Liberal education is a value-loaded notion which raises questions regarding the conditions and limits of promoting self-fulfilment within a broader conception of justice. The communitarian critique of rights-based liberalism reveals a tension between, on one hand, the maximizing, normative conception of liberal education and, on the other, the limited mandate of social and political institutions to foster its achievement. The aim of this paper is to argue against a minimalist conception of liberal education, as it seems to derive from rights-based (...) liberalism, especially political liberalism. Drawing on the writings of John Rawls and Michael Oakeshott, some insights into the purposes of liberal education are identified and discussed. Nevertheless, although both authors suggest that self-fulfilment, as it could be promoted by liberal education, is an ideal worth cultivating, their vantage points do not help clarify the conceptual framework in which self-fulfilment could be coherently addressed. The last section of the paper attempts to argue in favour of interpreting liberal education within the conceptual framework of aspiration-fulfilment and capacity-fulfilment, as it was developed by Alan Gewirth. (shrink)

This paper addresses whether universal, general education programs are enough to satisfy basic criteria of human rights, or whether comprehensive family planning programs, in conjunction with universal education programs, might also be morally required. Even before the Reagan administration instituted the ‘global gag rule’ at the 1984 conference in Mexico City, prohibiting funding to nongovernmental organizations that included providing information about abortion as a possible method of family planning, the moral acceptability of family planning programs has been called into question. (...) This paper makes a moral argument for family planning by appealing to both data and to theory: data about the efficacy of universal and comprehensive family planning education programs at reducing fertility and infant mortality, and theory about what is required for the establishment of autonomy. It reasons that universal educational programs are insufficient for the promotion of autonomy, and therefore argues on substantive autonomy grounds for comprehensive family planning programs in addition to universal education programs. (shrink)

The same year as the opening of the Woodstock music festival, a small medical school in Hamilton, Ontario, launched a daring new medical education programme in which lectures were replaced by small-group, interdisciplinary problem-based tutorials. Problem-based learning, as it became known, took the world of higher education by storm, such that today over 500 institutions in the World claim to use this method in almost every field of study, from engineering to liberal arts. Through the in-depth historical analysis of archive (...) materials, oral history interviews and contemporary publications, this thesis proposes a rigorous account of the intellectual history of PBL from its birth place at McMaster University, to its evolution in Maastricht University, closing on a comparison with the Danish problem-oriented, project-based model of higher education. The author delivers a narrative that stands at the cross-roads between history, philosophy of education and cognitive psychology. “Revolutions and Re-iterations” retraces not only the key historical events that shaped PBL but also the sources of inspiration for many of PBL’s key features and the central theoretical debates that defined the practice of PBL since the 1970s. (shrink)