The world is changing, but political and educational institutions appears to be stuck in the 19th century. Modern policy and education are both premised on an Enlightenment assumption of the human, rational, individual subject. Increasingly, elements of these philosophical premises are being interrogated. The critique emerges from the…

Public education is not just a way to organise and fund education. It is also the expression of a particular ideal about education and of a particular way to conceive of the relationship between education and society. The ideal of public education sees education as an important dimension of the common good and as an important institution in…

Health education in Aotearoa New Zealand is an enigma. Premised on ostensibly open and holistic philosophical premises, the school curriculum not only permits, but in some ways prescribes, pedagogies and teacher dispositions that engage with the diversity of young people at its centre. A capacity, to not only understand contemporary health…

The idea that the New Zealand education system will cater to all students, regardless of ability, and support them in developing their full potential to the best of their abilities, is enshrined in the famous 1939 Beeby/Fraser statement. Equality of access policy discourse has shifted to emphasise equitable outcomes, focussed increasingly on…

Philosophy and schools, children and dynamite, elephants and postage stamps: each has a place, but not necessarily in any natural combination with the other. Whether schools and philosophy belong together depends largely on what we mean by both. To the extent that schools are instruments of government regulation and a mechanism for production of…

This article presents the author's response to Strathdee's "Reply to O'Neill: The privatisation of public schooling in New Zealand." Strathdee has alerted the editors to a basic arithmetic error in the author's paper (O'Neill 2011, 24). He also makes substantive criticisms. Strathdee's criticisms focus on the two cases that are used to…

In a recent contribution to this journal, John O'Neill (2011) argues that recent privatisation practices in New Zealand public schooling are evidence of a small, but growing, influence of neo-liberalism on New Zealand's public education. The focus in his paper is on the active enablement of non-government provision of public education through, for…

This paper examines recent privatisation practices in New Zealand public schooling. The standard political rhetoric is that free publicly provided schooling is guaranteed by statute. This position may be challenged by reference to two apparently insignificant practical examples of the way in which policy gives effect to privatisation in public…

This article offers a critical analysis of recent trends in educational policy with particular reference to their assumptions about the knowledge society. It examines the implications of the analysis for the issue of elitism and the promotion of greater educational equality. The article concludes by offering an alternative approach to educational…

Improving retention rates in post-school education has become a focus for policy-makers and researchers throughout the western world. Without doubt, any measure that helps students wishing to succeed in higher education is valuable. However, the dominance retention has achieved on a wide variety of educational fronts ranging from policy to…

Presents a feminist analysis of how decentralized decision-making policies are reflected at the local level in four countries: Australia, Sweden, New Zealand, and Israel. These examples indicate that management practices tend to be more modernist than postmodernist, and often have highly inequitable effects for female teachers. Contains 63…

This volume presents the 53rd Yearbook of the National Reading Conference (NRC). The papers in this Yearbook reflect NRC's practice of pursuing not only traditionally important topics in literacy but also many issues that may not be deemed worthy of funding and government attention. Rather than a narrowing of the field, the submitted manuscripts,…