Stefan Ramaekers & Judith Suissa, The claims of parenting. Reasons, responsibility and society

Boekbespreking van: Stefan Ramaekers & Judith Suissa, The claims of parenting. Reasons, Dordrecht/Heidelberg/Londen/New York: responsibility and society. Springer, 2012. ISBN 9789400722507, 158 blz., € 99,95 (hardcover). Het boek is te downloaden via: http://www.springerlink.com/content/978-94-007-2251-4#section=957711&page=8&locus=0

Flourishing as an educational aim

Since the 1990s, there has been a spate of influential research defending flourishing as the aim of education. Promoting student flourishing is a key goal of education that extends beyond academic achievement. This approach recognizes the holistic development of students, nurturing their intellectual, emotional, social, and physical well-being. Over the past two decades, we have also witnessed increased practical uptake of this theoretical stance. Educators, schools, and head teachers from all over the world have drawn inspiration from this movement explicitly to prioritize virtue language and student flourishing in their classrooms or adopt a whole-school approach that aims to cultivate students’ virtuous characters with the goal of student flourishing and well-being. This is clearly a wide educational remit and one that has been championed and criticized. In response to objections, some of which were recently made, defenders of flourishing as an educational aim ought to revisit their premises and further explicate and defend their claim that education should aim at flourishing. This is precisely what the five contributions to this suite of articles do, making a timely contribution to furthering the debate over how and why education can and should aim at flourishing

Self-Responsible Self-Determination:The Educational Theory of Martinus Jan Langeveld (1905–1989), Its Origins and Sources

Martinus Jan Langeveld (1905–1989) was a key figure in Dutch academic educational studies after the Second World War. This article investigates the origins and sources of Langeveld’s theory by examining his prior publications and the main references in conjunction with the intellectual movements of his time. This research shows, first, that Langeveld built his educational theory upon a variety of sources: the German-American psychologist William Stern (1871–1938), the Dutch educationalist Philipp Abraham Kohnstamm (1875–1951), the German philosopher Theodor Litt (1880–1962), and Edmund Husserl’s (1859–1938) philosophy of phenomenology. Further, Langeveld borrowed a phrase from the medieval theology of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) as the key idea of his theory. Last, Langeveld’s theory incorporates the important topics of the first decades of the twentieth century. In particular, the coinciding philosophies of personalism and phenomenology in the context of anti-positivist movements shed new light on Langeveld’s theory.</p

Perceived discrimination against Dutch Muslim youths in the school context and its relation with externalising behavior

The role of the source of discrimination in relation to minority Muslim youths’ psychosocial well-being has received remarkably little attention in the post-9/11 climate. We have examined one of the aspects of psychosocial well-being that is given prominent attention in the media and public discourse, namely externalising behaviour. The article reports whether perceived discrimination by four sources (school peers and teachers, peers, and adults outside the school) is related to externalising behaviour. Links between perceived discrimination sources and externalising behaviour among Dutch Muslim youths (n = 308, ages 14–18) were examined through surveys. The quantitative findings guided our qualitative analyses of interviews with 10 Muslim Dutch youths on their accounts of discrimination in the school context. When comparing different discrimination sources, only teacher discrimination was found to predict externalising behaviour significantly (explaining 15% of the variance). The qualitative follow-up illustrated the significance of teacher discrimination: Some Muslim youths felt that their teachers held back their school progress, while others reported receiving insults from teachers about their parents’ native country and their religion. We argue that students’ perceived powerlessness within the teacher-student relationship deserves further attention, as some Dutch Muslim youths reported painful experiences, with perceived teacher discrimination linked to higher levels of externalising behaviour