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This introduction attempts to draw together the various threads which comprise this special issue and place them in the context of recent disruptions to the political order occasioned by the rise of populist politics, the resurgence of widespread racial tensions in a number of polities and the emergence of a global pandemic. Central to the challenges thrown up by these 'events' and a motive force, has been the incremental advancement of libertarianism with its capacity to disorient and displace a more socially oriented liberalism. Together with a range of changes (some might argue "enhancements") to our technological capacities these moves offer significant challenges to the advancement of a moral education that is sufficiently robust. The discussion moves from the development of historico-political readings of our present situation and challenge, through some important epistemic questions about truth-telling, integrity and sociality, and on to practical questions about the relationship between technology and personal moral capacities. This last challenge is explored with respect to the need to maintain the very analogue capacity of judgement in the face of a digitally mediated world. Moreover, this introduction also explores the structural and political challenges posed by narrow specialisation in the field of moral education, the evolution of bio-technology/materials and consciousness.

This essay examines a longstanding and recurrent metaphor in the representation of schools in modern society: the school as factory. Tracing this figure to the rise of philanthropic schools provided by factory owners from the early stages of the British industrial revolution, the essay surveys its uses both in the historical sources and in later critical-theoretical analyses commonly informed by the work of Michel Foucault. While acknowledging the frequent validity of the metaphor in specific historical conjunctures, the essay also questions its overapplication past and present, to the exclusion of other symbolic constructions of the school with deeper origins and wider salience for the practice of education. The essay concludes with a reminder that the reproduction of governing metaphors in the historical and cultural study of educational institutions should always be treated with philosophical caution.

We here analyse the ethical dimensions of the UK's "Research Excellence Framework" (REF), the latest (2014) version of an exercise which assesses the quality of university research in the UK every seven or so years. We find many of the common objections to this exercise unfounded, such as that it is excessively expensive by comparison with alternatives such as various metrics, or that it turns on the subjective judgement of the assessors. However there are grounds for concern about the crude language in which for example all relevant scholarship becomes called "research" and publications become "outputs." The focus on the impact of research, which was a new feature of the most recent exercise, is particularly problematic, creating as it does a tendency to what Aristotle called alazony, self-aggrandisement, on the part of academics. We conclude that the REF is a mixed good from an ethical point of view, and that more could be done to mitigate its more unfortunate features.

This paper draws on an AHRC/ESRC funded, three-year multi-dimensional study of the political, cultural and pedagogical practices of religious education (Project AH/F009135/1). More specifically, it draws on that material to help understand the challenges to a sense of professional identity amongst UK religious education teachers. The empirical findings are here located in and shed light on prior discussions of the extent to which teachers in general are to be considered professional. These prior discussions have seen the idea of teacher professionalism come under sustained attack with the conflation of the conceits of professional, vocation and occupation, and the opening section of the paper tries to understand how this has come to pass. This concern with professional identity is subsequently pursued into the domain of religious education and the ways in which, amongst other concerns, the rise of a deracinated examination process and the neglect of religious literacy have contributed significantly to the diminution of the religious education teacher as a professional.

Catholic schools in Scotland have been fully state-funded since the 1918 Education (Scotland) Act. Under this Act, 369 contemporary Catholic schools are able to retain their distinctive identity and religious education and the teachers have to be approved by the Catholic hierarchy. Similar to the position of other forms of state-funded and partially state-funded faith schools in Europe, the position of state-funded Catholic schools in Scotland has been contested. This paper initially locates the debate and discussion about Catholic schools in Scotland in the history and development of the wider faith schools debate in the UK, particularly England and Wales. The paper outlines the key themes in the debate on faith schooling in England and Wales identifying the similarities between the debate in Scotland and England and Wales and the distinctive features of the debate in Scotland. The paper will then focus on a critical examination and analysis of two key themes concerning state-funded Catholic schools in the Scottish context. The first theme is the debate over the continuation of government funding of Catholic schooling as it is effectively government funding of religious beliefs and practices for a particular Christian denomination. The second theme is more unique to Scotland and has some tenuous links to the debate on faith schools in Northern Ireland: the claims that Catholic schools are the root cause of sectarianism or contribute to sectarianism.

Ethnographic findings from a large qualitative research project on Religious Education in UK secondary schools uncovered contested meanings for the subject as a social practice. In order to bring to the fore some of the ways these contested meanings manifest themselves as confusions in the classroom, a performance ethnography was conducted, making use of Augusto Boal's forum theatre approach. This involved distilling ethnographic evidence into dramatic vignettes, performing these in front of an audience of pupils, and asking the pupils for feedback on the experience. The feedback enabled the research team to triangulate their findings, by inverting the ethnographers' gaze, allowing pupils to co-construct the meanings which the ethnographers had elicited from the data. The method is discussed in detail, as are the ways in which resource and examination pressures in the Religious Education classroom can obscure opportunities for authentic exploration of religious meanings in pupils' lives and the contribution of the forum theatre and pupils' reflections on how to remedy these distortions. (Contains 4 notes and 1 figure.)

The educational aims of religious education (RE) in the UK as evinced, for example, by Ofsted have been couched in the language of meaning making. Based on an ESRC funded three-year ethnographic study of 24 schools across the UK, this essay represents one attempt to interrogate how such meanings are shaped, or indeed fail to be shaped, in the day-to-day transactions of the school. We do this by locating RE in current discussions of efficacy, as manifest in inspectoral reports and allied scholarship, illustrate how complex the entailments and purposes of RE are, explore some of the ethnographic and related data to understand how meaning is shaped inside and outside the classroom, and, finally, attempt to locate that material in more general observations about the nature of meaning in RE--observations that are informed by contemporary readings of meaning making in the work of, among others, Baudrillard. We observe that RE, so dependent upon meaning for educational justification, is too frequently a site which witnesses failures of meaning. (Contains 5 notes and 3 figures.)

The "Does Religious Education work?" project is part of the Religion and Society programme funded by two major research councils in the UK. It sets out to track the trajectory of Religious Education (RE) in secondary schools in the UK from the aims and intentions represented in policy through its enactment in classroom practice to the estimations of its impact by students. Using a combination of approaches, we are in the process of investigating the practices which determine and shape the teaching of RE in secondary schools through linked case studies, semi-structured interviews and a practitioner enquiry strand. In this article we focus on the first stage of the project where we used the Delphi method to elicit expert opinion on the aims and intentions of RE in secondary schools in Scotland, England and Northern Ireland. We outline the place of the Delphi process within the rationale of the project, discuss emerging themes and some of the issues arising from the use of this approach. (Contains 1 note, 3 tables, and 1 figure.)

In this essay James Conroy raises the question of how far the state should engage in the rearing of children, looking in particular at homeschooling as a site for contestation. He considers this question by looking specifically at recent developments in the United Kingdom around the elision of child safeguarding issues with concern about the control of home education. In the first part of the essay, Conroy explores some general questions about the relation between politics and populism, and the consequences for the prerogatives of parents. In the second part of the essay, he interrogates constructivist accounts of the family and offers something of a historical corrective to the widely held view (emanating from Philippe Aries) that the very conceit of the family is a "modern" invention. This analysis leads Conroy to conclude that, while states do have a proper locus in the upbringing of children, they must make certain presumptions in favor of the parent if governmental responses to home education are to be considered political rather than populist and "controlling."

For something approaching 50 years, multicultural education has been accepted as an educational, social and moral good by liberal educators. Its instantiation in the practices of education has, in various ways, largely depended on a series of strategies for making the other (the stranger) familiar within the majority culture. This essay suggests that such a cultural and pedagogical focus on the other may be a mistake. Drawing on literary cultures that span both time and space it demonstrates how a more original, radical and effective pedagogy of pluralism and multiculturalism might be grounded on a very different set of ideas about the self than those that have come to dominate education over the last 50 years. The first section argues for the re-habilitation of the notion of "enstrangement", which has, since the early part of the nineteenth century, been displaced by the much more aggressive and alienating (Marxian and post-Marxian) notion of estrangement. This forms the ground for re-thinking our relationship to the self and the other and thus to the other and the world. The second section looks specifically at how we are enstranged onto-psychologically, epistemically and culturally and the implications of these forms of enstrangement for education. The third part concentrates on how a pedagogy of enstrangement can constructively open up new possibilities in, and for, multicultural education as a moral endeavour. (Contains 12 notes.)

The article develops a conception of education that we have named liminal education. Liminal education tries to counter the centripetal tendencies of the centre (particular that of the consumer market) by disclosing alternative positions in order to enable children to cultivate a critically reflective disposition. A second feature of liminal education is that it carries the potential to assist children in recognising that otherness is not the same thing as being alien. Finally, it is characterised by an embodiment of the notion of "communitas", a state in which no one can have authority over another or see themselves as superior. For children who live within the dominant (centre) culture and who find security in consumerism, liminal education is important because it offers them imaginative possibilities which could give rise to alternative conceptions of the good life. Children in liminal communities will benefit from liminal education, because they will have a better understanding of their own position and those of others, which, we believe, will reduce the anxiety of loosing one's identity and thereby the need to return to anxiously held foundational beliefs.

The purpose of this article is to suggest how philosophy might play a key, if precisely delineated, role in the shaping of policy that leads educational development. The argument begins with a reflection on the nature of confidence in the relationship between philosophy and policy. We note the widespread resistance to abstract theorising in the policy community, disguising the enormous potential of a philosophical approach. Defending a philosophically equipped approach to policy, which is inevitably theoretically laden, we argue that philosophical investigation should be construed not as an initial step anterior to the task of research, but as a way of standing in relation to evidence and policy making throughout the process of investigation and adjudication. To illustrate the distinctive contribution philosophy can make, we propose five interrelated stages where philosophical thinking plays a constitutive role in the full process of policy development, critique and instantiation.

Analysis of a questionnaire completed by initial teacher education (ITE) students at the University of Glasgow shows a clear divergence between their personal and professional ideals. The students define their own ideals predominantly in terms of situations, like being married, having children or being happy. Their professional ideals, which comprise the ideals they want to pass on to pupils and their views about the ideal teacher, are mainly defined in terms of character traits, like being kind, honest and hard working. Another outcome that was different from our expectations was that, though the ITE has a Catholic mission, only a small number of students mention religious ideals.

In this essay, the authors suggest that there is another, different and more ancient way of looking at the moral and social role of the teacher and the processes of education in which she is involved. This alternative perspective draws on older, more imaginative and complex sources of meaning than the latest Gallup poll or the latest adjusted performance indicator. It offers a rival interpretation of teaching and learning which, if actualised, has the potential to be more directly enabling than currently dominant modalities in allowing students to respond creatively to modern social conditions. The older tradition that this essay explores is rooted in the notion of the "Trickster" figure: an important character in legend and story, social and symbolic practices across a broad range of world cultures. In the first section of this essay the authors draw upon the work of Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis to help understand the manner in which many aspects of the modern imaginative lives have been closed down by two major features of modernity towards which the Trickster figure is traditionally opposed. The first of these is the development of an overdependence upon an "arithmetic calculus" as the primary mythic, and therefore heuristic, device of culture. The second is the rupture with history which has impoverished the storehouse of people's collective imagination. The authors then go on to establish the Trickster figure as a social and moral signifier that might offer an alternative hermeneutical tool to the arithmetic for the interrogation and interpretation of their deepest experiences. In the second section of the essay they explore the distinctively "Celtic" Trickster as a way of giving this universal signifier a specifically local character. Here they try to understand the process of contestation and inversion as an ethical and educational practice. In the final section of the argument they try to elucidate some of the pedagogic implications of deploying the Trickster image in the classroom. (Contains 8 notes.)

Analyzes the confusion in the language of political economy in Great Britain that generates and sustains moral infantilism in the civil polity. Critiques the limits of recent approaches to moral education. Sketches the relationship between the use of interpretative understanding and Jungian insights in support of poetry in moral engagement. Discusses implications for moral education. (CMK)