Recent policy developments within the public service sector have led to widespread de-professionalisation and a general loss of motivation and morale within education, health and social work. This state of affairs has been brought about by the imposition of a social market on public sector professions and through the introduction of competence-based education and training (CBET) strategies into professional studies. These developments are criticised for their failure to capture the essential epistemological and moral dimensions of the work of professionals, and (...) programmes for professional regeneration are recommended through the renewed emphasis on the workplace as the site of professional learning. Work-based learning may enable professionals to re-affirm the importance of experiential learning and reinforce the centrality of the ethical bases of professional practice. (shrink)

This paper explores the manner in which educational and political conservatives attempted to control the content and purposes of the history curriculum in English schools during the period 1987-1994. It focuses upon this particular coalition because, since the late 1970s, it has set the agenda for the debate and dominated the race to produce a history curriculum designed to help produce a particular kind of society. The paper argues that the New Right's claim to be engaging in an educational debate (...) is spurious. Rather, its concern is primarily ideological and only educational in terms of its use of history education as a vehicle through which to disseminate a specific set of values and beliefs. (shrink)

Recent policy developments within the public service sector have led to widespread de-professionalisation and a general loss of motivation and morale within education, health and social work. This state of affairs has been brought about by the imposition of a social market on public sector professions and through the introduction of competence-based education and training strategies into professional studies. These developments are criticised for their failure to capture the essential epistemological and moral dimensions of the work of professionals, and programmes (...) for professional regeneration are recommended through the renewed emphasis on the workplace as the site of professional learning. Work-based learning may enable professionals to re-affirm the importance of experiential learning and reinforce the centrality of the ethical bases of professional practice. (shrink)

This paper explores the manner in which educational and political conservatives attempted to control the content and purposes of the history curriculum in English schools during the period 1987-1994. It focuses upon this particular coalition because, since the late 1970s, it has set the agenda for the debate and dominated the race to produce a history curriculum designed to help produce a particular kind of society. The paper argues that the New Right's claim to be engaging in an educational debate (...) is spurious. Rather, its concern is primarily ideological and only educational in terms of its use of history education as a vehicle through which to disseminate a specific set of values and beliefs. (shrink)

This paper contrasts the model of the teacher-pupil relationship implied by instrumental 'new' era values currently being imposed on schools with that implied by a more ancient but highly relevant conception of education which is concerned with the search for personal meaning and the development of authentic understanding. It is argued that there is a significant 'poetic' dimension to the latter in which the learner's own engagement with things is celebrated and the teacher's role is essentially receptive-responsive both towards the (...) learner and the living traditions in which things receive their significance. It is suggested that the 'poetic' provides an important orientation, not just with respect to how teachers interact with children, but also with respect to the larger institutional context in which this interaction is situated. (shrink)