This paper, which is a response to a previous one by Charles Batteson published in the Journal, challenges the view that James Callaghan's personal intervention in the politics of education in 1976 in making the Ruskin Speech was pivotal in shaping the subsequent direction of Labour's policies for school reform. The paper also queries the idea that the Ruskin Speech was the immediate harbinger of New Right education policies. Instead, it is suggested, the historical record points (...) up that such policies gained ascendancy only some ten years later, the intervening period being dominated more by an acceptance of the educational consensus constructed by the Labour leadership in 1976-77. (shrink)

James Callaghan's 1976 Ruskin Speech is often presented as denoting the end of consensual policy-making in education and a profigurement of Thatcherite educational policies. This paper considers the validity of visualising 1976 as a foothill of New Right thinking about education and expresses some skepticism about interpretations which neglect subterranean politics.

In the 1970s, two events in particular, the William Tyndale School and James Callaghan's Ruskin speech, generated extensive media coverage and political activity and became 'watersheds' along the path to political and educational reform. This has shaped the system of school and governments in the 1990s. This book revisits Tyndale and Ruskin and examines their legacy. Drawing on contemporary accounts of a number of key individuals who were involved in those watershed events, it recasts their stories in (...) the light of current changes in education. The book explores the extent to which both these events shifted assumptions about education and provided the rationale for policy changes. It argues that fundamental questions need to be asked about the nature of the reform agenda and in particular, the balance of power. It also places the reform agenda within an international context. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spirometer, Whale, Slave:Breathing Emergencies, c. 1850John Durham Peters (bio)Breath dramatically starts with a slap at birth and ceases with death and yet we typically ignore it until it is under duress. Unlike marine mammals such as whales and dolphins who can never fully automate breathing—they sleep one brain hemisphere at a time so as to keep conscious watch, like yogis, over their respiration—we humans are mostly somnambulists with regard (...) to breath. Unlike our briny cousins, we won't drown if we neglect our breath. Our relatively accommodating habitat at the fold of lithosphere and atmosphere enables a Lethe of oblivion, though many elements of our world are hostile to breath: water, fire, earth, extremes of height, heat, or cold. Nothing could be more fundamental for aerobic terrestrial creatures than breathing. So its routine cloaking in impercipience must somehow be functional and require a great deal of nervous expenditure. (It always takes a lot of work to make an infrastructure invisible.)Breathing is a good test case for the notion, common to many variants of critical theory, that nature for humans is always second nature: what would it mean to find culture, history, and politics in something that is so relentlessly universal and given? The intensity of the urge for drink, food, sex, or sleep pales compared to that of taking a breath withheld or expelling a breath too long held. Here, it seems, desire and need converge. Breathing morphs into awareness, art and artifice when threat, absence or curiosity rouse it from its slumber—when we swim, have a coughing fit, sing, or challenge someone to a breath-holding contest. Under the earth in a mine, high in the air on a mountain or airplane, ill with a respiratory disease, or in other extreme situations, we need techniques and technologies to breathe. Like everything supposedly natural, we can't leave breathing in peace. We mold breath in techniques of speech, song, and prayer and in technologies of diving, medicine, and air travel. A full accounting of such would form a full encyclopedia of human ingenuity.1 [End Page 85]With typical flamboyance, Peter Sloterdijk declared that the atmosphere first ceased to be taken for granted, i.e., became technical, a matter of art, on 22 April 1915, with the German deployment of poison gas in World War I. On a world-historical scale, he takes this weaponization of the environment as an "air-quake" that launched modern air-conditioning in its most literal sense of climatization (as French and German has it) and not just interior cooling (Sloterdijk 89-110 passim). We need a history of comparative breathing emergencies! Every era, like every life, has its encounters with the precarity of breathing, even if not as conveniently dated or climate-change prognostic as 22 April 1915. The urban concentration of human population starting a few thousand years ago, for instance, made people co-breathers (con-spirators) in new ways and thus more prone to the contagious respiratory illnesses that have long ravaged our species.I want to look at one such moment—one marked by a deadly global respiratory illness, new instruments for producing data, worries about radical alterations to the atmosphere, comparative interest in nonhuman forms of life, and the politicization of breathing. 1850, like 2020, was a moment when breath awoke from its autonomic quiet. The nineteenth century was the great age of tuberculosis, the tragic and romantic lung disease. It was a time of fog, smoke, and mud, of climate-changing volcanic eruptions and a year without a summer, and of a mysterious, brooding "storm-cloud" that John Ruskin complained of so bitterly. Medical instruments, the whaling industry, and struggles for the abolition of slavery all brought the lungs into the foreground.SpirometerThe nineteenth century was also the great age of instrumentation. Light and sound were only the two most famous dynamic processes to yield to new graphic methods of inscription such as photography and phonography. The spirometer was one of many devices designed to render visual data of physiological functions, such as the myograph, the flame manometer, sphygmomanometer, and the kymograph. Many of them are still in use. The invention... (shrink)

"Ruskin was the most important aesthetic authority of the 19th century. In his dozens of books and lectures he wrote about the qualities of art. the key figure, the history that connected one to another. In The Stones of Venice, Modern Painters, Seven Lamps of Architecture he developed rules and standards that are amazingly contemporary in their range of sympathies. However, Ruskin wrote thousands of pages of criticism; for the modern reader his thought needs always to be rediscovered. (...) This anthology by Robert Herbert contains the essential thought of Ruskin on theory and practice (creativity, color, compositio, exhibiting workd of art), ("the nature of gothic," Venetian Renaissance, iron and glass as new materials for building), and sculpture and ornament (Greek, Byzantine, Medieval, and Renaissance). Herbert devotes his section on painting to Ruskin's remarks on Giotto, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Michelangelo, the Venetians, Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites, and many others. Ruskin was full of contradictions and quirks, but he is the one 19th-century critic who gave the 20th century many of its most progressive thoughts on architecture, painting, and relationship of art to a social and moral context."--BOOK COVER. (shrink)

'To be taught to write or to speak - but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think - nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.' Ruskin was the most powerful and influential critic of the nineteenth century. He wrote about nature, art, architecture, (...) politics, history, myth, and much besides; all his work is characterized by a clarity of vision as unsettling and intense now as it was for his first readers. This new selection draws on the whole range of his astonishingly varied output, from the passionate celebration of J. M. W. Turner's painting in the first volume of Modern Painters to Praeterita, the elegiac autobiography of his later years. The introduction outlines Ruskin's life and thought, and shows why he remains such a rewarding writer today. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

The following lectures were really given, in substance, at a girls' school (far in the country); which, in the course of various experiments on the possibility of introducing some better practice of drawing into the modern scheme of female education, I visited frequently enough to enable the children to regard me as a friend. The Lectures always fell more or less into the form of fragmentary answers to questions; and they are allowed to retain that form, as, on the whole, (...) likely to be more interesting than the symmetries of a continuous treatise. Many children (for the school was large) took part, at different times, in the conversations; but I have endeavored, without confusedly multiplying the number of imaginary speakers, to represent, as far as I could, the general tone of comment and inquiry among young people. (shrink)

John Ruskin, a famous English philosopher and art professional, wrote "The Ethics of the Dust" in 1866. It is the best thing he has ever executed like it. In this book, Ruskin teaches morals in a totally distinctive way: he uses the fairy world as a metaphor to teach morals to kids. There are a variety of conversations within the story between elemental beings that represent various things about nature, education, and being yourself. The Fairy Queen, who is (...) a good man or woman, teaches the alternative fairies approximately the whole thing, from a way to be lovely and do their task to being fair and honest. Some of Ruskin's moral training come from his symbolic tales and his poetry. He talks about being honest, how training can exchange someone, and how human beings are related to the herbal international thru the fairy chats. No, "The Ethics of the Dust" isn't just a story. It's a psychological portray that makes human beings consider how they act morally and the way society as an entire act morally. Ruskin's specific mix of magic and morals is a laugh and easy way to teach humans approximately being aware about others and their very own variations. (shrink)

Tilbe Göksun and Anjan Chatterjee Dept. of Psychology, Koç University, Turkey Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University … Read More →.