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Most academic institutions, particularly universities, now have formal codes of conduct relating to interpersonal relations, formally constituted procedures and formally appointed officers to oversee and deal with complaints and grievances. The sphere of academic ethics may be seen either as wider or narrower than the focus of such policies. Most writing on the subject focuses on individuals or categories of person, so many papers have been written on the rights and duties of professors, administrators and students. But people should start with the university as an institution. Promotion is an example of an area where people tend to confuse substance with procedure. Most institutions realize the importance of having well-honed policies covering tenure and promotion. One area to which professors do pay attention and on which much is written is the curriculum. It is widely recognized as being part of our professional role to consider what subjects should be studied and in what way.

This paper endorses the overall argument of the preceding contributions. It argues for an approach to teacher education focused more strongly on the nature of the educational enterprise and the why, wherefore and how of teaching specific subjects. The importance of distinguishing between the provisional nature of knowledge claims and relativism is stressed, as is the distinction between the uncertain and the arbitrary.

Academic freedom does not refer to freedom to engage in any speech act, but to freedom to hold any belief and espouse it in an appropriately academic manner. This freedom belongs to certain institutions, rather than to individuals, because of their academic nature. Academic freedom should be absolute, regardless of any offence it may on occasion cause.

There is a need to disentangle various distinct kinds of claim. The body may be important in schooling, though not in education. Movement, sport, fitness and health need to be distinguished. Does sport improve character? Does education imply knowledge about matters of health? Is learning to dance analogous to either learning to play cricket or learning to play a musical instrument? The most challenging questions concern whether the body provides an alternative route to knowledge, if so of what. For example, is ballet a unique form of language with its own intrinsic value, an alternative way of arriving at valued propositional knowledge, or does it provide access to a unique kind of knowledge? The conclusion is drawn that none of these claims is sustainable in terms that make them of any great educational significance.

This paper, while broadly arguing in favour of the common school, nonetheless accepts the possibility of distinct specialist institutions in the later years of secondary schooling. It also argues for a careful distinction between a comprehensive school and a comprehensive classroom; further distinguishing between grouping by reference to alleged overall or all-round ability (‘streaming’) and grouping by reference to current preparedness for particular studies (‘setting’). It favours the latter and is critical of a policy of inclusion that tends towards the placing of students with special needs in the regular classroom. It argues throughout that practice and policy must be based on educational rather than social grounds, should they be in conflict.

Richard Pring's lack of clarity about the kind of education to be provided in common schools and, especially, about the desirability or otherwise of differentiated provision for students with different aptitudes. In The Life and Death of Secondary Education for All, Pring argues that our ultimate aim should be 'making our children more human', to which end should be 'helping them acquire the appropriate dispositions, intellectual and moral'. Pring stresses that the language we use in talking about education makes a material difference to the practice it gives rise to. 'Unexamined language bewitches policy and practice in many ways'. Pring urges us to widen our conception of education to go beyond the 'narrow conception of standards' currently in vogue and the conflation of those standards with a limited repertoire of performance indicators. Pring is correct in his observation that in the past people wrongly assumed that intellectual ability, which was confounded with IQ, was a fixed innate quality.

The paper argues that 100 years of empirical research into teaching has failed to provide a usable account of best practice. This is partly because of conceptual and other logical problems that cannot in practice be resolved, as has been argued before. However, it is further argued that the real reason that no useful rules of good teaching can be established is that there are no substantive and important rules covering human interactions such as teaching.

This article draws out the class-based functions of genre by contrasting “penny bloods” with the Victorian middle-class sensation novel. In the penny fiction, the threat of rape is pervasive and yet obscured by the genre's surfeit of spectacle, which absorbs the rape threats into the novel's broader scope. The heroine threatened with rape in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Black Band (1862) exhibits little psychological response to her two abductions, and the events seem to be quickly forgotten once the moment is past. The memory of trauma, however, is transposed onto other elements of the plot. The penny blood's play between generic codes functions as a sleight of hand to de-emphasize the reality of sexual violence.

People take offence too easily and are encouraged to do so by, e.g., institutional harassment policies. 'Offensive' is sometimes equated with 'anything that offends someone', sometimes with a definitive list of specific behaviours. When is it justifiable to take offence? Distinctions need to be drawn: between offensive to the senses and to the mind; between meaning to offend, actually giving offence, and behaving in a manner likely to cause offence; between feeling upset and taking some formal action; between what is offensive to some, to all, and in itself. Comments are made on objectivity in moral judgements. Currently there is a failure to distinguish between what offends and what is objectively offensive. Practical consequences occur in terms of censorship and freedom of speech. Generalisations and jokes about identifiable groups or stereotypes are not inherently offensive. A distinction is drawn between being upset and being a victim. Taking offence is a supremely self-serving act. Current concern with offence trivialises morality and runs counter to basic principles of toleration, freedom and fairness.

Recent empirical research into the brain, while reinforcing the view that we are extensively ‘programmed’, does not refute the idea of a distinctive human mind. The human mind is primarily a product of the human capacity for a distinctive kind of language. Human language is thus what gives us our consciousness, reasoning capacity and autonomy. To study and understand the human, however, is ultimately a task beyond empirical disciplines such as psychology. Literature is the repository of wisdom relating to humanity and as such needs to be emphasized more in education.

A policy of inclusion may, in certain circumstances, be justified but inclusion is not an inherently moral principle. On occasion, the practice of inclusion may clearly offend against the principles of fairness. It is crucially important to distinguish between empirical arguments for inclusion and would-be moral arguments. That having been done, it is not clear that there are in general any compelling empirical arguments for a widespread policy of inclusion, and it is tolerably clear that inclusion is not morally incumbent upon us.

The essence of the argument in this article is threefold: that empirical questions about laws governing human activity do not have definitive answers; that certain conceptual questions do, and when they do they have important practical implications; but that many conceptual questions do not have definitive answers either. The argument is pursued by reference to Wilson's views on the nature and importance of philosophy, and to moral education by way of example. The conclusion drawn is that empirical research into education as such, and other specifically human activities, is misconceived. The reason that we still debate such questions as ''Can virtue be taught?'' is that they have no answer, but that does not mean that any view can equally well be adopted or that anything goes in every specific case. A better or worse understanding, a more or less efficacious response, can still be reached in particular cases. Such understanding is achieved through philosophy and the study of the humanities.

The British prime minister Harold Macmillan once reported one of his tutors in the classical languages and humanities as saying: 'Nothing you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life- save only thisthat if you work hard and diligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole purpose of education' (Kenny, 1997: 20). In quoting this statement, the philosopher Anthony Kenny, a recent Master of Balliol College, Oxford, adds that Russell Meiggs, another distinguished classicist, pre-eminently gave his students this ability: an ability to see through what he called the 'higher nonsense'. (Essentially comparable is Ernest Hemingway's notion of an internal 'crap-detector', subsequently taken over by Postman and Weingartner (1969) in their Teaching as a Subversive Activity; so this is by no means the exclusive concern of Oxford classicists!) I, too, believe this to be at the heart of educati...