Education

Valerie Walkerdine's “Using the Work of Felix Guattari to Understand Space, Place, Social Justice, and Education” examines a number of theoretical ideas derived principally from Felix Guattari's work with psychiatric patients. Walkerdine applies these approaches to educational settings where personal subjective change and transformation is desired. The central approach utilises imaginative work and a rethinking of subjecthood in an attempt to equip the individual to deal with what is perceived as a potential destabilisation, alienation, and perhaps disintegration of the self's sense of identity as a result of life changing educational inputs. This “Conversation” engages Walkerdine's and Guattari's work and reconsiders some basic tenets in their approaches and challenging the continuing reliance on orthodox theory concerning early childhood development, attachment, and the threat that change is thought to pose to ideas of self. While supporting Walkerdine's and Guattari's overall approach, particularly in relation to adults, I argue that there are significant flaws in conventional childhood development and attachment theories underpinning their method. Drawing on more recent findings in biological and brain science, I propose that it is today possible to abandon moribund psychoanalytic theoretical premises of childhood development and arrive at a more empirically founded, non-pathological understanding of both change and human development.

Antonio Gramsci adopted concepts from others only to develop them further and not necessarily along the same path as in their original context. ‘Passive revolution’ assisted Vincenzo Cuoco to explain the short-lived top down democratisation of the Neapolitan State in 1799. Gramsci generalised it to explain the Italian Risorgimento and the bourgeois state it bore. He denoted it as ‘revolution without a revolution’ in contrast with post-1789 France. Besides state formation, Gramsci enriched passive revolution by associating it with the political subterfuges of ‘transformism’ and ‘technicisation’. He experimented with the term further by expanding its historical limits to embrace the Fascist regime and, economically, Fordist inroads from across the Atlantic. This paper focuses on these (and other) fundamental stages in the narrative of the Italian political state and economic development accompanying it. Therein, the concept of hegemony – arguably Gramsci’s most evocative – is added in order to meaningfully contextualise the social formation and social relations within. In this case, a ‘negative’ reading of passive revolution portrays it as a failure of hegemonic strategy; the people are not successfully educated and absorbed within bourgeois universal values. Consequently, besides broad socio-pedagogic dynamics, the formal education institution and private institutions double their effort to educate hegemonic leadership in political and socio-economic terms. This role as expressed by the main legislative acts created by the Piedmontese, the Fascists, the Christian Democrats and one of Berlusconi’s governments is analysed in order to indicate the deliberate links set between formal education and the economy through the identification of specific goals promoted by these institutions, and, throughout, how passive revolution can assist in meaningfully explaining such developments.

Transferable skills are internationally acknowledged as an important tool to reduce the friction generated through skills mismatch between education and the labour market. This paper examines some challenging aspects of transferable skills that may reduce their effectiveness, such as their unclear definition and delineation, difficulties in translating policy into practice, and the challenge of convincing employers to invest in such skills. While over the years, elements of transferable skills were added to the Maltese educational curriculum, the country requires a comprehensive policy that tackles the barriers hindering the dissemination of transferable skills. This paper proposes the adoption of a comprehensive skills policy that includes a focus on demand and supply skills audit research, the revision and development of curriculum and teaching methods, the training of stakeholders, and quality assurance, assessment and recognition of transferable skills.