Synopses & Reviews
In this book John Gray argues that we live in a time of endings for the ideologies that governed the modern period. The Enlightenment projects of universal emancipation animates all the political doctrines and movements that are central in contemporary western societies. Yet it does not reflect the reality of the plural world in which we live. The western cultural hegemony which the Enlightenment embodied is coming to a close. Western liberal societies are not precursors of a universal civilization, but only one form of life among many in the late modern world.
Our inherited stock of political ideas no longer tracks that world. The crisis of New Right thought is as profound as that of the Left. Green theorists and communitarian thinkers have not understood the deep diversity and intractable conflicts of contemporary societies. And postmodernists, whose thought is ruled by the dated utopias of the modern period, do not engage with the real conditions of the world's emerging postmodern societies. Late modern thought occurs in an interregnum between modern projects that are no longer credible and postmodern realities that many find intolerable.
John Gray suggests that some Enlightenment hopes of progress must be extinguished if we are to learn to respect cultural diversity and accept ecological limits. Respect for the Earth and for other species and cultures means abandoning the utopian and arcadian projects that haunt modern thought. We should aim to moderate the impact of human activity on the Earth while alleviating the unavoidable evils of human life. Yet the hubris which treats the Earth as an instrument of human purposes, and which regards other cultures as approximations to a universal civilization, embodies ancient and powerful traditions. John Gray's aim is to question these traditions and thereby to prepare our thinking for a time of beginnings.
Review
"This book is an excellent read and I have no doubt that it will become a standard text in the sociology of education. It represents the first attempt at explaining the closing gender gap (if not the emergence of a new one!) in terms of the wider social, political, cultural and economic changes in the 1980s and 1990s."
Phillip Brown, School of Social and Administrative Studies, University of Wales, Cardiff "There are 3 main reasons why this book is worth reading many times and from different perspectives. The first is that it brings together the long-term scholarship of three of England's leading feminist scholars in education. The second is that it is an important knowledge-based intervention in an educational debate which has claimed a high profile in media and education policy circles over the 1990s and into the 2000s. The third reason is that the book's lines of argument are conceptually and empircally rich and its conclusions provocative." British Educational Research Journal
Review
"Since Gray is one of the most intelligent among commentators on political affairs, his new essays are endlessly stimulating ... one emerges with sharpened wits."
Kenneth Minogue, New Statesman and Society "He is the most penetrating contemporary chronicler of the death throes of the Hayekian New right, whose company he once improbably kept. He is also the most subtle and original British exponent of the pluralistic, post-liberal, post-Croslandite communitarianism which must be a major ingredient in any remotely satisfactory governing philosophy for our time ... John Gray has the root of the matter in him. If the next government wants to avoid the pitfalls of opportunism, it might start by devoting a Chequers weekend to a seminar on Endgames." David Marquand, The Times Literary Supplement
"Lucid, subtle and astute." Radical Philosophy
Synopsis
The education gender gap is closing. Since the 1980s examination results have changed dramatically, as girls have "caught up" and, in some cases, overtaken boys. Through an analysis of the postwar transformation in British economic, social and cultural life, this important book provides valuable insights into how and why this unprecedented change has taken place.
In particular, the book focuses on the welfare state and the education reforms under Margaret Thatcher which encouraged this momentum for change despite her personal efforts to re-instil Victorian educational values. These reforms, the authors argue, coupled with the women's movement, re-shaped girls' and boys' identities and educational choices irrevocably, but not necessarily in the same or complementary ways.
Closing the Gender Gap will be essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students in education, sociology and gender studies.
Synopsis
Undergraduate and postgraduate students in education, sociology and gender studies, as well as the general reader with an interest in education or gender.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [159]-179) and index.
About the Author
Madeleine Arnot is Lecturer in the Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Jesus College.
Miriam David is Visiting Professorial Fellow at the London University Institute of Education.
Gaby Weiner is Professor of Teacher Education and Research Ume? University, Sweden.
Table of Contents
Preface.
Abbreviations and Acronyms.
Part I: Refashioning Gender Relations.
1. Revisiting Gender in the 1990s.
2. Changing Gender Patterns in Education.
3. Challenging Victorian Values.
Part II: Social Policy and Education Reform.
4. Motherhood and Women's Work in the Welfare State.
5. Schooling, Teachers and Feminism.
6. Markets, Competition and Performance.
Part III: New Generations of Girls and Boys.
7. Schoolgirls and Social Change.
8. Schoolboys and Social Change.
9. Closing the Gender Gap in Education?.
Authors' Note on Further Reading.
References and Bibliography.
Index.