capitalist state. The state is seen as an arena for struggle between forces pushing for egalitarian, democratic reforms and those seeking to use the resources of the state for private capital accumulation. Depending on which side has primacy at the moment, schools will reflect one set of goals over the other. However, victory is never complete, and the tide of battle has shifted back and forth historically. The authors develop this theory through interpreting the dynamic relation between U.S. schools and the workplace. Based on this approach, they predict changes in both schooling and work as well as the forms that future conflicts between the contending forces are likely to take. (shrink)

__Modernising School Governance__ examines the impact of recent market-based reforms on the role of governors in the English state education system. A focus of the book concerns how government and non-government demands for ‘strong governance’ have been translated to mean improved performance management of senior school leaders and greater monitoring and disciplining of governors. This book addresses fundamental questions about the neoliberal logic underpinning these reforms and how governors are being trained and responsibilised in new ways to enhance (...) the integrity of these developments. Drawing on large-scale research conducted over three years, the book examines the impact of these reforms on the day to day practices of governors and the diminished role of democracy in these contexts. Wilkins also captures the economic and political rationalities shaping the conduct of governors at this time and traces these expressions to wider structural developments linked to depoliticisation, decentralisation and disintermediation. This book addresses timely and original issues concerning the role of corporate planning and expert handling to state education at a time of increased school autonomy, shrinking local government support/oversight, and tight, centralised accountability. It will appeal to researchers and postgraduate students in disciplines of education, sociology, political science, public policy and management. It will also be of interest to researchers and policy makers from countries with similar or emerging quasi-market education systems. (shrink)

This is the last of the four essays in Part II of the book on liberalism and traditionalist education; all four are by authors who would like to find ways for the liberal state to honour the self-definitions of traditional cultures and to find ways of avoiding a confrontation with differences. One of the tasks of the book is to separate out different kinds of affiliation and the extent to which the arguments made about cultural recognition can be extended to (...) other objects of affiliation. Mark Halstead’s chapter on schooling and cultural maintenance for religious minorities in the liberal state provides a catalogue of the different types of groups that are to be found in liberal societies, and the different kinds of cultural and educational claims that are typically attached to each of them. His definition of minority group is useful in conceptualizing many of the papers in the volume. The chapter falls into three sections: Section 10.1, which looks at four types of disadvantaged minorities, attempts to distinguish non-Western fundamentalist religious minorities living in the West from other minorities that may experience disadvantage of various kinds in liberal societies; Section 10.2, on religious minorities in the liberal state, explores some of the educational and other difficulties encountered by such religious minorities in more detail, and typical liberal responses; Section 10.3, on rethinking the liberal response, contains some proposals that are designed to meet the educational needs of both the liberal state and the religious minorities at the same time. (shrink)

The Modern School Movement traces the efforts made by the Anarchist movement to abolish all forms of authority and usher in a new society through a different form of education. Between 1910 and 1960 anarchists established more than twenty schools in the United States where children might study in an atmosphere of freedom and self-reliance in sharp contrast to the discipline of the traditional classroom. The prominent participants of this movement, including Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Alexander Berkman and Man (...) Ray are discussed. (shrink)

Despite a vast amount of research into school bullying and the widespread implementation of anti-bullying policies and programs, large numbers of students continue to report that they are routinely subjected to bullying by their peers. In this theoretical article, I argue that part of the problem is that there has been a lack of critical discussion of the theoretical foundations upon which such studies are based. Drawing on recent theoretical contributions within the field of school bullying, the work (...) of anthropologist James C. Scott, and the work of philosophers Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, I take particular issue with the notion of power that has long been a foundational pillar of bullying definitions. Utilizing a Foucauldian understanding of power, I argue that rather than focusing on the power imbalance involved in bullying relations, focus instead needs to shift onto the role that bullying plays in power relations. Reimagining Agamben’s figure of homo sacer as a victim of school bullying, I consider the ways in which some individuals are reduced to bare life and forced into a state of exception whereby social laws are no longer deemed applicable. The article concludes with a discussion of how this state of exception might be challenged. (shrink)

Originally published 1971, this volume unravels the complicated history of the religious question in British education. The background of the key Acts of Parliament which established the "dual" system – of Church and Local Authority school – is examined. The changing policies of different religious groupings are analyzed, and their outcome in legislation brought out.

To answer the question of whether school can become a non-adultist institution, this article examines the unequal adult–child (teacher–pupil) power relations that characterize school under the framework of bourgeois-capitalist society and that are upheld by certain functions, methods, norms and knowledge standards. Under the influence of the anti-authoritarian youth protest movements from the 1960s onwards, overt power in school (e.g. by means of corporal punishment) has been criticized and, in most countries, abolished. However, power imbalances between teachers (...) and pupils have not disappeared, but rather developed towards a more subtle, covert power, e.g. by framing certain expectations. The hierarchical top-down and one-way learning principles of school institutions are mostly left uncontested. This article does not content itself with simply stating that schools repeatedly reproduce adultism under these societal conditions, but also discusses possible strategies and interventions that could shift unequal power relations and ultimately overturn them. It looks at various concepts and alternative forms of education critical of adultism that have emerged since the beginning of the 20th century both within and outside the state school system. It further explores the contradictions that should be expected to arise in their implementation within the framework of existing educational institutions. Particular attention is paid to the respective possibilities for action on the part of teachers and pupils. We offer a decisive challenge to teachers to rethink how they deal with their power, which is always derived and fragile, and how they can contribute to pupils empowering themselves and significantly influence learning and decision-making processes at school. (shrink)

This is a work of normative political philosophy that seeks to identify the legitimate goals of public education policy in liberal democratic states and the implications of those goals for arguments about public funding and regulation of religious schools. ;The thesis of the first section is that the inferiority of certain types of religious school as instruments of civic education in a pluralist state would not suffice to justify liberal states in a general refusal to fund such schools. States (...) with no position on the value of autonomy for the good life would have to balance civic concerns against the preferences of religious parents who want to send their children to narrowly religious schools to shield them from exposure to ethical diversity. But, I argue, the principles of liberal democracy actually presuppose the value of autonomy. ;In the second section, I develop a conception of ethical autonomy and argue for its adoption as a public value. Autonomy, understood to entail distinctively rational reflection that must nonetheless inevitably be situated within an unchosen cultural context, can be publicly justified as having instrumental value to all persons in their quest to live a good life. And I defend the legitimacy of adopting autonomy as a goal of public education policy against a series of objections, most notably those grounded in claims about parental rights and fairness to traditional cultures. ;In the third section, I explore the implications of the autonomy goal for religious schools. After defending secular public schools from several prominent criticisms, I consider the argument that religious secondary schools are unsuitable to deliver education for autonomy because they provide children with inadequate exposure to and rational engagement with ethical diversity: I conclude that states cannot justify prohibiting or even presumptively denying public funding to all religious secondary schools, but that there is need for extensive public regulation. Finally, I argue that religious primary schools should be treated differently because of the particular developmental needs and capacities of pre-adolescents. Religious primary schools whose pedagogy is non-authoritarian are specially suitable to lay the foundations for autonomy in young children from religious families. (shrink)

Due to the pandemic and the suspension of in-person school classes, there was an interruption in the meals served to approximately 40 million students who benefited from the Brazilian National School Feeding Program (PNAE). This article describes two case studies, comparing the strategies adopted by two municipalities for maintaining school feeding during the Covid-19 pandemic in the northern region of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and discuss possible impacts of these strategies on food and nutrition (...) security. These municipalities together cover about 81% of the population in the region. In July 2020, we conducted interviews with PNAE municipal managers, following a qualitative approach. We discuss the results in relation to existing Brazilian guidance on food and nutrition security. The municipalities have developed distinct strategies to overcome operational obstacles and maintain PNAE goals, such as distributing food kits and making cash transfers to students’ families. The main determinants of these strategies are financial availability, the relationship between municipal teams and school communities, and the pre-pandemic PNAE logistics and management. Depending on the strategy and duration of the pandemic, the impacts on food and nutrition security can be wide-ranging, affecting food quality and local farmers who sell products to PNAE. It is necessary to acknowledge that this is not a short-term pandemic and find ways to perform school feeding in accordance with PNAE criteria. (shrink)

This paper analyses the Australian Values Education Program (VEP) within the framework of late-classical political economy. Using analytical methods from systemic functional linguistics and critical discourse analysis, we demonstrate that the VEP is an unwitting restatement of the principles of ideology as developed by the likes of Destutt de Tracy and the Young Hegelians. We conclude that the sudden shock of globalisation and the post-national cultures this has entailed is in many ways similar to the shock of formal nationalism that (...) emerged in the late-Seventeenth and early-Eighteenth centuries. The overall result of the VEP for the Australian school system is a massive procedural burden that is unlikely to produce the results at which the program is aimed. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that medical school admissions should be limited to statistically relevant factors. My argument rests primarily on three assumptions. A state professional school should maximize production. If a state professional school should maximize production, then it should maximize production per student. If a state professional school should maximize production per student, then, within the optimum budget, a state medical school should maximize quality-adjusted medical services per graduate. I put forth a tentative (...) equation for ranking applicants as a way of maximizing quality-adjusted medical services per graduate. This way of ranking is cheaper than the way admissions is currently done. Hence, the proposal is practically as well as theoretically appealing. (shrink)

It is generally accepted that liberal states should fund public schools for compulsory education. But whether states should also finance denominational schools is controversial. Does such funding not compromise the principle of liberal neutrality? In this article we evaluate two opposing views on this question. Both views give different interpretations of liberal neutrality and both have contrasting views on the relation between education and conceptions of the good. Arguing that neither view is convincing, we defend an alternative view, which holds (...) that the liberal state under certain conditions should fund denominational schools. (shrink)

In this essay, Bruce Maxwell, David Waddington, Kevin McDonough, Andrée-Anne Cormier, and Marina Schwimmer compare two competing approaches to social integration policy, Multiculturalism and Interculturalism, from the perspective of the issue of the state funding and regulation of conservative religious schools. After identifying the key differences between Interculturalism and Multiculturalism, as well as their many similarities, the authors present an explanatory analysis of this intractable policy challenge. Conservative religious schooling, they argue, tests a conceptual tension inherent in Multiculturalism between respect (...) for group diversity and autonomy, on the one hand, and the ideal of intercultural citizenship, on the other. Taking as a case study Québec's education system and, in particular, recent curricular innovations aimed at helping young people acquire the capabilities of intercultural citizenship, the authors illustrate how Interculturalism signals a compelling way forward in the effort to overcome the political dilemma of conservative religious schooling. (shrink)

When the state buys and then provides to the citizens goods and services, the state may certainly choose to audit, independently and comprehensively, the quality of the goods and services so provided, particularly when citizens are reporting back that the goods or services are causing unwanted, deleterious effects. This principle applies to intellectual property -- information -- education -- as well as to other goods and services. In particular, it applies to the theory of evolution as taught by the state (...) in its schools, colleges, and universities. A substantial public has long expressed concern; and the state may properly respond to that concern. Naturally, the state would never allow the vendor of goods and services to dictate that only its employees, or others whom it effectively controls, may be allowed to conduct audits. Indeed, persons substantially subject to the control of the vendor are the last possible choices to serve as independent auditors. The conflict-of-interest is well-recognized regarding information and opinion services: a huge problem arose with the big national auditing firms when they also established management consulting divisions -- the auditors tended to report favorably about companies and projects on which their own management consultants were involved. Yet the science community quite bluntly and openly proclaims that only its members -- persons it controls -- may function as auditors of the quality of scientific statements and propositions. They do this by asserting that only scientists may declare what is, or is not, scientific. Now it may be true that within any company, only employees of that company may properly develop the products that the company sells, and only they may deliver the company's statements regarding the quality of its own products. But when a company sells its products outside of itself, to others, such as the government, it may not impose as a condition of sale that only its employees may continue to render opinions about the quality of the product. When the science community actively urges the government to take-up and re-distribute its product, it necessarily surrenders any claim to a monopoly over auditing the product. A difficulty of conducting truly independent audits of science product vended to the government for delivery to the people lies in the fact that to-date, there is no systematic program of developing and training people to serve as such independent auditors. The closest group of people to rely on for this would be lawyers who, in litigation, have developed the ability to cross-examine expert witnesses in cases such as patent cases, or product-liability cases, or other litigations that involve expert testimony in advanced academic fields. This paper outlines a program by which states can conduct appropriate independent audits of evolution as vended to the state by the science community. (shrink)

This manuscript explores the argument for lower student-to-school counselor ratios in U.S. public education. Drawing upon a comprehensive historical review and existing research, we establish the integral role of school counselors and the notable benefits of reduced student-to-counselor ratios. Our analysis of national data exposes marked disparities across states and districts, with the most underfunded often serving higher percentages of low-income students and students of color. This situation raises significant ethical concerns, prompting a call for conscientious policy reform (...) and targeted investment. Informed by emerging best practices, we propose recommendations for enhancing counselor staffing and ultimately student outcomes. This ethical argument underscores the need for proactive actions and provides a basis for future research to further delineate the impact of school counselor ratios on educational equity and student success. (shrink)

Contemporary educational policy is centrally concerned with local management of schooling; a practice apparently supported by and following easily from John Stuart Mill's views on liberty and representative government. This paper argues that contemporary practices of local management of schooling are conservative rather than empowering, and that Mill's actual proposals result in an unresolvable paradox in this area. It is then argued that if the State is conceptualised as a relatively autonomous body seeking to secure conditions conducive to accumulation of (...) capital, and if ‘promoting the general welfare’ is formulated in a manner which would not lead inexorably to a free-market capitalist State, then Mill's ideas can provide guidelines for a radical form of democratisation and devolution of power in relation to local management of schooling. (shrink)

Contemporary educational policy is centrally concerned with local management of schooling; a practice apparently supported by and following easily from John Stuart Mill’s views on liberty and representative government. This paper argues that contemporary practices of local management of schooling are conservative rather than empowering, and that Mill’s actual proposals result in an unresolvable paradox in this area. It is then argued that if the State is conceptualised as a relatively autonomous body seeking to secure conditions conducive to accumulation of (...) capital, and if ‘promoting the general welfare’ is formulated in a manner which would not lead inexorably to a free-market capitalist State, then Mill’s ideas can provide guidelines for a radical form of democratisation and devolution of power in relation to local management of schooling. (shrink)

In this article we take up Burtonwood's criticism of our view that liberal states should, under certain conditions, fund denominational schools. We not only reject his plea for the accommodation of strong faith schools by liberalism but also criticise his portrayal of the character of the conflict between liberals and strong faith school advocates. Arguing that liberalism is not part of the diversity of goods, we maintain that liberals and strong faith school advocates should not be seen as (...) competing on the same playing field. Rather, liberalism transcends the battleground both by enabling and conditioning the competition between adherents of rival conceptions of the good. (shrink)

Current challenges in medical practice, research, and administration demand physicians who are familiar with bioethics, health law, and health economics. Curriculum directors at American Association of Medical Colleges-affiliated medical schools were sent confidential surveys requesting the number of required hours of the above subjects and the years in which they were taught, as well as instructor names. The number of relevant publications since 1990 for each named instructor was assessed by a PubMed search.In sum, teaching in all three subjects combined (...) comprises less than two percent of the total hours in the American medical curriculum, and most instructors have not recently published articles in the fields they teach. This suggests that medical schools should reevaluate their curricula and instructors in bioethics, health law, and health economics. (shrink)

Rationale and objectives: Medical humanities are becoming increasingly recognized as positively impacting medical education and medical practice. However, the extent of medical humanities teaching in medical schools is largely unknown. We reviewed medical school curricula in Canada, the UK and the US. We also explored the relationship between medical school ranking and the inclusion of medical humanities in the curricula. -/- Methods: We searched the curriculum websites of all accredited medical schools in Canada, the UK and the US (...) to check which medical humanities topics were taught, and whether they were mandatory or optional. We then noted rankings both by Times Higher Education and U.S. News and World Report and calculated the average rank. We formally explored whether there was an association between average medical school ranking and medical humanities offerings using Spearman's correlation and inverse variance weighting meta-analysis. -/- Results: We identified 18 accredited medical school programmes in Canada, 41 in the UK, and 154 in the US. Of these, nine (56%) in Canada, 34 (73%) in the UK and 124 (80%) in the US offered at least one medical humanity that was not ethics. The most common medical humanities were medical humanities (unspecified), history, and literature (Canada); sociology and social medicine, medical humanities (unspecified), and art (UK); and medical humanities (unspecified), literature and history (US). Higher ranked medical schools appeared less likely to offer medical humanities. -/- Conclusions: The extent and content of medical humanities offerings at accredited medical schools in Canada, the UK and the US varies, and there appears to be an inverse relationship between medical school quality and medical humanities offerings. Our analysis was limited by the data provided on the Universities' websites. Given the potential for medical humanities to improve medical education and medical practice, opportunities to reduce this variation should be exploited. (shrink)