Market-based policies, especially school vouchers, are expanding rapidly and shifting students out of traditional public schools. This article broadens, deepens, and updates prior critiques of the free market logic in five ways. First, although prior articles have pointed to some of the conditions necessary for efficient market functioning, I…

This paper shows how a significant, but short-lived, episode in Scotland's educational history--the rise and decline of Socialist Sunday Schools (SSSs) in the first half of the twentieth century--provoked controversial debates about issues that continue to have relevance today. The first half of the paper explains the origins of SSSs, their links…

This paper details the oscillation between the aesthetic and political response to the refugee crisis as seen through the eyes of the UK's emergency response committee COBRA (Cabinet Office Briefing Room A) and its alternative COBRA RES. Firstly, it examines the interjection of the official COBRA Committee within the image-economy of crisis,…

This paper is on the paradox of a right, the right to education that is almost universally declared as compulsory. The reason for the compulsion seems to be in its nature as a right. Within a Hohfeldian framework, any claim-right has a corresponding duty. Given that making education compulsory equates to establishing a duty, the possible…

Various surveys have confirmed that there is a crisis of recruitment and retention of teachers in schools. This article examines the government response to this crisis, in particular to what is commonly cited as the main cause--unmanageable workloads. What it describes as the workload challenge has certainly not been ignored by the DfE, which in…

Films of the "perestroika" period (1986-1991) related to school/university theme showed that: - the educational / upbringing process has lost the previous strict storylines and in many respects has lost its communist landmarks;--both school and university have acute problem areas (crisis, disappointment and fatigue, professional…

The article proposes and illustrates a methodological framework that aligns with the action-research models and utopian methodology in particular, although it represents a more substantial leap forward, especially regarding the distributed nature of decision making in the different processes of research/intervention, and its multiple and…

Chinese education scholars Cesan Wang and Qiquan Zhong led a debate over knowledge centredness versus student centredness in China's ongoing pre-collegiate curriculum reform. The debate was considered the most influential academic event in the past 30 years in the field of education in China. Employing a Critical Discourse Analysis approach, this…

This article argues that the Teaching Excellence Framework manifests the vice of epistemic insensibility. To this end, it explains that the TEF is a metrics-driven evaluation mechanism which permits English higher education institutions to charge higher fees if the 'quality' of their teaching is deemed 'excellent'. Through the TEF, the Government…

This article explores how school-aged Chinese youth make meaning of the civic roles of citizens in the context of a society with a powerful one-party government. We examined how 16 focus groups (N = 64) of adolescents from urban and rural schools in Shanghai and Nantong talked about the causes and solutions of social problems facing China. Our…

The aim of this article is to show how governmentality may be used to analyze historical events and discourses, and how this historical analysis can be used as a perspective to problematize contemporary discourses. The example used in this article is from my research on life-extension handbooks published in Sweden 1700-1930, and by this I stress…

Interculturalism, in its two forms, critiques multiculturalism. A European version emphasises cultural encounter and novelty, and is relatively apolitical except for its disavowal of the national in preference for the local and the transnational. In contrast, its Quebecan counterpart gives significance to the idea of the right of a national…

This paper attempts to propose an alternative policy frame for higher education policy by demonstrating the inadequacy of the market approach adopted by the 2011 English higher education policy in addressing the economic and social agenda, and by reframing higher education as a mechanism that selects and distributes talents to vocational sectors…

This paper presents a comparative critique of key education and teacher education policies in England adopted by New Labour (1997-2010) and the Coalition government (2010-2015). It focuses on direct measures intended to alleviate the effects of poverty on young people's educational outcomes, and on teacher education policies with implications for…

Central to this article is a case study of one particular governmental instrument in Flanders, the educational magazine "Klasse voor Ouders" (Klasse for Parents). This popular magazine aims to provide information for and communication with parents as one of the target groups in the educational field. Despite the claimed formal and…