1850: The Ragged School Union Magazine Address

“Man is surely, of all things in the creation, most interesting to man. It is his intellect and his moral sense—his conscious capacity of an excellence he has never reached— his inward vision of the true, the beautiful, and the good—that invest him with a dignity which belongs to him alone of all earthly beings, and, more than any mere external superiority, mark him as a creature of a higher order, and adapted to nobler ends than the rest, between which and himself there is a wide and inaccessible distance.” Read more…

Critical Perspectives: Digital Technologies, Education and Sustainability

We live in an age of digital technology and year after year new infrastructure to support this gets laid out, economies expand based on these and new software tools are released into the wild made by tech developers trying to make a living. For many, digital technology has permeated every aspect of our lives as users, and if not as users then as people who have their lives shaped by other peoples use of digital technologies.

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Public Sociology: From Dehumanisation to Epistemological Error Checking

In this essay I explore the subject of public sociology by making sense of Michael Burawoy’s original theses laid out in 2004 (Burawoy, 2005). I offer a syncretic account of what I perceive to be the core dynamics of public sociology relating thinkers and bodies of work that provide particular insightful articulations. Due to the limited scope of what can be explored in detail here I have selected what I see as the key themes which pervade the spirit of public sociology making it operationally meaningful as a practice in the world. Read more…

Ragged Schools and Ragged Scholars: Sunday Schools – Thomas Cranfield – John Pounds – the City Mission – Ragged Schools

I have some true stories to tell of children who went to a ragged school: but I wish to tell these stories in my own way; and I must first write about other persons and things. It was a good day when Sunday schools were first thought of Since then, large numbers of children, who else would have grown up ignorant of God, have been taught to read his holy word; and many have believed and obeyed the gospel, and been saved from the wrath to come.

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