The British Government emphasizes the involvement of family and parents in children's education. In parallel there is a rapid increase in the use of computer technology in schools. Primary school teachers are required to present parents with an end of year school report, which often represents the only real information parents receive. While the government assumes that teachers' communication with parents can improve through the use of computerised systems and report writing software, the evidence appears to point to primary schools (...) and parents rejecting the use of technological communication as insufficiently personal and informative. The Government assumes that schools will implement highly sophisticated technology while it presumes that parents and teachers approach their communication from a level power base and equal technological ability. Thus the school systems reinforce social and class differences. (shrink)

In this article, we distinguish between three approaches to ethics in school, each giving an interpretation of the expression ‘ethics in school’: the descriptive facts about ethics approach, roughly consisting of teaching empirical facts about moral matters to students; the moral fostering approach, consisting of mediating a set of given values to students; and the philosophical ethics (PE) approach, consisting of critically discussing and evaluating moral issues with students. Thereafter, three influential arguments for why there ought to be ethics in (...) school are discussed, and each argument is interpreted given each approach to ethics in school, respectively. Thereby, we evaluate which interpretation of ‘ethics in school’ produces the strongest arguments, and thus, which approach is best supported by these arguments. The conclusion is that there ought to be PE in school. (shrink)

There seems to be an overall agreement that parents qua parents are, almost by definition, in need of support and hence that there is always a ‘parental deficit’. In order to help parents out many initiatives are taken, predominantly drawing from a technical conception of parenting. This particular conception defines the deficit as a shortage of practical and theoretical knowledge, and conceives of the predicament of parenting or upbringing as something that can be successfully dealt with. Two criticisms are developed (...) in this article. First, this conception of parenting is exposed as a ‘frictionless fiction’ that makes a very strong appeal to many of us, inhabitants of late modern Western societies, perhaps because it promises answers where there are none to be given. Second, a different conception of the parental deficit is developed following Ramaekers and Suissa who spelled out a parental hermeneutical-existential deficit drawing upon Cavell. This specific kind of deficit picks out another kind of support. I develop this alternative by sketching a figure of strong engagement that provides parent support. (shrink)