Folk high schools are adult education institutions established in Denmark in the 19th century, being known for their focus on specific values and approach to teaching. The diploma thesis covers the topic of folk high schools from the period of their establishment, throughout the historical evolution of the concept, until the current situation of folk high schools and their social function. The thesis examines the possibility of integration of the selected model of folk high school in Czech Republic, more specifically within the Municipal Library of Prague (MLP). At the theoretical level, it was identified that it is necessary to adapt the Czech legislation and provide a fixed financial cover, in order to incorporate the folk high school to the system of public libraries in reality. Conducted quantitative research confirms the interest of users of the Municipal Library of Prague in a library as an adult education activities provider. Key words folk high school, liberal education, active citizenship, lifelong learning

The aim of this thesis is to form a comprehensive view on the discussed issue, explaining the suitability or unsuitability of corporal punishment in a given situation. Describe the role of the family in the upbringing of children, the effects of corporal punishment on children, corporal punishment in connection with CAN syndrome and corporal punishment from the perspective of children. The thesis will include a practical component. It is written in a more critical reflection on the topic. The thesis will compare corporal punishment as a form of an education and its opposite - a liberal education.The conclusion will include case studies. Two case studies deal with uthoritarian upbringing while the third case study deals with liberal education. Keywords: Corporal punishment Liberal education Child abuse Family education Consequences of punishment Family

The United Nations declared 2005 to 2014 to be the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. This agenda is being implemented enthusiastically in university facilities management and operations, and while research in sustainability is increasingly common, tertiary curriculum has not experienced a similar push. This thesis undertakes to explore the expressions of sustainability in the academic activities of universities, and to determine what sort of change (if any) is appropriate. It also seeks to mediate what has become a polarised debate between idealists and pragmatists around the implementation of EFS. Two key features of the work are: 1) the investigation of sustainability in the aggregate student experience, rather than individual subjects; and 2) returning to first principles to avoid a normative stance a priori.¶ A range of methods is employed adaptively through the process of this alternately broad and deep exploratory study, including: participant observation, interviews, content analysis, questionnaires, social network analysis, bibliometrics, and data clustering. A systemic approach to Canadian and Australian case work captures the diversity of institutional roles and academic motivations at play in adaptation to the EFS agenda.¶ A stasis exists between the literature around higher education curriculum for sustainability and its implementation. The problem is exacerbated by the lack of pedagogical training in most university academics. A long-standing utilitarian sectoral culture and an increasingly job-focused student market further challenge such public-good concepts as sustainability in the academy. Four simple ideas sit at the heart of 35 years of environmental and sustainability education literature, despite changes in jargon: liberal education and broad foundations; interdisciplinarity in problem-solving; cosmopolitan philosophies; and civic action. Relevant disciplinary content includes biology, environmental science, policy, philosophy, human society, economics, and culture. Most of these elements are rare in the Australian sector, which instead offers science and technology-focused environmental programs with flexible requirements. A transition to the human realm is evident in programs targeting sustainability.¶ Curriculum cannot be viewed in isolation, however, as it concerns only one of a university’s many constituencies, and one facet of academic staff scholarship. For example, even in higher education sectors more sympathetic to a diversity of university niches and curricular models, like Canada’s, sustainability offerings operate at a tension from low-cost and low-effort teaching models. So-called ‘umbrella’ networking structures on cross-cutting topics must walk a careful line to be comprehensive yet non-competitive. They present great opportunities for sustainability teaching but are almost uniformly research-focused. A distinct sense emerges that the erosion of the collective identity and activities of academe has weakened the ability of universities to respond to new information and challenges in anything but corporate, isomorphic ways.¶ Two detailed Australian cases of research, research training and curriculum development activities around sustainability paint a rich picture of the agenda. The intractability of fragmentation between disciplines is evident, even in so-called interdisciplinary units. Problem-based topics often do not have an established social network or committee structure, and priorities can differ by budget unit. Disciplines provide identity, peers and cohesive research directions that can be compelling for individual academics. The most fascinating pattern that arises during the mapping of research co-authorship and co-supervisory relationships around sustainability is the bi-directional orientation: academics collaborate outside their departmental home on papers, but within that home to mentor research students. This combination unifies two contrasting theories of social capital transmission – those preferring dense and sparse networks, respectively – and may be ideal. Students then receive consistent messages while gaining access to the largest (non-redundant) set of human and technical resources via their supervisors’ personal networks. This hypothesis should be explored further: if supported, it would have major impacts on the rhetoric around collaboration in interdisciplinary units in particular.¶ Curriculum design processes in utilitarian universities are subject to the same fallibilities in adapting to sustainability as other institutions and the wider society. Change is motivated and moderated by financial imperatives and the scale of thought is often coincident with budgets. Engagement processes are often incomplete or undemocratic, hampered by inadequate leadership and shifting membership. Group learning via research, experimentation or vigorous debate is surprisingly rare. Finally, ad-hoc or project-based academic teams are rarely mandated to tackle the causes of problems, some of which can be intractable, and are limited to treating the symptoms. Incremental pragmatism may be a necessary element to university adaptation for EFS.¶ A number of recommendations are offered to improve interdisciplinarity and university values more generally. Individual academics should: offer additive alternatives to metrics and incentive schemes that maintain existing functions; act on common ground to rebuild a community of scholars; wield to the fullest the freedom in the classroom, and the opportunity to reflect, that university teaching allows; and, continue to debate ideas with passion and rigour, avoiding ‘academic correctness’. University management can contribute by: establishing a clear academic identity for the university beyond ‘excellence’, and supporting firm foundations for students based on that particular vision; taking a proactive view of course review and development and facilitating experimentation in those settings; intentionally fostering interdisciplinary units differently to disciplinary ones; and, establishing and recognising equivalence across a range of successful academic career archetypes.¶ This methodologically innovative work also suggests opportunities for extending the research, including: refining and testing the sustainability canon developed here; better understanding collaborative behaviour and the impact of various models of supervisory teams on student career paths; and, finding better ways of defining, modelling and evaluating interdisciplinary scholarship. Sustainability is likeliest to emerge from a healthy and independent tertiary sector, than one operating as an overt policy instrument.

This essay aims to examine Martha Nussbaum's proposal for a classical defense of reform in liberal education and her critique of utility thinking in higher education. I want to explore how Nussbaum uses history to create an ethical alternative that cultivates both moral and intellectual virtues, which she considers to be crucial for the survival of democracy. In examining Nussbaum's use of Aristotle, I focus on her work as a proposal for institutional implementation of an Aristotelian epistemology and the cultivation of the individual as an ethical political subject. This study highlights the epistemological, educational and political ideas that form the basis of Nussbaum's ideals. I intend, however, to go beyond a contextualizing reading and thus establish a dialogue with a radical intersubjectivity to respond to Nussbaum's ambitions to recognize human vulnerabilities as assets for reason. From this perspective, I problematise Nussbaum's aspirations for reform and argue that she maintains a loyalty to an ideal that stands in contrast to the possibilities for epistemological and thus ethical political change.

This thesis examines the roles of the New Zealand university in a knowledge society. Gaps in the literature of the New Zealand university in a contemporary context mean that the enquiry is informed by European and North American discussions of the educational requirements of a knowledge society. As the notions of the knowledge society and a liberal university education are both problematic and central to this enquiry, they are interrogated, in the second chapter, in some depth. A second review examines the work, recommendations and subsequent legislative outcomes of the Tertiary Education Advisory Commission (TEAC) policy process of 1999 to 2003. The principles of critical theory and critical policy scholarship inform these interpretative textual analyses. The two review chapters, which follow the introductory chapter, comprise the first part of the thesis. A description of the methodological framework employed throughout the project and a report of the findings of a survey of stakeholders follow. The discussion chapter comprises the third and final part of the thesis. The thesis seeks to distinguish the notion of the knowledge society from that of the neo-liberal approach to social and economic management. I argue that the notion of the knowledge society is viable in a range of socio-economic conditions. I suggest that the educational requirements of a knowledge society are better addressed when the scope of a university education is framed by holistic individual, social, and economic determinants, rather than rigid ideological imperatives such as those characteristic of neo-liberalism. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies is employed. Primary data are gathered by way of a postal questionnaire. The perceptions of three cohorts of stakeholders of the New Zealand university are analysed using both statistical and interpretative tools. Data gathered through a review of the literature of the university in relation to the notion of the knowledge society in New Zealand, North America, and various European contexts are analysed using a combination of critical and interpretive approaches. The major finding to emerge from the enquiry is that stakeholders of the New Zealand university associate an effective university education with breadth of learning. The notion of a liberal university education, with its attendant beyond-vocation curriculum assumptions, is not considered anachronistic by the majority of stakeholders surveyed during this project. Public and private sector employers and university students strongly associate a liberal university education with effective preparation for participation in a knowledge-intensive environment. Year 13 secondary students are less certain. A secondary finding is that most stakeholders consider that the research activities of the university academic should continue to inform university teaching, but that the teaching role is of growing importance, and therefore worthy of greater emphasis, in the context of a knowledge society. The project is intended to provoke further discussion around the relationship between the New Zealand university and the knowledge society. To date there has been little academic consideration of this relationship. The contribution of this thesis, relative to this gap, is therefore significant.

Ce doctorat se penche sur les conditions d’émergence d’une figure de « l’artiste universitaire » aux États-Unis au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Il s’intéresse au contexte intellectuel et politique qui a accompagné ce changement radical de paradigme dans l’enseignement artistique américain et tente d’en observer les répercussions sur les modalités d’écriture d’une histoire de l’art dont les instances productrices sont elles-mêmes considérablement renouvelées. Accordant une place importante aux réformes de l’enseignement supérieur, cette thèse souligne le rôle instrumental de cette nouvelle figure dans la requalification de la recherche universitaire entre les années 1930 et 1960. Toutefois, loin d’être la simple conséquence d’aspirations politiques, l’artiste universitaire s’incarne dans des parcours hétérogènes ne partageant pas nécessairement les mêmes pratiques ou les mêmes objectifs. De manière convenue ou plus inattendue, nombre d’artistes dont le nom a été associé aux universités ont participé à une refonte des modalités de production des savoirs. Pourtant la reconnaissance de ces contributions individuelles s’est avérée beaucoup plus problématique que la célébration générique d’un nouvel art américain porté par des artistes « éduqués ». Aussi, cette thèse s’attache-t-elle à observer ces questions sous un angle épistémologique et à mettre ce déficit paradoxal de crédit académique en regard de pratiques contemporaines de l’histoire et de l’histoire de l’art. Ce dernier aspect est plus spécifiquement étudié à travers le parcours de Donald Judd et sa volonté d’opposer à l’idéalisme philosophique européen une pratique « réaliste » de l’histoire de l’art / This doctoral thesis explores the conditions in which the figure of the ‘academic artist’ emerged in the USA following World War II. The intellectual and political climate for radical change in the American visual arts educational paradigm is evidenced as are its repercussions on the profound renewal of agencies involved in art history production. Importance is given to reform in higher education and the instrumental role the academic artist played in redefining academic research between the 1930s and the 1960s. Such figures were far from being merely aspirational in political terms as is apparent in their range of trajectories, their practices and goals which did not necessarily coincide. Many artists, whose names were associated with academia, contributed – some conventionally, others less predictably – to new ways of producing knowledge. Yet recognizing such individual contributions posed many more problems than the more generic celebration of the new American art personified by “educated” artists. My dissertation therefore views these issues from an epistemological standpoint, weighing what paradoxically was an academic deficit against contemporary practices in history and art history. The latter is examined through the specific case of Donald Judd and his determined stance against European philosophical idealism via the “realistic” practice of art history