Forms of Knowledge, Teacher Education and the Manipulation of Beliefs

In this paper I will argue that Hirst\u27s idea of forms of knowledge has a vital contribution to make to the education of teachers. In his 1965 paper, \u27School Education and the Nature of Knowledge\u27 (Hirst, 1974), Hirst argued that there are seven distinct forms of knowledge, each with its own unique concepts, distinctive logical structure, testability against experience and unique methods of testing. These seven forms of knowledge were mathematics, the physical sciences, the human sciences, history, religion, literature and the fine arts, and philosophy and moral knowledge. My paper, however, is not an attempt to reinstate forms of knowledge as such, as these have been effectively criticised in the literature (Barrow 1976, Pring 1976, Watt 1974). Rather, I wish to consider a feature of Hirst\u27s argument little noticed in the literature, namely, that he proposed the existence of forms of knowledge as part of his attempt to give content to, and justify, a liberal education. In effect, he developed the notion of \u27forms of knowledge\u27 as part of an educational strategy to avoid, or minimise, the manipulation of beliefs. It is my contention that, if we as teacher educators are to properly sensitise student teachers to the dangers of indoctrination and belief manipulation inherent in their classroom practice, we need to introduce them to the problems that forms of knowledge were thought to solve and how the notion of a \u27form of knowledge\u27 can be suitably amended to provide a truly satisfactory solution. I should stress that my amendment to \u27forms of knowledge\u27 is not how Hirst himself has developed his notion in response to criticism. Rather, it is the outcome of my reflection of what of merit survives once the criticisms of the notion have been taken into account

The effect of vacuum polarisation on muon-proton scattering at small energies and angles

We give a compact expression for the unpolarised differential cross section for muon-proton scattering in the one photon exchange approximation. The effect of adding the vacuum polarisation amplitude to the no-spin-flip amplitude for one photon exchange is calculated at small energies and scattering angles and is found to be negligible for present experiments.Comment: 6 pages, one figur

Electromagnetic corrections for the analysis of low energy pi-p scattering data

We calculate the electromagnetic corrections to the isospin invariant mixing angle and to the two eigenphases for the s and p-waves for low energy pi-p elastic and charge exchange scattering. These corrections have to be applied to the nuclear quantities obtained from phase shift analyses of the experimental data in order to obtain the hadronic phases. We compare our results with earlier calculations and estimate the uncertainties in the corrections.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures. Uses elsart.cls Accepted for publication in Nuclear Physics

New light on electromagnetic corrections to the scattering parameters obtained from experiments on pionium

We calculate the electromagnetic corrections needed to obtain isospin invariant hadronic pion-pion s-wave scattering lengths a^0, a^2 from the elements a_cc, a_0c of the s-wave scattering matrix for the (\pi^+ \pi^-, \pi^0 \pi^0) system at the \pi^+ \pi^- threshold. These elements can be extracted from experiments on pionium. Our calculation uses energy independent hadronic pion-pion potentials that satisfactorily reproduce the low-energy phase shifts given by two-loop chiral pertur- bation theory. We also take into account an important relativistic effect whose inclusion influences the corrections considerably.Comment: 14 pages including 3 figures. Uses elsart.cls. Some numbers have been updated and a few typos have been correcte

Reassortment and Interspecies Transmission of North American H6N2 Influenza Viruses

AbstractH6N2 influenza viruses were isolated from California chickens in 2000 and 2001. Here we report the characterization of these H6N2 viruses, one of the few descriptions of non-H5, non-H7 subtype influenza viruses in this host. The H6N2 viruses were nonpathogenic in experimentally infected chickens and could be divided into three genotypes. All three genotypes of virus had similar surface glycoproteins and all contained an 18 amino acid deletion in the neuraminidase, a characteristic of other chicken influenza viruses. Differences were apparent, however, in the complement of replicative protein genes between the genotypes. The presence of multiple H6N2 genotypes suggests that independent transmission and/or reassortment events may have taken place between aquatic bird and chicken influenza viruses