The abolition of the General Teaching Council for England and the future of teacher discipline

With the abolition of the General Teaching Council for England in the 2011 Education Act, this article considers the future of teacher discipline in England. It provides a critique of the changes to the regulation of teacher misconduct and incompetence that draws on a Foucauldian framework, especially concerning the issue of public displays of discipline and the concomitant movement to more hidden forms. In addition, the external context of accountability that accompanies the reforms to teacher discipline are considered including the perfection of the panoptic metaphor presented by the changes to Ofsted practices such as the introduction of zero-notice inspections. The article concludes that the reforms will further move teachers from being occupational professionals to being organisational professionals marking them apart from comparable professions in medicine and law

Oberlin Perfectionism and Its Edwardsean Origins

An impression has very generally prevailed, wrote James Harris Fairchild toward the end of his twenty-three-year presidency of Oberlin College, that the theological views unleashed at Oberlin College by the late Rev. Charles Grandison Finney & his Associates involves a considerable departure from the accepted orthodox faith. It was an impression that Fairchild believed to be inaccurate, and he would probably be horrified to discover a century later that the prevailing impression the Oberlin Theology has made on historians of the nineteenth-century United States continues to be one in which Oberlin stands for almost all the progressive and enthusiastic unorthodoxies of the Age of Jackson, from Sylvester Graham\u27s crackers to moral perfectionism. But Fairchild, who was one of Finney\u27s earliest students in the original Oberlin Collegiate Institute and who succeeded Finney as professor of moral philosophy and theology in 1858 and then as president of Oberlin College in 1866, was certain that he discerned a far different genealogy for Oberlin, one which ran back not to the age of Jackson but to the age of ]onathan Edwards. The ethical Philosophy inculcated by Mr. Finney & his associates of later times is that of the elder Edwards, Fairchild repeatedly insisted, and the Oberlin Theology, far from being original, was nothing less than the theory ... presented by various authors, especially by President Edwards ... and by his pupil and friend Samuel Hopkins. [excerpt

Achieving Foundation Accountability and Transparency: Lessons From the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s \u3ci\u3eScorecard\u3c/i\u3e

· The purpose of this article is to help foundations in their accountability and transparency efforts by sharing lessons from one foundation’s journey to develop a scorecard. · A commitment to funding and sharing the results from rigorous evaluations set the tone for Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) accountability. · The Scorecard is a powerful tool for RWJF to set goals, track organizational effectiveness, and motivate responses to shortcomings. · Foundations can tailor their scorecard to include what best serves their needs. · With its Scorecard, RWJF found that comparative and quantitative measures are the most powerful forces to motivate change. · Setting targets motivates staff to focus their efforts on certain areas and make improvements

Flowers Hospital: Nearing Perfection on Core Measures

Describes elements of a strategy for achieving high process-of-care performance by continuously monitoring patients in four clinical areas and ensuring they receive the right care -- including concurrent reviews and quality improvement teams

Citizen Engineers: Leaders in Building a Sustainable World

As with the “citizen soldiers” of World War II, the engineering industry must produce “citizen engineers” who will accept the leadership challenge necessary to deliver a combination of technical, economic, social, and environmental values to its stakeholders that will truly improve people’s quality of life

Neoliberalism and the Contradictions of Freedom: Ideology, Subjectivity, and Critical Pedagogy

The idea of freedom is a central figure in the ideology of neoliberalism. In the contemporary context, neoliberals argue that rolling back regulations and the marketization of social life create more choices and thus more freedom. While this position in fact dissimulates the increasing powerlessness of ordinary people, it also has roots in older philosophical arguments-in particular in the work of the economist and philosopher F.A. Hayek, whose thought has been a central inspiration for neoliberal policy. I begin my discussion here with an analysis of his concept of freedom. I believe that the ideologeme of freedom is central to securing neoliberalism's persistent hegemony, and that it needs to be engaged by critics at some depth. In spite of the failures and suffering produced by neoliberalism in practice, it retains a moral appeal for many, and not only those who are its principal beneficiaries. This appeal rests on the supposed symbiosis-and even identification-of neoliberalism (and capitalism itself) with freedom. Therefore, a critical-theoretical investigation of the philosophical and ideological architecture of this equation is urgent. In this article, I undertake this investigation in order to reveal the specific structures of violence that are the actual and positive content of neoliberal freedom.Educatio

Contempt, Community, and the Interruption of Sense

In the early modern period, contempt emerged as a persistent theme in moral philosophy. Most of the moral philosophers of the period shared two basic commitments in their thinking about contempt. First, they argued that we understand the value of others in the morally appropriate way when we understand them from the perspective of the morally relevant community. And second, they argued that we are naturally inclined to judge others as contemptible, and that we must therefore interrupt that natural movement of sense-bestowal in order to value others in the morally appropriate way. In this paper I examine in detail the arguments of Nicolas Malebranche and Immanuel Kant concerning the wrongness of contempt, emphasizing the ways in which they depend on conceptions of community and of the interruption of moral sense-bestowal. After showing how each of these arguments fails to comprehend the nature and the wrongness of contempt, I argue that we can find the resources for a more adequate account in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, and specifically in his reflections on ontology and on the meaning of communit

Truth, Goodness and Beauty: Revisiting the Classic Common Core Standards

As the educational community works to simultaneously understand and implement the Common Core standards and its emphasis on the development of various intellectual traits and capacities, it is worth pausing to consider this most recent educational reform in light of the classical understanding of the educational task. This article highlights three elements from the “classic” common core educational standards as understood by classical educational theorists: truth, goodness, and beauty and the role each plays in developing an educated person. These classic standards place the development and elevation of the human spirit as the foundation of all learning. Although truth, goodness, and beauty each have a unique contribution in the education of individuals, this article focuses on beauty and the way it stimulates a desire for both goodness and truth. Additionally, these standards require a different form of pedagogy; developing a commitment to truth and goodness and experiencing beauty do not come to a person with traditional forms of education. The ground for this investigation is found in the works of an ancient philosopher, Plato; a classical educational theorist, John Steward Mill; and a passage from the Christian scriptures, Psalms 27. The article culminates with suggestions, a primer for ways to bring beauty to students both in the physical environment of the classroom and in the person of the teacher

Some Thoughts on God and Spiritual Practice in Yoga and Christianity

I do not approach this topic as an expert historian of the diverse schools of yoga or as a systematician of their teachings or as an exegete of their classical texts.1 Rather I address the theme of yoga and Christianity as a Christian theologian who has been a practitioner of Iyengar yoga, a prominent method of modern postural yoga, for more than thirty years and who has done some scholarly reading on contemporary and classical yoga and on Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutra (hereafter YS) in particular.2 Despite all the controversy that has arisen in recent years about whether or not Christians should be practicing yoga, my own spiritual life has been greatly enriched by the yoga practice and the teachings of B. K. S. Iyengar (1918-2014)3 as well as by some of the writings of contemporary scholars on the YS and the YS’s subsequent history of commentary.4 In what follows I offer some thoughts on the possible value of yoga for Christians, about which much has already been written,5 but I will also reflect on a few challenges that emerge when one attempts to unite yoga theory and practice with Christian teaching and spirituality. My main focus will be on the conception of the Lord (Ishvara) in the YS, on the notion of God in the teachings of Mr. Iyengar, and on the understanding of God in Christianity, so as to show where these views on the divine align and where they diverge

Local entanglements and utopian moves : an inquiry into train accidents

In 1996 after nearly fifty years in public ownership the British rail network was privatised. As a part of this what had been single organisation, British Rail, was broken into a set of different units which were individually sold off. Prominent among these were Railtrack plc (owner of the track, stations, signalling and other infrastructure), more than twenty train operating companies (TOCs) which received franchises to run trains (usually with government subsidies), and three companies which owned and leased rolling stock