Battle Readings is a regularly updated compilation of articles, essays, and opinion pieces relevant to the themes of the Battle of Ideas.
Choose a theme from the listing on the left to narrow your search, or view all readings.
In today's insecure academy, quality control takes a back seat to pleasing students and covering up errors, a senior lecturer claims
Times Higher Education, 17 March 2011
Most mainstream politicians have booted into touch - for now - the idea of charging Scottish students tuition fees. That shifts the debate back to two big questions: what is university for and what shape should university education take in the future?
Kenneth Macdonald, BBC News, 14 March 2011
State education has consistently encouraged working-class children to accept their lot in life.
James Heartfield, spiked, 2 March 2011
Today’s labour market conditions bear very hard on young people. Underlying structural trends have been made worse by recession. We need to ensure that students have every opportunity to gain the most important and generalisable skills, including those gained in employment
Alison Wolf, Department for Education, March 2011
Simply calling the use of study drugs "unfair" tells us nothing about why colleges should ban them. If such drugs really do improve academic performance among healthy students (and the evidence is scant), shouldn't colleges put them in the drinking water instead?
Matt Lamkin, Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 February 2011
Reflections on The Importance of Teaching: Citizenship is Dead. Long Live History?
IoI Education Fourm, 20 February 2011
Gary McCulloch, Routledge, 18 February 2011
Social mobility is at the heart of the Government's agenda. That is why Michael Gove is reforming our schools, why Iain Duncan Smith is making work pay for everyone, why Nick Clegg will shortly publish a cross-government social mobility strategy setting out our plans. Universities must be part of this.
David Willetts, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 17 February 2011
Ian Morris, Continuum, 6 February 2011
All the non-stop commentary on Amy Chua's new book overlooks one important fact: determined ‘tiger mums’ are a response to the fact that society itself no longer pushes children to succeed.
Nancy McDermott, spiked, 28 January 2011
Ground Zero Tolerance: America's Culture War
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Professor Marilyn Monk, emeritus professor of molecular embryology, University College London
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