The author argues that a Higher Education Bill will be lacking in the future, as promised in the 2011 White Paper on HE; and hence the regulatory framework for English HE will, for the immediate future at least, have to evolve within the law as it is rather than via new legal powers. The essential issue is how to extract the benefits of market…

In this article, we examine John Updike's short story "A&P" and its depiction of the grocery store as a curricular space re/presenting consumption and resistance to it. We position Updike's fictional A&P as a space where the "big curriculum" (Schubert, 2006a) of consumption is enacted in everyday life and explore both how the curriculum of…

Consulting for a moment such luminaries as Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. King, Cesar Chavez--I would say that personal revelation is not less necessary to radical change than public revolution. Amen? "Backing Away From The Product" really has to be both a spiritual practice and a public embarrassment so extreme that its witnesses won't stop talking about it…

The apparent sexualization and exploitation of young girls by the consumer media is a much debated topic in the advanced liberal democracies. This paper will develop the argument that the "consumer-media culture" has established itself as one of the most powerful influences in processes of self-formation for young people, and that a…

In 1864, when Americans were enduring the daily miseries of the Civil War, Emily Dickinson, perhaps with the nationwide crisis in mind, wrote "A nearness to Tremendousness--/An Agony procures." The author suggests that perhaps Dickinson's poetry may be applied to the current economic downturn, when financial comfort is fleeting and many ponder…

Real-estate markets are almost as volatile as stock markets. Prices of agricultural land, of commercial real estate, and of homes and condominiums have gone through a series of huge bubbles, as if people never learned from the previous ones. Such events--in particular the recent housing bubble--are driven by what John Maynard Keynes called animal…

John Hull's recent educational writings have included several on what he calls the "money culture". This is analysed and criticised in this article. Hull offers a Marxist and a neo-Marxist account of the role of money in western societies utilising the labour theory of value, false consciousness and the materialist interpretation of history. It is…

A year after receiving his PhD in psychology from the University of Rochester, Tim Kasser accepted a position at Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois, where he is currently professor of psychology. He regularly teaches psychology classes on personality, clinical and abnormal psychology, dreaming, and research methods, as well as an…

The use of private loans to finance college education has significantly increased in the last decade. Insufficient public financial aid support, a complex federal aid application process, aggressive marketing by private lenders, and an unwillingness by some parents to borrow under the federal PLUS program are leading students to take out what can…

So-called "radical" and "critical"pedagogy seems to be everywhere these days on the landscapes of geographical teaching praxis and theory. Part of the remit of radical/critical pedagogy involves a de-centring of the traditional "banking" method of pedagogical praxis. Yet, how do we challenge this "banking" model of knowledge transmission in both a…

In this article, the authors briefly describe key issues central to what Spring (2007) refers to as the "industrial-consumer paradigm" and the role of English as the global language characterized by what Harvey (1990) called "time and space compression." The authors also comment and provide a critique of some of its primary…

Several recent studies indicate that cheating has become both more prevalent and more socially acceptable. In this article I draw parallels between market values and student attitudes about cheating. They include: (1) reduction of a broad range of goods to their economic value, (2) use of non-reciprocity as a guiding principle, (3) valuing the…