The foundations of William Blake’s universe

The writing of William Blake are studied in an attempt to discover his views on various philosophical questions, and to show that underneath the esoteric symbolism and mythology lies a reasonably coherent philosophical system. By dealing with his works in roughly chronological order it is seen which problems concerned him most at each stage of his career. The first chapter discusses Blake’s “Doctrine of Contraries” (derived possibly from his interest in the works of Swedenborg). Whereby he declares the essential duality of things – male and female, body and soul, imagination and reason, and, most important for his earlier works, innocence and experience, the two contrasting states of the human soul. Chapter two examines Blake’s developing views on the nature of God and his relationship with man, involving inevitably the topics of predestination and free will. Although in his early works Blake condemns God the father as the cruel, man-made Urizen, a caricature of the Old Testament’s invisible Jehovah and contrast to the human Jesus, before his death he revered such a deity as the only true God and accepted the total predestination he earlier abhorred in the works of Swedenborg. The third chapter deals with the relationship of man and the universe, noting Blake’s ambivalent view of Nature and the world of material objects. Blake holds that different degrees of vision are attainable by man, and these can be to some extent aligned with different levels of the universe attainable by man in his now fallen state. The nature of the Pall, which was also Creation, and of the Last Judgment, still in man's future, are also discussed. In the final chapter Blake's last important work. The Ghost of Abel, is used to show Blake's philosophical position at the end of his life

Enabling learning through technology: Some institutional imperatives

This paper considers the importance of the institution as the dynamic interpretative element on which will depend the successful integration of the learning technology developed through our national initiatives into the academic curricula of Higher‐Education institutions. Based on our experience of working on teaching technology programmes, within the framework of national and institutional initiatives, it is evident that the establishment of an institutional strategy, and its implementation in a supporting university‐wide programme of staff development and training, together with strong commitment at the senior managerial level, are imperatives which determine the successful integration of learning technology within academic institutions

Doing homework: negotiations of the domestic in twentieth-century novels of teaching

In this project, I analyze seven twentieth-century novels of teaching in order to investigate how notions of “home” and “school” are constructed, connected, and perpetuated in popular teaching narratives. Images of teachers in much of this century’s fiction often rest on views of the school as home that are derived from stereotypes of gender, race, and nationality—stereotypes that can be both inaccurate and repressive. For this reason, I examine these texts in light of how they negotiate school space with domestic space (“domestic” both as personal or familial, and as public or national). I contend that many of these narratives offer little more than simplistic, nostalgic views of what “home/school” space can be, and even fewer question the very equation of “school as home.” In those narratives that do probe the school/home connection, the teacher-protagonists often fail to emerge as the sentimental heroes that the teachers of the more conventional novels prove to be. Nevertheless, I argue that the most promising depictions of teachers and their work are those that acknowledge and engage the rich complexities of “home” and its (sometimes problematic) relation to the classroom, for the very tensions and conflicts that problematize the school’s classification as a domestic “safe haven” are the very tools that can facilitate growth, learning, and self-discovery. The approach for my analysis draws from feminist and cultural studies, as well as educational history. The works I discuss include the following: The Blackboard Jungle; Good Morning, Miss Dove; To Sir, With Love; Spinster; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; Up the Down Staircase; and Election

A Test for the Identity of Dysoptic with Blind in Mice

A genetic test for the identity of two mutants Dysoptic and Blind was made. The results of breeding point to their identity, but the results are not absolutely conclusive. A study of the Dysoptic-Blind embryo may furnish the final evidence

The division of labour in child health care: Poland and England & Wales compared

The health of children is a matter of primary concern both to the state and to the individual, and the maintenance and restoration of that health are activities which take place both in the public domain and in the home. The recognition of the importance and interdependence of paid and unpaid labour is central to the conceptual framework of this study. It is a framework which views the division of labour in public and private domains not separately, but in terms of each other. This represents a break with classical sociological theories. Until feminists challenged the functionalist conception of the family as "natural" and unproblematic, these theories had been content with two discontinuous accounts of the division of labour: "one that it all began with Adam Smith and the other that it began with Adam and Eve" (Stacey, 1981: 172). That is one aspect of the approach. The other lies in the comparative nature of the study, dealing as it does with two countries: Poland and Britain (1). An endeavour of this kind is hedged in by difficulties both methodological and interpretive, yet the sociological method is essentially a comparative one. Inevitably, a comparison of countries with varying ideo-political and economic systems is fundamentally concerned with the effect of these differences on particular social processes. Although this is also true of the present enquiry, what it does not set out to do is to counterpoint a notion of capitalism with one of socialism, then to weigh up the merits of one over the other. This would be to assume that such a socialism exists and thereby to run the risk of subjecting evidence to what Gouldner (1980) has referred to as the self-normalising effect of theory. Rather, the conceptualisation of the division of labour described above allows, firstly, a comparison which is sensitive to issues of both class and gender and the relation between the two. In this way the enquiry encompasses the major structural divides of British society, and at the same time confronts two of the major claims of state-socialist society: that it seeks to reduce social inequalities in general and to eliminate sexual inequalities in particular. It also provides the opportunity to draw comparisons which go beyond an institutional analysis to the level of personal experience. In linking public policy to the intimate matter of health it allows us to follow Mills' enjoinder that we should "grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society" (Mills, 1977:12). If vital in the study of a single society, how much more so is the sociological imagination for a comparison of two countries with conflicting social systems? This brief exposition of the conceptual background to the present study explains why an analysis of publicly provided health care in Poland and in Britain has been left to a single penultimate chapter. The initial task of the study was to establish a comparable notion of health and to examine the way in which this varies according to socio-economic group in each country. This is the subject of Chapter I and serves as a point of reference for what follows. Crucial to a comparison of health and health care is its location within a material context. Chapters II and III note overall differences in national disposable wealth and focus on the consequences of markedly different systems for the production and distribution of that wealth which are adopted in each country. These are viewed, in Chapter II in terms of the levels and patterns of female economic activity rates - including economic activity in private farming, and the inter-relationships between these and the division of labour within the family. Chapter III reviews the evidence concerning the extent of social inequality and poverty which has been generated by these wealth producing and distributing processes. Following a short analysis of the division of domestic labour in the two countries in Chapter IV, Chapter V presents a wide-ranging comparative account of social policies relevant to child health. Again, these policies may be classified as either (a) serving to accommodate the employment of women with what are understood to be their domestic responsibilities or (b) serving to mitigate or in some other way deal with the consequences of social inequality and poverty. The study culminates in Chapter VI with an examination of specific state intervention in the maintenance and restoration of child health, and conclusions emerging from the study as a whole are presented in Chapter VII. Two further points remain to be made. The first has to do with the nature of the source materials on which the thesis is based. These have been varied, and include the published writings of sociologists, medical sociologists, doctors and demographers in both Poland and Britain. Official statistics and legislative texts have been consulted where appropriate. In addition, the data would have been much depleted were it not for the availability of a variety of reports produced in Poland for intra-institutional consumption. These reports emanate from the Central Statistical Agency (GUS), the Central Planning Commission, the Research Institute attached to the Ministry of Labour, Wages and Social Security (IPiSS), the Institute of Mother and Child (IMiDz) and also include a large number commissioned by the Council for the Family (Rada d/s Rodziny), a group of specialists convened in 1978 by Edward Gierek, as part of his "familialisation" of social policy. Details of all of these are to be found in the bibliography. Finally, it is of some importance that the study is oriented towards a British readership. If greater weight has then been given to the Polish case, it is because a level of understanding of British arrangements has in places been assumed, the judgement having been that a proper comparison does not necessarily require a consistently even- handed approach, but that on the contrary, a fuller exposition of the less familiar is sometimes what is called for. Hopefully this judgement will be vindicated

Changes in the pronunciation of Māori and implications for teachers and learners of Māori

This paper discusses changes in the pronunciation of Māori and implications for teachers and learners of Māori. Data on changes in the pronunciation of Māori derives from the MAONZE project (Māori and New Zealand English with support from the Marsden fund). The project uses recordings from three sets of speakers to track changes in the pronunciation of Māori and evaluate influence from English. Results from the project show changes in both vowel quality and vowel duration and some evidence of diphthong mergers in pairs such as ai/ae and ou/au, especially amongst the younger speakers. In terms of duration the younger speakers are producing smaller length distinctions between long/short vowel pairs other than /ā, a/. We discuss the implications of such changes for those teaching Māori and for students learning Māori as a subject. These changes raise interesting questions concerning the pronunciation of Māori by future generations

/u/ fronting and /t/ aspiration in Māori and New Zealand English

This article examines the relationship between the frontness of /u/ and the aspiration of /t/ in both Māori and New Zealand English (NZE). In both languages, these processes can be observed since the earliest recordings dating from the latter part of the nineteenth century. We report analyses of these developments for three groups of male speakers of Māori spanning the twentieth century. We compare the Māori analyses with analyses of related features of the speakers' English and of the English of monolingual contemporaries. The occurrence of these processes in Māori cannot be seen simply as interference from NZE as the Māori-speaking population became increasingly bilingual. We conclude that it was the arrival of English with its contrast between aspirated and unaspirated plosives, rather than direct borrowing, that was the trigger for the fronting of the hitherto stable back Māori /u/ vowel together with increased aspiration of /t/ before both /i/ and /u/