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The main aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on today´s financial crisis through the Modern- Meta Modern discourse. It is argued that the debate of the financial crisis cannot be reduced solely to economic causes and that the deeper causes of the crisis are mainly philosophical, ethical, educational, and social. Most of the already proposed antidotes for today´s financial crisis (i.e. enhancement of the domestic financial system, emerging market and innovative products, better control of the financing system) ignore the deeper moral and educational crisis of modernity that places the responsibility for the financial crisis on citizens and their lack of savings. Meta-modernity opposes viewing citizens as consumers, as depersonalised, technically controlled objects of the financial and political system. It seeks more ethical standards in business, education, and politics and it encourages developing new perspectives for evaluating the financial practices. Meta-modern discourse supports the view that the financial crisis is a direct result of prioritising the interests of the power holders – banks and financial enterprises – at the expense of citizens' well-being and value-based questions.

This article describes an action research study on reflective development at school and discusses methodological and pedagogical issues arising from teacher beliefs and expectations. Teachers and researchers participated in four cooperative cycles of inquiry, where situated learning and reflection supported their conceptual change and meaning-making. Teachers underwent a gradual shift from imposed, predefined teaching and learning to reflective collaboration and response to different needs of different students, while researchers gained a contextualized understanding of teachers' attitudes and beliefs about teaching and learning and examined their own and the teachers' roles as action researchers. Issues related to school ethos, teachers' defensive attitudes and trust-building among teachers are discussed in light of the reflective paradigm of participants' development.

This paper explores how democratic values are stimulated by predictors related to family and school. We began by posing a simple question: How can we best explain students' democratic values in relation to their home backgrounds, school-class climate, political environment, political interest and participation of students in social activities? To answer this, we chose to elaborate on a model comparing various background factors. Both models (cf. figures 2 and 3) seem to indicate that school climate has a huge effect on political environment and political interest. Here, political environment has a stronger effect on social participation than political interest. Although Germany and Cyprus have many differences, the actual models for both countries are almost identical.