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This article explored the post-war British official commitment to the foundation of a universal system of education in response to the socialist ideal of \"secondary education for all\" as publicised by R. H. Tawney. The objective was to take exception to the well-established literature of British politics of 'consensus' by means of gathering the necessary data to unveil the usually disregarded politics of 'conflict' between the two major British political parties during the years of political consensus. The approach was structural functionalist and the focus was on the interplay of the dominant and assertive groups of power (Conservatives vs. Labour) with their respective educational agendas that instigated educational reforms. The analysis showed that the socialist-inspired educational reforms were introduced in a spirit of political 'conflict', not 'consensus', and that the educational changes brought about were in favour of the dominant, not assertive, group.

The definition of the mission of the University has always been a daunting challenge. For more than a century, the (British) University has been steadily straying from the creation and transmission of the light of knowledge to that of light knowledge. The present article has focused on this deviation and looked into its course to contend that it is the departure of the debate on defining the mission of the University from its original academic and liberal attributes to the recently assigned technical and vocational tasks which has actually compelled Jacques Derrida (2004) to make his groundbreaking call for the recovery of the enlightenment that the University has failed to follow. The participation of social philosophers of higher education is salutary and must bring the liberal purpose of the University (in the UK and worldwide) back to the core of the debate.

This article purports to account for the British government's resort to sell Ufi ltd to a private group of investors in 2011-after more than a decade of strenuous official efforts (both political and financial) to make of it a higher education success story. The central argument is that New Labour politicians' superficial interpretation of the concept of lifelong learning, due to their tight market-economy party-political agenda, has caused the failure of most of their higher education reforms. This state of affairs forced some concerned academics to react.

The revolutionary discoveries in communication technologies, that have ushered in a new era of news/ knowledge collection and distribution in the Anglo-Saxon societies, are problematic and questionable as they have triggered unprecedented transformations in such (presumably not related) concepts as citizenship. The aim of this article is to argue that the emergence of new types of citizens tells of the irreversible decline in the inherited values of media and academia. Given the suggested comparative perspective, the structure of the paper takes it from the (near) death of professional journalism and traditional university through the emergence of a new generation of citizens and the wishful thinking that ordinarily accompanies it to end with the less publicised fact that it is another world being lost.

This article looks at literacy in England from Roman times to the close of the nineteenth century. By exploring the changing significance of literacy and its spread among the different social classes, the article is intended to offer a contribution to a better understanding of the impact of literacy on the unfolding of the social history of England.