Corroding the Curriculum: Sustainability versus Education

Austin Williams | February 2010 (Academic Questions, Springer Link) This essay explores the ubiquity of the sustainability agenda in higher education in the United Kingdom (with some parallel examples from the United States) with a view to pointing out its corrosive influence on educational ambition. In so doing, I suggest that the prevalence of sustainability within education has only been possible because academia has lowered its...

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Political “stranger danger” in classrooms

Austin Williams | 10 August 2009 (The Australian) SCHOOLCHILDREN are being brainwashed with an environmental message in the classroom. Children are not just being pinned down in the classroom and force-fed what to think: it’s worse than that. The next generation – from primary schoolchildren through to college students – is being taught not to think, merely encouraged to accept the official line. It ought to be a...

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Sustainable Schools: a consultation paper

Austin Williams | 31 August 2006 Future Cities Project respond to ‘Sustainable Schools: for pupils, communities and the environment’, a consultation paper for the Department for Education and Skills (DfES). The opening pages of the consultation set out the agenda under discussion. It suggests that ‘issues that matter to young people, from the state of the local park to global warming, (be) used as a context for learning...

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The Academics of the Madhouse

Austin Williams | 31 March 2005 Revised criteria for university research funding are causing much protest. But is the solution being argued for any better? The ‘strictly private and confidential’ memo sent to Daily Telegraph staff in February outlined five criteria on which their performance and hence their status in the compulsory redundancy hierarchy would be judged. The five categories were: 1. Approach to work (their...

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