Why Politics Is a Good Thing—The Positive Potential of Policy Work (and the People Who Do It) in Universities

Is the Way of the Humane Authority a Good Thing?

A Confucian Constitutional Order ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691154602.003.0008 ◽

2012 ◽

Author(s):

Wang Shaoguang

Keyword(s):

Social Welfare ◽

Political System ◽

Political Legitimacy ◽

Good Thing ◽

The Political ◽

Political Reality ◽

The People ◽

Definition Of ◽

Moral Philosophers ◽

The Way

This chapter criticizes the emphasis on privatization, the destruction of the Maoist-style emphasis on social welfare, and the growing gap between rich and poor. It argues that more needs to be done to combat the inequalities generated by capitalist modernization in China. Political legitimacy is not something to be defined by moral philosophers in total abstraction from the political reality. Rather, it is a matter of whether or not a political system faces a crisis of legitimacy depends on whether the people who live there doubt the rightness of its power, and whether they consider it the appropriate system for their country. The chapter ultimately endorses a definition of legitimacy as the legitimacy of the popular will.

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The Mote and the Beam

PMLA ◽

10.1632/459900 ◽

1953 ◽

Vol 68 (1) ◽

pp. 30-33

Author(s):

Donald Devenish Walsh

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Foreign Language ◽

General Public ◽

The United States ◽

Foreign Language Teaching ◽

Good Thing ◽

Foreign Languages ◽

The People ◽

School Committees ◽

Defective Vision

Teachers of foreign languages in the United States, it may be assumed, are convinced that foreign-language teaching is a good thing. But this conviction is not shared by all the people who do not teach foreign languages. Teachers of other subjects, principals, superintendents, school committees, and the general public do not always see eye to eye with us on this question. Their defective vision, this mote in our brother's eye, is of natural and paramount concern to us as we peer around the edge of our own smallish beam.

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Getting Real about Unknowns in Complex Policy Work

10.35489/bsg-rise-wp_2021/083 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Matt Andrews

Keyword(s):

Education Policies ◽

Policy Success ◽

Policy Interventions ◽

The People ◽

Planning Processes ◽

Policy Work ◽

Novel Strategy ◽

Theories Of Change ◽

Work Education ◽

And Control

As with all public policy work, education policies are demanding. Policy workers need to ‘know’ a lot—about the problems they are addressing, the people who need to be engaged, the promises they can make in response, the context they are working in, and the processes they will follow to implement. Most policy workers answer questions about such issues within the structures of plan and control processes used to devise budgets and projects. These structures limit their knowledge gathering, organization and sense-making activities to up-front planning activities, and even though sophisticated tools like Theories of Change suggest planners ‘know’ all that is needed for policy success, they often do not. Policies are often fraught with ‘unknowns’ that cannot be captured in passive planning processes and thus repeatedly undermine even the best laid plans. Through a novel strategy that asks how much one knows about the answers to 25 essential policy questions, and an application to recent education policy interventions in Mozambique, this paper shows that it is possible to get real about unknowns in policy work. Just recognizing these unknowns exist—and understanding why they do and what kind of challenge they pose to policy workers—can help promote a more modest and realistic approach to doing complex policy work.

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Media Education and the Practice of Democracy

Medienbildung im Spannungsfeld medienpädagogischer Leitbegriffe - MedienPädagogik: Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis der Medienbildung ◽

10.21240/mpaed/00/2006.02.21.x ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 2006 (Occasional Papers) ◽

pp. 1-12

Author(s):

Robert Ferguson

Keyword(s):

Status Quo ◽

Media Education ◽

Good Thing ◽

General Consensus ◽

The People ◽

The Status ◽

Scant Attention ◽

Western Civilisation ◽

Political Weapon ◽

Hearts And Minds

They do say that all ideas have their time, and in media education it seems that it is the time for democracy. Books and papers begin to appear and there are conferences with democracy in their titles to replace a focus on the postmodern, or identity. There seems to be a general consensus that democracy is a ‹good thing›. But, as with most other significant terms which hold centre stage for a while, they need to be interrogated with some care. For some more critical educators democracy takes its place alongside Gandhi’s comment when asked about Western Civilisation – he said it would be a good idea. The ‹practice› of democracy takes on a poignant, ironic, desperate or cynical cloak in the light of recent world events and the rise of terrorism as a political weapon. It depends where you stand. Democracy is not something that thrills the hearts and minds of the vast majority of citizens who live in nations who declare themselves to be democratic. Apathy and cynicism work together against democratic growth. But so do governments whose declared democratic aims pay scant attention to the people they are supposed to represent. And then there are the ‹democratic› exercises which supposedly involve the people in a conversation (‹we are listening› they say) which results in the status quo being implemented by politicians with morally superior physiognomies. After all, they say, we did ask your opinions. We did ask you to participate. And so democracy staggers from crisis to disaster...

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From Volkslieder and Stimmen der Völker in Liedern / Folk Songs and Voices of the People in Song

Song Loves the Masses ◽

10.1525/california/9780520234949.003.0005 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Johann Gottfried Herder

Keyword(s):

Folk Songs ◽

Good Thing ◽

The People

The continuation of the evidence for folk songs will follow in this part. Because, however, every good thing finds voice in two or three cases, and because even a hundred pieces of evidence would be insufficient, we want here to save paper and words. Instead, we should want to move on to that which could serve as clarification and presentation of these many poems....

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Is the desire for a meaningful life a selfless desire?

Human Affairs ◽

10.1515/humaff-2019-0039 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 29 (4) ◽

pp. 445-452

Author(s):

Joshua Lewis Thomas

Keyword(s):

Alternative Explanation ◽

Good Thing ◽

Meaningful Life ◽

The People ◽

Human Desire ◽

The Universe ◽

Susan Wolf

Abstract Susan Wolf defines a meaningful life as one that is somewhat successfully engaged in promoting positive value. I grant this claim; however, I disagree with Wolf’s theory about why we desire meaningfulness, so understood. She suggests that the human desire for meaningfulness is derived from an awareness of ourselves as equally insignificant in the universe and a resulting anti-solipsistic concern for promoting goodness outside the boundaries of our own lives. I accept that this may succeed in explaining why people want to engage in projects that happen to be meaningful. Nevertheless, I argue that Wolf fails to explain why people have a desire for meaningfulness itself. In other words, she has told us one reason we may be motivated to promote positive value, but not why we personally want to be the people who promote it—why we think it is a good thing that meaningful acts be done, but not why we want them to be our meaningful acts. In detailing my response, I follow Wolf in relating our desire for meaningfulness to a kind of love-based motivation. However, I argue that it has more in common with a selfish form of love than the altruistic kind of love proposed by Wolf. Finally, I suggest an alternative explanation which I believe can more fully account for our desire for meaningfulness: the prospect of disappearing from the universe without a trace makes us anxious, so we pursue meaningful achievements in an attempt to make our own physical deaths less final.

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