Michael A. Petersa and Fazal Rizvib aBeijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China; bMelbourne University, Melbourne, Australia Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘no...
ABSTRACT This introduction attempts to draw together the various threads which comprise this special issue and place them in the context of recent disruptions to the political order occasioned by the rise of populist politics, the resurgence of widespread racial tensions in a number of polities and the emergence of a global pandemic. Central to the challenges thrown up by these ‘events’ and a motive force, has been the incremental advancement of libertarianism with its capacity to disorient and displace a (...) more socially oriented liberalism. Together with a range of changes to our technological capacities these moves offer significant challenges to the advancement of a moral education that is sufficiently robust. The discussion moves from the development of historico-political readings of our present situation and challenge, through some important epistemic questions about truth-telling, integrity and sociality, and on to practical questions about the relationship between technology and personal moral capacities. This last challenge is explored with respect to the need to maintain the very analogue capacity of judgement in the face of a digitally mediated world. Moreover, this introduction also explores the structural and political challenges posed by narrow specialisation in the field of moral education, the evolution of bio-technology/materials and consciousness. (shrink)
We here analyse the ethical dimensions of the UK's ‘Research Excellence Framework’, the latest version of an exercise which assesses the quality of university research in the UK every seven or so years. We find many of the common objections to this exercise unfounded, such as that it is excessively expensive by comparison with alternatives such as various metrics, or that it turns on the subjective judgement of the assessors. However there are grounds for concern about the crude language in (...) which for example all relevant scholarship becomes called ‘research’ and publications become ‘outputs’. The focus on the impact of research, which was a new feature of the most recent exercise, is particularly problematic, creating as it does a tendency to what Aristotle called alazony, self-aggrandisement, on the part of academics. We conclude that the REF is a mixed good from an ethical point of view, and that more could be done to mitigate its more unfortunate features. (shrink)
For something approaching 50 years, multicultural education has been accepted as an educational, social and moral good by liberal educators. Its instantiation in the practices of education has, in various ways, largely depended on a series of strategies for making the other familiar within the majority culture. This essay suggests that such a cultural and pedagogical focus on the other may be a mistake. Drawing on literary cultures that span both time and space it demonstrates how a more original, radical (...) and effective pedagogy of pluralism and multiculturalism might be grounded on a very different set of ideas about the self than those that have come to dominate education over the last 50 years. The first section argues for the re-habilitation of the notion of enstrangement, which has, since the early part of the nineteenth century, been displaced by the much more aggressive and alienating notion of estrangement. This forms the ground for re-thinking our relationship to the self and the other and thus to the other and the world. The second section looks specifically at how we are enstranged onto-psychologically, epistemically and culturally and the implications of these forms of enstrangement for education. The third part concentrates on how a pedagogy of enstrangement can constructively open up new possibilities in, and for, multicultural education as a moral endeavour. (shrink)
The purpose of this article is to suggest how philosophy might play a key, if precisely delineated, role in the shaping of policy that leads educational development. The argument begins with a reflection on the nature of confidence in the relationship between philosophy and policy. We note the widespread resistance to abstract theorising in the policy community, disguising the enormous potential of a philosophical approach. Defending a philosophically equipped approach to policy, which is inevitably theoretically laden, we argue that philosophical (...) investigation should be construed not as an initial step anterior to the task of research, but as a way of standing in relation to evidence and policy making throughout the process of investigation and adjudication. To illustrate the distinctive contribution philosophy can make, we propose five interrelated stages where philosophical thinking plays a constitutive role in the full process of policy development, critique and instantiation. (shrink)
Relying on some of the insights of Jungian psychology, this paper analyses the confusion in the language of political economy in Britain which generates and sustains moral infantilism in the civil polity. It goes on to suggest that both politicians and educators are, or perceive themselves to be, powerless to arrest the progress of the transnational juggernaut which has displaced government as the sustainer of individual and collective aspiration. As an antidote to these movements, the paper offers a rehabilitated understanding (...) of the power of the poetic imagination in equipping the individual with control over her or his own decision-making. The power on offer is rooted in the development of Verstehen as a method of engagement which embraces emotionality, ambiguity and provisionality. Finally, it explores some of the pedagogical implications of this thinking. (shrink)
We here analyse the ethical dimensions of the UK’s ‘Research Excellent Framework’, the latest version of an exercise which assesses the quality of university research in the UK every seven or so years. We find many of the common objections to this exercise unfounded, such as that it is excessively expensive by comparison with alternatives such as various metrics, or that it turns on the subjective judgement of the assessors. However there are grounds for concern about the crude language in (...) which for example all relevant scholarship becomes called ‘research’, and publications become ‘outputs’. The focus on the impact of research, which was a new feature of the most recent exercise, is particularly problematic, creating as it does a tendency to what Aristotle called alazony, self-aggrandisement, on the part of academics. We conclude that the REF is a mixed good from an ethical point of view, and that more could be done to mitigate its more unfortunate features. (shrink)
