Suchergebnisse

Are young people blindly self-interested? How does university shape students' political participation? Can busy parents and grandparents find time to volunteer? Challenging conventional thinking, leading academics explore how individuals' relationships with civil society change over time as different lifecourse events and stages trigger and hinder civic engagement. Drawing on personal narratives, longitudinal cohort studies and national surveys, this unprecedented study considers rarely examined aspects of civic engagement including school students' sense of social responsibility and the charitable legacy bequests of elderly people and highlights significant implications for those promoting greater civic and political participation.

This article explores children's responses to a single question: 'If someone gave you £1 million today, what would you do with it?' Although such an exploration might seem trivial, we argue that their responses provide important insights into children's values and priorities. One‐third intend to spend it all, one quarter to save it. But the largest group claim that they would give all or some of the money away. Their responses highlight the divergent ways in which children use money to foster particular forms of social relations and social standing. Against the prevalent discourse of consumer society, the dominant theme of giving may indicate that the individualism of neoliberalism is less pervasive than is often feared, but also suggest that further research is needed into the social contexts and processes which encourage children to be 'givers', 'savers' or 'spenders'.

The paper reviews recent evidence concerning the progess and effects of the currently fashionable "school autonomy" and "parental choice" agendas in contemporary education policy in England and Wales, the USA and New Zealand. School autonomy, as used here, refers to school self-management through some or all aspects of funding and decision-making being devolved from regional and district offices to individual schools. In considering parental choice, the paper is particularly concerned with those policies that claim to enhance opportunities for choice among state schools and those that use public funds to extend choice into the private sector. (DIPF/orig.)