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In this polemical piece, we begin by arguing that the Schools White Paper (2022) is framed within, and seeks to promulgate, a right-wing 'regime of truth'. We interrogate the vocabulary of the Paper to reveal and challenge its 'truths' -- about the curriculum and its 'delivery'; the testing and examination regime; behaviour; and initial teacher education and the associated pedagogy. We then argue that the requirement for all schools to join 'strong' multi-academy trusts (MATs) is an intimate part of this agenda, not an optional add-on: the Department for Education employs MAT CEOs in every part of the system; MATs operate autocratically; and there is no local democratic control and no local accountability to communities, parents or children. All this reinforces and leaves unquestioned the centralised governmental control of schooling. We end with a call to fight to establish an alternative 'regime of truth' based on respect, reciprocity and democracy.

In John Raven's "Diving in Where Angels Fear to Tread: Pre-Requisites to Evidence-Based Interventions," he outlines several critical failings in which social scientists bear a responsibility for potentially a great deal of damage toward children, society, and notably, the planet itself. The nature of the damage appears to be one of stagnation, ('a self-perpetuating system which… negates efforts to introduce change') by virtue of suppression and discrediting of talent and innovation, and as a consequence, the promotion of a 'fascist ideology' in education (ibid). The causes behind such destruction appear to be largely attributed to: (1) an 'uncritical acceptance of reductionist science'; and (2) a preference towards 'an authoritarian, single factor remediation of social problems'. In this response to Raven's paper, Michael Wigelsworth considers the nature of these charges from his own perspective, focusing on the context of implementation of strength-based approaches in schools designed to promote social and emotional learning (SEL) (rather than focusing on statutory academic elements of learning). [For "Diving in Where Angels Fear to Tread: Pre-Requisites to Evidence-Based Interventions," see EJ1248321.]

The paper is based on the concept of political culture, which is particularly important for the maintenance and functioning of a democratic political system and is closely linked with the political literacy of young people. In this paper research focus is on the two dimensions of political culture -- political values and trust. Specifically, the main research question is: what are the determinants of accepting constitutional values and the trust in political institutions of final year secondary school pupils? The paper use the data provided by research on political literacy of final year secondary school pupils. In order to provide answer to the research question the hierarchical multiple regression is used. In the first step, particular socio-demographic variables (sex, education of mother and education of father) were introduced. In the second step, the type of secondary school education was added. The third group of predictors encompassed the level of religiosity, generalized prejudices and authoritarianism. In the final step political knowledge was included. The introduced model provides certain explanation regarding constitutional values, but fails to explain distrust in political institutions. The phenomenon of low trust in political institutions is discussed in paper.

A critique of both homogenizing and vertical power runs through the Zapatista social project in Chiapas, Mexico, lending a distinctive character to both Zapatismo's political vision of self-governance and to the educational vision of its community schools. Zapatismo's critical practices may thus offer valuable contributions to antifascist praxis and pedagogy. This paper considers anti/fascism through a micropolitical lens, focusing on two prevailing tendencies: binarization of power relations and homogenization of identities. It then suggests that Zapatista practices undermine microfascist tendencies in social-political life through subversion of command relationships, plural identification, critique of representation and safeguarding of alterity. The paper concludes by tracing the manner in which a critique of state schooling within Chiapas's indigenous communities has led to the development of Zapatista autonomous schools, examining ways in which these schools refuse totalization and prefigure community autonomy.

Given the rise in extremist radicalization using digital media, antifascist education must develop its own philosophy of digital technologies. The first half of this paper turns to Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman's theory of the American agitator as well as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's notion of fascist projection and paranoia to provide groundwork for this project. Though written in the 1940s, Frankfurt School essays on agitation and projection can be thought of as early indications of the importance of affect in fascist politics, which has only become intensified with the advent of digital media. The paper then proceeds to apply a critical concept of "agitational aesthetics" to chan culture in the present day, highlighting the affective economy of memes in the radicalization process. In conclusion, a series of questions are posed to educators to help them think through the complexities of intervening before, during, and after the online agitation of proto-fascist tendencies in youth.

Recent scholarship on anti-fascist education has stressed the role of everyday manifestations of power and oppression as the locus of molecular or microfascism, a term coined by Deleuze and Guattari. While identifying the ways in which power structures operate at the quotidian level is undoubtedly an important educational task, this paper argues that an anti-fascist educational approach must also account for the ways in which such structures are connected to concrete political manifestations of fascism. To this end, it explores the potential contributions and challenges of an Arendtian conception of love in the context of anti-fascist education. Drawing on Arendt's polemical interactions about love with Israeli scholar Gershom Scholem, this paper suggests that Arendt's conception of love as belonging outside the realm of the political, and her rejection of a love for the nation and for collectivities in general, can serve as important pedagogical tools in uncovering and critiquing specific affective appeals characteristic of fascist and neo-fascist rhetoric. While in Arendt's own work love is not explicitly associated with an analysis of fascism, her thinking about love brings us back to questions about the very meaning of politics, questions that are foundational to any meaningful attempt to establish an anti-fascist pedagogy.[AQ]

As online education continues to proliferate that there is a need to understand how institutions can better support faculty in the transition to online education. Building on work that has suggested the importance of learning spaces for faculty to engage in discussion and reflection on their move to online education, this paper employs Bakhtin's notion of "ideological becoming" to provide a theoretically grounded understanding of how the design of such spaces can better facilitate this move. The paper reveals how learning spaces designed to develop critical awareness empower faculty to navigate discourses of online education, enabling them to build on their existing knowledge and skills as educators. The findings reveal how engaging faculty in critical dialogue can enable a cumulative shift in thinking from discussions dominated by authoritative discourses of online education that create an initial confusion between performance and pedagogy to the development of critical awareness that enables them to challenge dominant discourses and reconnect with the self as an experienced educator. The paper provides an important insight into an approach that might enable institutions to better support faculty buy-in and acceptance of online education.

This paper considers critical reflection as a pedagogical strategy in UK higher education at a moment of an amplification of populist, reactionary discourses. It draws on written reflections of foundation-level students in a case study cohort and offers insights into their lived learning experiences and perceptions of the value of reflection. This is situated within the UK 'Brexit' context, alongside a proliferation of far-right populist voices, emboldened supremacies and rising fascism. Accompanying this has been a normalisation of reactionary 'anti-social justice' discourses. It is vital that HE practitioners recognise, pre-empt and interrupt such discourses, developing pedagogies and curricula in response. Yet there are inherent challenges in a climate of 'post-truth' anti-intellectualism. This paper argues that critical reflection contributes a useful approach to learning, fostering development of students' personal, intellectual and political capacities to navigate this complex socio-political terrain and engage with social justice.

In this paper, we explored how political knowledge related to generalised prejudice, defined as the common variance of three highly correlated specific prejudice concerning ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. We aligned our hypotheses with the Cognitive Ability and Style to Evaluation (CASE) model, which postulates the mechanism underlying the relationship between individual-level cognitive variables and intergroup outcomes. As knowledge in its many forms correlates with and serves as a proxy of cognitive abilities, we hypothesised that political knowledge, when considered a precursor of prejudice, can be expected to act similarly to cognitive variables within the CASE model. We performed an empirical test of the hypothesised relationships on a nationally representative sample of Croatian students in their final year of secondary education (aged 17-19). As expected, there was a significant negative association between political knowledge and generalised prejudice, both direct and indirect via right-wing authoritarianism. Youth with higher political knowledge had significantly lower levels of generalised prejudice. In addition, while there were differences in the overall levels of political knowledge, right-wing authoritarianism and generalised prejudice between students attending different secondary education programmes, the pattern of relationships between these concepts was found to be stable across educational settings.

The article shows how the liberal-democratic provisions of the constitutions of the U.S. and Venezuela can lead to partisan institution and allow the emergence of authoritarianism.

Purpose: This paper aims to confront some of the many facets of academic freedom as a whole, including the shared concerns with Western academia, its relationship to the politics of Arab society and the relevance of these issues within local political domains. It attempts to profile the problems hindering societal progress beyond the seemingly defined truth. While this subject has many facets, this article only examines academic freedom within the scope of knowledge and inquiry derived from the revered text of the Qur'an, including its relation to democracy and radicalism. It is an effort to refocus Arab intellectual dialogue on its ailing academia. It also argues for Arab society to reclaim its core culture of Islam as an enabler of learning aside from the Eurocentric perspective of academic freedom. Design/methodology/approach: This paper uses an expository and persuasive format in its novel perspective. This expository form sets out the argument of academic freedom as being indigenous to Arab-Islamic heritage and pursues a persuasive statement for its resolution. This format outlines the main familiar aspects of academic freedom and lays out its components within Arab-Islamic history. Findings: This paper provides insights and arguments supporting its main theory. It suggests that Arabs must judiciously consider what their education will look like and accomplish in the next 100 years, considering the sociopolitical status quo and the chances of changing it. It argues that academic freedom is indigenous to Arab-Islamic early history, academia and knowledge governance. Therefore, Arab academia must not ignore its heritage to examine what hinders education and intellectualism. It concludes with the point that reinstalling a culture of knowledge will create a relevant democracy. Research limitations/implications: The implications for research, practice and society are vast. Further academic freedom research would redefine terms of processes, change the role of academic leadership, debunk locally dominated politics, introduce learning-first policies, balance inequalities in gender, abolish academic tribalism and move past colonialist ideas and predominance. For researchers, this point of view would open doors for new scholastic approaches. Practical implications: This paper includes practical implications that stem from an approach that would provoke practical possibilities and call for more academic conversations. Further conversations should explore and debate the gaps in Arab-Islamic knowledge history. The Global South of the Arab World or the Middle East and Northern Africa/Southwest Asia North Africa region could consider drafting a contemporary MENA account of a Magna Charta Libertatis Academicae or a Magna Charta Universitatum that is galvanized by Arab revivable heritage. Moreover, It would be productive if Western universities that operate in the Arab World would also take an active role in denouncing undemocratic practices and not merely operate as commercial enterprises. Social implications: Realizing academic freedom in Arab institutions will have a positive spillover effect on Arab society, including thriving and free media, freedom of speech and gender issues. Academic freedom is one of the main elements in structuring free political culture that adhere to the principles of tolerance. Academic freedom is necessary for showing all contesting ideas in a better light and, ultimately, achieving a form of intellectual equipoise. Originality/value: This paper concerns academic freedom in the Arab-Islamic World. The majority of academic freedom scholarship today assumes a Western democratic context in discussing or even arguing against it. The paper's focus is a novel expansion of that literature.

In this paper, we explore how advanced college students use the past history and experiences of others to understand the present while learning a foreign language through a content-integrated curriculum. To assess student learning we operationalize Norris (2006. "The Why (and How) of Assessing Student Learning Outcomes in College Foreign Language Programs." "The Modern Language Journal" 90 (4): 576-583) learning outcomes model (content, skills and dispositions) through linguistic indices. The learning is documented throughout a semester via learners' written production, comparing the changes and expansion in the use of meaning-making resources that demonstrate their understanding of others through choices in the wording, logical organization of texts, and their positioning in relation to those contents. The participants have varied language trajectories ranging from heritage to L2 language learners of Spanish. The findings show how a content and language integrated curriculum focusing on a historical theme (i.e. Southern Cone dictatorships) through a particular genre (i.e. film review) can reveal students' content, skills and dispositions in an L2. Learners demonstrated their developing capacities in a foreign language and history through their production of written texts that allow them to use knowledge about the past to interpret the present via academic genres. The paper provides a framework for describing content, skills and dispositions learning outcomes with linguistic features that evidence the achievement of those outcomes.

Teachers matter. They make a difference in the life of the individual and the society at large. Hence, their education and training has always been at the centre of any government's education policy. This paper focuses on teacher education in Albania. The narrative describes and analyzes the main milestones in teacher education during the four historical periods of Albania: the National Awakening, Independence, Totalitarianism and Post-totalitarianism. The main thrust of the paper is to examine how the historical, political and socio-cultural factors interrelate to influence on teacher education and pedagogy at certain points in time of Albania's history. The paper reveals the way the western educational ideas that emerged and evolved during the pre World War II period were suppressed during totalitarianism, but were reasserted when Albania transitioned to democracy.

Education is widely seen as a force for good, associated with hope and optimism about better individual and social futures. By contrast, and controversially, this paper argues that education and education policy in recent decades has been far from benign, as evidenced in the growing alienation of significant numbers of teachers and students and, crucially for our paper, in the growth of authoritarian models of schooling, involving 'zero-tolerance', 'no excuses' disciplinary approaches. Against this background, and drawing on Hannah Arendt and the work of contemporary moral philosophers Elizabeth Minnich and Simona Forti, this paper diagnoses the nature and effects of school discipline policies in the neoliberal era, and in particular practices such as isolation, as a contemporary form of banal, or everyday, evil.

With an eye towards a potential scientific ethics curriculum, this paper examines four contrasting discourses regarding the ethics of using human subjects in science. The first two represent official statements regarding ethics. These include the U.S.'s National Science Education Standards, that identify ethics with a professional code, and the Belmont Report, that conceptualizes ethics in three principles to guide research oversight boards. Contrasting this view of ethics as decorum and practice in line with a "priori" principles is the conception of ethics from unofficial sources representing populations who have been human subjects. The first counter-discourse examined comes from "Guinea Pig Zero", an underground magazine for professional human subjects. Here ethics emerges as a question of politics over principle. The good behavior of the doctors and researchers is an effect of the politics and agency of the communities that supply science with subjects. The second counter-discourse is a comic book called "Truth", which tells the story of Black soldiers who were used as guinea pigs in World War II. Ethics is both more political and more uncertain in this narrative. Science is portrayed as complicit with the racism of NAZI Germany; at the same time, and in contrast to the professional guinea pigs, neither agency nor politics are presented as effective tools for forcing the ethical conduct of the scientific establishment. The conclusion examines the value of presenting all of these views of scientific ethics in science education.

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a relatively novel approach to L2 learning. Designed under this approach, this paper proposes a set of three activities that seek to foster secondary level students' critical thinking, creativity, and intrapersonal skills. English language learning is integrated with the specific subjects of Literature, by analyzing and creating poetry, and History, discussing poems by Marcelo Gelman, Osvaldo Balbi, and Joaquín Enrique Areta, who were victims of the final Argentina's military dictatorship (1976-1983).

Within the framework of the reemergence of the theme of antifascism in contemporary educational theory, this paper raises the question of whether antifascism may be considered as a genuinely educational concept. Moreover, it investigates whether and to what extent the idea of antifascist education should remain anchored to an explicit reference to (anti)fascism as a historical phenomenon. Focusing, in particular, on the Italian scene, a distinction is established between antifascist education and education for antifascism. While understanding the concern of the scholars who appeal to a more strictly historical use of the category "(anti)fascist," the article vindicates the significance of the idea of antifascist education broadly understood, by drawing upon Umberto Eco's notion of Ur-fascism. In this endeavor, some key tenets of two Italian thinkers--Aldo Capitini and Guido Calogero--are marshaled and three main ideas are pinned down as representing the tripod of antifascist education: "openness," "the ulteriority of Thou" and a "non-imperial understanding of truth." The engagement with Capitini's religious--but non-confessional--approach indicates a view of antifascist education in religious and existential terms, this perspective possibly being more topical than ever in contemporary scenarios.

This article examines how the concept of freedom has been appropriated by the far right to impose a number of authoritarian policies designed to dismantle the critical functions of public and higher education. It explores, in particular, the ways in which Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has used an appeal to freedom to punish critics, wage a war on trans people, misrepresent the history of slavery, and impose a new version of McCarthyism on higher education. It challenges what it terms neoliberal and fascist notions of freedom by making clear that democracy and capitalism are incompatible, and that any viable notion of freedom must address not only personal and political rights but also economic rights. Freedom from domination must be matched by a freedom to live in a world marked by the principles of justice, equality, and dignity. There is no freedom in the midst of massive inequalities in wealth, power, and education.

The contemporary landscape of dread in living and teaching demands a creative and experimental form of investigation that can trace the affective contours of the present and uncover the obscure openings for an oppositional imagination. In a series of interlinked excurses, this essay articulates a poetic probing of the nexus of slow fascism and capitalist realism in the contemporary United States, as this is lived in the waking dreams of pedagogy and imaginative praxis. Looking beyond familiar analyses, this project exposes the terror of loss that motivates the punishments visited upon school and society by elites and points to the spectral presence of justice, which lives with us as persistent horizon even as it is persistently refused by power. Interleaved with these unravelings of the texture of experience as domination, this project gestures toward a thinking and teaching that is wise to capitalism's recurrent fantasies. This pedagogy inverts the certainties that organize our senses of knowledge and curriculum, navigates the hidden topology of the real (beyond the reflexive affirmation in schools of "what is"), and proposes an unruly form of thought that moves out past the walls that sign the edge of the classroom and the edge of the truth. This project does not announce a settled approach but rather challenges the limits of the familiar at the level of our structures of feeling. We feel the terror of the given in the present, but we can also follow the seam of experience toward the point at which its impositions are attached--in spite of themselves--to the confounding/liberatory logic of the "impossible."

In Georgia, the question of academic freedom emerged only after the country gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and its universities could begin reckoning with a heavy past of ideological pressure, censorship, governmental control and top-down management. Despite official declarations of the right to academic freedom and its recognition within Georgia's legal framework, actual practice in the country's higher education system tells a different story. The paper draws on qualitative data obtained from sixteen academics representing diverse institutions and disciplines, as well as the secondary data including educational legislation, government regulations, ministers' decrees, various reports from non-governmental organisations, think tanks and media archives. The findings of this paper reflect how academic freedom is understood in Georgia and two major threats to its exercise in universities, namely, interference from external politics and internal managerialism. We argue that academic freedom as a concept does not yet have its own place in Georgia's higher education system, protected de jure but with different de facto realities. The paper sheds light on how Soviet legacies of self-censorship, hidden mechanisms of control and a culture of conformity continue to create tensions inside universities and an environment in which academic freedom cannot flourish.

This paper conceptualizes intellectual dissent as a galvanizer of academic freedom in a post-totalitarian academia that is moving toward democratization. Drawing on the case of Ukraine, the analytical narrative describes difficulties in overcoming legacies in universities emerging from repressive rule that discouraged creativity, initiative, and critical inquiry, and having to envisage a transition to democratic governance in the context of neoliberal geopolitics. The case analysis suggests that intellectual dissent is essential but limited in its ability to establish the praxis of academic freedom under increasing control by oligarchic governments and a self-serving bureaucracy. By exploring interdependencies between intellectual dissent and academic freedom, this paper lays ground for an analytical framework that can be helpful in rethinking the prospects of universities at the crossroads of authoritarianism and democracy.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, journalism in China was marked by a breakthrough in investigative journalism that resulted from a particular conjuncture: the central government's wish to control local authorities through surveillance by the media, coupled with the desire of a new generation of journalists to carry out investigations in a professional manner. Between 2003 and 2016, a group of journalists in Shanghai running the daily paper Dongfang Zaobao and then the news site Pengpai bore witness to this period. A series of interviews with these journalists enabled us to understand their strategy over the long term and identify a phase of negotiations with the authorities that led to the creation of media and a period of asymmetric game-playing to produce information. It emerged that although the journalists accumulated major successes in matters of investigation, the authorities ultimately always curtailed editorial freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the significance of passions in political education through the consideration of Chantal Mouffe's agonistic democracy. Mouffe points out the role of the passions that facilitate organizing political identities, and presents the risks of eliminating passions. The liberal interpretation of democracy intends to eliminate passions that prevent people achieving a rational consensus. On the other hand, the emphasis on rationality makes it easy for right-wing populism to mobilize people's passions. In other words, the elimination of passions creates a situation in which dialogue with other political identities is difficult: this is the contradiction of the liberal interpretation of democracy. To avoid this, Mouffe suggests channels that express collective passions as democratic designs to disarm antagonistic passions. Mouffe's democratic theory indicates the risk of a too optimistic understanding of the passions in political education which takes deliberative approaches. Also, this result suggests the necessity of reconsidering the position of passions in the political education. From the perspective of Mouffe's agonistic democracy, the role of political education should be regarded as not elimination of passions but sublimation of antagonistic passions. To achieve this sublimation, we should facilitate participation in democratic practices. However, sublimation of antagonistic passions through democratic institutions is not always successful. If antagonistic passions are expressed in destructive forms, what should we do? This paper touches only briefly on this point. Further studies are needed in order to contribute to this issue.