Creationism is an ambiguous term used in a variety of contexts: political, scientific, religious and educational. This paper attempts to trace the discourse on creationism in two European countries (France and the United Kingdom) and show how different cultural backgrounds shape the construction of its meaning. The striking difference between the total redefinition of the narration on creationism in France after the Harun Yahya's case, and the practically oriented steady development of the discussion in the United Kingdom seems to result from two different political sensitivities, deeply rooted in local cultures. The goal of my paper is doublefold. It attempts to present the emergence of two distinct incommensurable conceptualisations of a social problem and in the same time it tries to answer how to discuss them in a democratic framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
In this paper, I am applying a rights-based approach to childhood social exclusion that, following Sen's capability approach as one formulation of such a rights-based approach, sees social exclusion as the failure of people to have access to critical capabilities relating to their integration into society. The implications of this approach will then be applied to the relation between education and social exclusion, where it is shown that education has a critical impact on mitigating or reinforcing social exclusion. Taking such a capabilities-based approach implies a shift away from a concentration on average achievement generated by an education system to the low end of the achievement distribution and the ability of the education system to raise the performance and integrate the most disadvantaged students. The paper investigates how education systems in Europe and other industrialized countries are achieving this goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
This paper proposes a critical reflection on the use of quantitative sources for the historian of education. It identifies and discusses key promises and challenges related to the construction and interpretation of historical statistics in education, drawing on a number of British and some French historiographical examples. Ultimately, the article encourages, where possible and appropriate, a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods in order to identify trends and patterns in education and facilitate their contextualisation in terms of processes and meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]