POLITICO Playbook: Democrats spar over Biden s next mega-proposal politico.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from politico.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The case for promoting free speech, debate and enquiry in the social work classroom
The culture of social work education encourages self-censorship, but the development of critical thinking and the need to respect diverse opinions is critical for practice, argues academic Jane Fenton
April 23, 2021 in Workforce
Photo: blacksalmon/Adobe Stock
By Dr Jane Fenton
The government has just proposed new measures to strengthen free speech at university on the basis that there have been recent attempts to censor speech and quell diverse or controversial opinions. This article explores that issue within the social work classroom.
Firstly, there may be some features of the current cohort of social work students that lend themselves to a potential difficulty with free academic enquiry and debate. For example, recent research has shown social work graduates to be significantly less skilled at critical thinking and significantly less assertive than a UK normative sample (Sheppard
What happened to Democrats who are liberals?
In a column some weeks ago, Bret Stephens argued that “America needs a Liberal Party that represents what we used to be and what we desperately need to become again.” Currently, he writes, the most “basic division in politics isn’t between liberals and conservatives, as the terms used to be understood. It’s between liberals and illiberals.”
By “liberalism,” he’s referring to “the tenets and spirit of liberal democracy,” which, he says, “used to be the more-or-less common ground of American politics, inhabited by Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes as much as by Barack Obama and the two Clintons.” These include things like respect for the outcome of elections, the rule of law, freedom of speech, and the principle, legally and otherwise, of innocent until proven guilty.
Mona Charen
Seventeen legislatures are considering laws that would dictate how medical personnel can treat transgender youth the latest flashpoint in the culture war. Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson surprised observers this week when he vetoed one of those bills. It would have outlawed puberty blockers, cross-sex hormone treatment and gender-affirming surgeries for children.
The Arkansas legislature and 16 others are attempting to big-foot a complex issue. With rare exceptions (such as limitations on assisted suicide and abortion), legislatures are not the best place for decision-making about medical issues. But in our hyper-hysterical culture, it s becoming less and less possible to engage in these debates where they belong in the realm of science and journalism.
Science tells us 47 is when we are at our unhappiest so what can we do about it?
Professor Brendan Kelly tells Suzanne Harrington the seven strategies for finding happiness
Sat, 10 Apr, 2021 - 19:09
Suzanne Harrington
When Douglas Adams wrote his comedy science fiction series The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, he declared 42 the answer to life, the universe and everything. Science fact, however, shows that 47.2 in human years is when we feel furthest from comedy; it is the average age, globally, when we feel glummest. The U-bend of human chronology. The midlife slump.
As psychiatrist Brendan Kelly approached his 47th birthday, he wondered if he too would dip into misery. He decided to have a psychological, scientific and cultural look at happiness to figure out who feels it most and least and why and, more importantly, what we can actively do to cultivate it.