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.

A lot has been written recently about the emergence of a ‘global society’ in which economies, cultures and political systems of different nations have started to coalesce. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these commentaries have often taken the form of binary debates ߝ ‘globalisation is all-encompassing’ vs ‘globalisation is pretty irrelevant’; ‘globalisation is the glorious road to the future’ vs ‘globalisation is the road to hell’; ‘globalisation is a fundamentally economic issue’ vs ‘globalisation is really about cultural homogenisation’. Generally speaking, these binaries aren’t helpful, and the phenomenon of globalisation deserves a less reductive and more thoughtful analysis, as it increasingly affects us all ߝ particularly within the sphere of education.

This chapter argues that the relationship between popular culture and the classroom remains a contentious issue. Its presence has been used as a symbol of how much our culture has declined and how educationally corrupted our schools have become, while its absence has been used to suggest our schools are out of touch with their primary constituency ߝ young people. This is not a simple issue to address; even the notion of ‘culture’ itself is subject to considerable disagreement.