Civil courage refers to the behavior where people actively intervene to protect a victim in a concrete situation of injustice despite the risk of becoming a victim themselves. To act with civil courage, one requires competencies that relate to prosocial values as well as the physical and social ability to act. In this context, this brief reports…

In this article, based on their book Educational Goods: Values, Evidence and Decision Making, Harry Brighouse, Helen Ladd, Susanna Loeb, and Adam Swift encourage education decision makers to give careful thought to the values that underlie the data they collect and use to inform policy. Rather than basing decisions entirely on what improves…

This article provides a discussion of the book, "Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities" by Martha C. Nussbaum from the perspective of a visiting scholar to the United States from China. It begins by addressing two critical topics discussed by Nussbaum: consequences of focusing only on economic growth and the importance of…

In his excellent paper, Callan (2016) differentiates intellectual safety, which fosters smugness, indifference and lack of effort, from dignity safety, which is needed for participation, learning and engagement. He suggests that college classrooms that reject the first and espouse the second would be ones that focus on "cultivating…

The twentieth century has been characterised by the proliferation of human rights in the discursive practices of the United Nations (Baxi, 1997). In this article, we explore the continual process of rights-based education towards transformative action, and an open and democratic society, as dependent upon the facilitation of human rights literacy…

In this essay Charlene Tan offers a philosophical analysis of the Singapore state's vision of shared citizenship by examining it from a Confucian perspective. The state's vision, known formally as "Our Shared Values," consists of communitarian values that reflect the official ideology of multiculturalism. This initiative included a White…

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the functions of hidden curriculum on respect for human dignity which is one of the basic democratic values in detail in two elementary schools with low and high quality school life in Adana-Turkey. In this case study, the data were gathered through observations and interviews from teachers and…

The corporate approach to education is groundless (because a large portion of education in the past, and even still, has always been firmly grounded in the Humanities). So, why this continuous assault on the Humanities? Because educational institutions have bought into the myth that education and the corporate world are hand-in-glove. But by…

In South Africa we had an education system that was content-based, inflexible, oppressive, and segregated in terms of disability and race. It was determined by time, calendar and by failing and passing at the end of the year. Learners had to "fit into" a particular kind of system or were integrated into an existing system. A shift is now…

In South Africa there is widespread recognition amongst university educators that the new outcomes-based education (OBE) system can prevent instrumental thinking, particularly in view of OBE's agenda to encourage critical learning. However, what these educators do not necessarily take into account is that many students are not always ready to deal…