Abstract: Chapter 4 tells stories of mischievous, naughty and fierce boys and girls, prompting us to rethink gendered moralities and how they are learned in childhood. Systematic behavioral analyses reveal gendered patterns in children’s moral experience, for example, boys initiate physical aggression, dominance and swearing more than girls, but girls assert themselves in more subtle ways, such as through tattling and scolding. I further explore how children’s learning of authority, aggression, boyhood, and violence is shaped by their family life as well as the larger historical trends. The chapter also examines how young girls understand their own situations and defend themselves. Despite the entrenched son-preference in this community, little girls are far from passive or submissive. To honor Arthur Wolf’s legacy on marriage and adoption and offer new insights on young girls’ emotional experience, which was not addressed in Wolf’s previous works, I present the case of an adopted daughter: an “unruly” girl who defies parental commands, asserts her own will, and negotiates love-hate relationships with different family members.

This chapter shows that a series of public policies have the potential to boost citizens’ perspectives for finding work and thereby foster incentives for peace. The first prominent policy is to invest in education. A more educated population generates countless benefits, one of which is the prospect of obtaining better jobs. Fundamentally, more meaningful employment raises the opportunity cost of giving up paid work to join an armed rebellion. Furthermore, physical capital (money) can more easily be stolen than human capital (knowledge). Hence, investing cash in building classrooms means that trying to topple the state will become less lucrative. Next, it is spelled out how better health leads to both a longer time horizon and a higher opportunity cost of conflict. This, in turn, makes long-run (peaceful) investments more appealing and reduces the scope for short-term appropriation and looting. Finally, a series of labor market policies are assessed, stressing the role of good jobs in making it less attractive to leave work and go to war. Empirical evidence from a variety of contexts is presented.

This chapter summarizes the evidence provided in the previous chapters that Anglo-European developmental psychology and education have been limited by a pervasive bias toward individualism. This is despite the focus of international educational assessment bodies on collaborative skills as being necessary for all students. The result of this has been a lack of robust findings, especially regarding social development, and an education system that is largely ineffective for students who are not from Anglo-European backgrounds. Addressing these related issues requires a shift in educational practice and policy toward collective achievement and collaborative forms of pedagogy. The chapter recommends the first steps toward moving education away from an individualistic paradigm. These include changing the unit of analysis from the individual to the interaction, creating group-level outcome variables, and restructuring learning environments. Multiple levels of schooling – the curriculum, instructional designs, the structure of schools, policy, assessment, and teacher training – are all discussed in terms of how they would need to shift to support collaborative competence as a goal for all children.

The familys economic and socio-cultural capital and how it is shared among its members influence a person’s capabilities and choices. This chapter posits that the family acts as a collective conversion factor, and presents a case study in Mali. A typology of household configurations that best expresses the diversity of family forms is built, then used to see the relation to the overall quality of life of household members, measured by goods (household assets) and opportunities (child education and women’s autonomy). The association between these configurations and children’s access to schooling, controlling for the household standard of living, is then considered, regression analysis results showing that access to education is correlated with the household standard of living, but there is also a household configuration net effect. Extended households seem better off and better suited to develop solidarity strategies that facilitate access to schooling. But the priority given to education also appears to play a role in differences between households, shown by a higher education rate of children in rural households headed by an educated man and in urban ones that are female-headed.

Children’s agency is the process through which children intentionally act and transform the current situation they live in and themselves. In this chapter, the life experiences of three Chinese children (six to twelve years old) during the first peak of the COVID-19 pandemic from February to May in 2020 are used as empirical examples to illustrate the unfolding of children’s agency. Adopting cultural-historical activity theory as a theoretical framework, this study argued that despite the constraints on physical movement imposed by the pandemic, these children responded with strong manifestations of agency by relying on a wide range of mediational means. The results support Vygotsky’s dialectical claim, according to which social crises may trigger creative human development. The study contributes to the Vygotskian literature on agency, with the Chinese cases demonstrating that human agency, as a process of undertaken efforts, is aimed at finding equilibrium in times of uncertainty.

The theme of recognition is one of the most intensively discussed topics in the humanities and social sciences in the last decades. This chapter discusses its relevance for moral education. We begin with two examples illustrating lack of recognition in the school class, one concerning cultural difference and the other economic and social inequality. Secondly, we introduce the idea of recognition, its importance for individual and social life and some basic ways to think about its various forms. Thirdly, we discuss some specificities of school education that are necessary to bear in mind when applying the concept of recognition in this context. Finally, we tie these conceptual and theoretical considerations back to the two examples and show how a recognition-theoretical perspective can helpfully illuminate them. The conclusion summarizes our most important findings.

Children in middle childhood, from about ages 6 to 12, are developing increased competencies that affect the ways in which they interact with others. Additionally, their contexts change, as they typically begin formal schooling and are exposed to different opportunities, challenges, and individuals with whom they interact. Considering these changes, it is important to consider both how these impact children’s prosocial development and how their prosocial behaviors support their development. In this chapter, we review the development of prosociality in middle childhood, highlighting key issues and central research findings, centering on the developmental tasks that are key to this age period. We also discuss issues and considerations in assessing prosocial development in middle childhood. Finally, we consider the implications for promoting a more just society through the promotion of prosociality and highlight future considerations for research.

This chapter argues that our subjective experiences ߝ how we experience the world and understand ourselves within it ߝ are just as closely governed as our objective conduct, discussed in the last chapter. Whether they realise it or not, contemporary teachers are expected to play a significant role in this form of regulation. After all, teachers are now not simply responsible for transmitting a given curriculum and keeping children in line; they are de facto psychologists, responsible for the mental health, regulation and development of their pupils.

This chapter argues that the issue of ‘truth’ has played a foundational role, not only within the discipline of philosophy but also within many different aspects of Australian culture. However, there seems to be little agreement on what it really is, and while some philosophers contend that truth is a meaningless concept ߝ a linguistic mirage ߝ most would argue there’s something of importance there ߝ but what is it?Even if we struggle to determine the real nature of truth ߝ as we did with the real nature of right and wrong in Chapter 15 ߝ at least we structure our culture, our knowledges and our school curricula around stuff we know to be unequivocally true … or do we? Arguably, many of the assumptions we make, often derived from five centuries of European colonialism, do not stand up to close scrutiny. They are often ‘truths’ that suit particular interests of the powerful, and subtly act to reinforce their worldview.

The working life of educators ߝ whether in schools or universities ߝ has become dauntingly complex, with the relentless focus on standards and testing, pressure to ensure equitable outcomes, a managerialist working environments, ever-growing professional responsibilities and expectations, increasingly heterogeneous classrooms and fairly relentless media criticism, to name only a fewissues. The job requires continual self-reflection, a commitment to lifelong learning and an ongoing dedication to the profession in order to remain viable at all. Making sense of it all ߝ Making Sense of Mass Education ߝ is not an easy task. Hopefully this book can help a little.

A quick glance through history demonstrates that it has not always been an unbroken chain of human happiness, to put it mildly.Different individuals, groups and peoples have faced persecution for any number of reasons: where they came from, how they looked, their perceived (dis)ability, who or what they believed in, who they loved, how they identified, the family they were born into, or, in some cases, for no reason at all. It is against this backdrop that our current set of human rights has emerged. While this chapter focuses primarilyon children’s rights and their relationship with education and educator obligations, it is necessary to understand the history of rights in order to understand why human rights, and particularly children’s rights, are so important to the work we do as educators.

Of all the ways in which humans have chosen to divide themselves, none has a history as problematic as race. This concept has significant implications for almost every aspect of contemporary human conduct, irrespective of what ‘race’ we identify with, or even are deemed to belong to. This is particularly so in the field of education.

This chapter will look at the complicated history of race as well as some of the current challenges being faced. In order to describe the complex issues within this important area, a wide range of interrelated terms are used. Probably the most important of these terms is the underpinning notion of ‘othering’ ߝ that is, thinking about a certain person or group as not ‘one of us’... as ‘the other’. This important concept is also very relevant to discussions of gender and sexualities, so it is discussed further in Chapter 3.

This chapter makes the case for the importance of philosophy as a discipline in its own right, as a subject area vital to the better understanding of education and as a set of self-reflective practices that can make us better teachers. Philosophy is largely concerned with those areas of study and speculation beyond the reach of empirical analysis, addressing problems about how we construct knowledge, how we produce a just society and how we determine ‘right’ from ‘wrong’. Its central research methodology is simply to think with clarity. The significance of this discipline has not been limited to answering abstract questions about the human condition; philosophy has been instrumental in both making us into rational and reflective citizens and framing the ideas behind our entire system of mass schooling.

More often than not, the advent of contemporary information and communication technologies is presented as one of the great success stories of contemporary schooling, and while ICT has the potential to be a transformative force in education, the issues are complicated and the outcomes far from certain. The field is often divided into those who grew up with such technologies ߝ ‘digital natives’/students ߝ and those who have come to these technologies at a later date ߝ ‘digital immigrants’/teachers. This binary articulates a central problem within a power relation where teachers are normally expected to know more than those they teach. Furthermore, such new technologies do not simply represent mechanisms for accessing more information more quickly and in more interesting ways. By stepping outside the domain of traditional linear texts, traditional understandings of literacy start to lose their meaning. New digital technologies necessitate the adoption of the notion of ‘multiliteracies’, a plural understanding of literacy that encompasses a range of other modes of contemporary meaning-making ߝ hypertext, audio, video and so on ߝ which are integral to the digital universe.

Given that feminist arguments have been around for decades, and that there has been progress towards gender equality, many would argue that concerns over gender have been resolved ߝ a battle won. However, declaring victory in this manner seems very premature. After all, the evidence suggests that a significant number of wider questions still attract attention: just what is gender and what is the best theoretical framework for approaching it? What roles do schools play in its construction? Do we still have to go down the ‘men are to blame for everything’ route? Why should schooling have anything to do with gender identity?

This chapter will unpack the complex and changing relationship between gender and education. In order to accomplish this, it will link each of the most common myths in the area with one of the three waves of feminism that characterised the twentieth century. As with the arguments surrounding social class, it will ultimately be suggested that explanations relying upon a master discourse ߝ not ‘the economy’ again, but in this case patriarchy ߝ a unified system of male domination ߝ are outdated.Similarly, it is argued that the view of gender as a binary of man/woman based on anatomy at birth has had its day.

This chapter examines the rather ambiguous notion of alternative education. To some, sending a child to a Catholic school constitutes an alternative education; to others, nothing short of a total rejection of the central parameters of the mass school deserves the label ߝ such as the elimination of timetables, authority relations, organised curricula, fixed learning goals, even the notion that pupils are to be schooled in any way at all. It’s a subject that often engenders no little passion in those who embrace the categorisation, and no little ridicule among those who do not. Strange though some of the alternative education options might seem, they are all worthy of serious consideration … but what exactly are they?

This chapter argues that educators need to have a good grasp of all the various forms of pre-adulthood we take for granted, such as ‘the child’ and ‘youth’. These categories are the focus of a range of different disciplines, most of which found their explanatory models in nature itself. As such, while the behaviour of children and youth may be deemed to require explanation, the very existence of the categories themselves does not. The issues raised in this chapter concern the degree to which childhood and youth are actually socially constructed categories serving particular social functions. Of greatest interest here are the ways in which childhood and youth are both artefacts of, and vehicles for, social governance.

We are living in the era of educational data and standardised testing. As one teacher puts it, ‘Boom, and it’s all about data!’ (Spina 2021). This chapter explores the consequence of ‘datafication’, including how the possibilities of social governance have increased exponentially. Contemporary governance has always been about the management of data, whether this involves making particular populations intelligible through continual assessment, or by constructing ever-increasing categories of difference. However, the ever-increasing need to instantly correlate almost unfathomable amounts of data means we are no longer subjected to ‘an avalanche of printed numbers’ (Hacking 1990, p. 189) as in the early nineteenth century, but rather a worldwide, mile-high tsunami. The potential of governance is moving far beyond those envisaged within earlier iterations of individuationߝdifferentiationߝnormalisation outlined in Chapter 5. The datafication of education ߝ and life in general ߝ means that the possibilities of correlation, differentiation and intervention are now almost limitless.