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The purpose of this paper is to explore philosophies of progressive education circulating in Australia in the period immediately following the expansion of secondary schools in the 1960s. It examines the rise of the alternative and community school movement of the 1970s, focusing on initiatives within the Victorian government school sector. It aims to better understand the realisation of progressive education in the design and spatial arrangements of schools, with specific reference to the re-making of school and community relations and new norms of the student-subject of alternative schooling.

It combines historical analysis of educational ideas and reforms, focusing largely on the ideas of practitioners and networks of educators, and is guided by an interest in the importance of school space and place in mediating educational change and aspirations. It draws on published writings and reports from teachers and commentators in the 1970s, publications from the Victorian Department of Education, media discussions, internal and published documentation on specific schools and oral history interviews with former teachers and principals who worked at alternative schools.

It shows the different realisation of radical aims in the set up of two schools, against a backdrop of wider innovations in state education, looking specifically at the imagined effects of re-arranging the physical and symbolic space of schooling.

Its value lies in offering the beginnings of a history of 1970s educational progressivism. It brings forward a focus on the spatial dimensions of radical schooling, and moves from characterisation of a mood of change to illuminate the complexities of these ideas in the contrasting ambitions and design of two signature community schools.

Organizational theorists and strategy scholars are both interested in how organizations deal with ambiguity, especially in relation to implementation. This chapter examines one source of ambiguity that organizations face, which is based on their efforts to implement moral mandates. These mandates, which are related to areas such as environmental sustainability and diversity, are inherently ambiguous, as they lack a shared understanding regarding their scope and associated practices. They are also often broad and systemic and may be unclearly aligned with an organization's strategy. Due to these challenges, in this chapter, we theorize that collective action at the field level is necessary for organizations to advance and concretize moral mandates. We examine this theorizing through the case of the implementation of sustainability in higher education. We hypothesize and find support for the idea that when an organization's members engage in collective action at the field level, those organizations have an increased likelihood of achieving sustainability implementation. To gain insight into this field-to-organization relationship, we qualitatively examine 18 years of conversations from an online forum to develop a process model of moral mandate implementation. We theorize that collective action functions as a field-configuring space, in which actors from a variety of organizations come together to (1) refine the scope of the mandate and (2) create an implementation repertoire that actors can draw on when seeking to bring sustainability to their own organizations. Overall, our study provides a model of how ambiguous moral mandates can be implemented by highlighting the important role of collective action across organizations in concretizing those mandates and providing actors with the tools for their implementation.

Of course the predominating subject in British librarianship in the past month was the Manchester Meeting. It was the largest gathering in our recollection, and those who were fortunate enough to attend lived some crowded hours of glorious life. The arrangements showed that the most careful and painstaking labour had gone to their making. The Local Committee and the various librarians in Manchester and the district deserve all possible gratitude, and the Library Association has every reason to congratulate itself upon a conference which ran without fault and which received great and wide publicity.

A MAN'S LAST WORDS carry presumption of credibility not associated with utterances made earlier in life. William Shakespeare acknowledged this credibility in at least three of his plays. When the physician, Cornelius, told Cymbeline that the Queen had confessed that she loved him not, Cymbeline declared, ‘She alone knew this;/And, but she spoke it dying, I would not/Believe her lips in opening it.’

THE attention which has lately been given to the subject of registration may well be taken as indicative of a growing desire for it, and no one who has closely followed the growing importance of libraries in the educational life of the country, and the consequent impetus given to the craft of librarianship, can have doubted that ere many years had passed it would be necessary to establish a professional register as other professional and trade bodies have done.

The purpose of this paper is to revisit philosopher Hannah Arendt's classic study of the banality of evil in light of posthumously published works bearing on moral psychology and philosophy.

Largely expository and interpretive, this conceptual paper articulates Arendt's approach to morally responsible thinking, with an emphasis on managerial decision making. Arendt's practical ethics draws, in part, on Kantian aesthetic theory, providing an original but unfinished account of “the life of the mind” and personal responsibility in community.

Arendt contends that humans can, and are morally obliged to, use conscience, imagination and reason to avoid evil‐doing; that self‐critical introspection, active imagination and representative judgment are essential for moral decision making, especially in times of moral crisis; and that neither profit nor pressure can justify breaching fundamental responsibilities to humanity.

This paper discusses, but does not critique, Arendt's oeuvre. It interprets, connects and applies ideas from disparate works relating to responsible moral psychology.

Confronting a “modern crisis” in values, Arendt acknowledged pressures on leaders to fulfill organizational objectives, even those effecting harm which violate deeply‐held personal ethics. Warning against temptations to divide selves into a “personal” moral self and a compartmentalized “organisational self,” she prescribed ways of thinking and judging to counteract thoughtless evil‐doing.

The paper connects Arendt's privative analysis of evil‐doing in Eichmann in Jerusalem with later works which delineate shared human mental capacities and processes which facilitate morally responsible leadership, independent of culture or context.

DURING the past year no little stir was caused by Lord Rosebery's speech at the opening of the new Mitchell Library. Comments on the speech were world‐wide; the “Cemetery of Books” appealed to the imagination of all. The halfpenny papers and the high class literary journals alike opened their columns to innumerable letter writers. After it is all over now and the opinions calmed down the following sentence is not far wrong: “There is little doubt that Lord Rosebery was in facetious vein, but it is curious that (in spite of the ‘surgical operation’ supposed to be necessary) only the papers north of the Tweed seem to have realized this.”

IF we devote this page largely to the Library Association we believe our readers, who are the most active workers in librarianship, will think us justified because the Association is the central fact in our lives. Its Annual Report for 1955 has reached us. It is a document to be read, appreciated and criticised; we only wish we could say that it always is, for then surely some of the tart utterances about the inactivity, even uselessness, of our organization would be evaluated at their real worth or want of it. The Association does not work by means of press campaigns, or illegal dismissal of members who do not fulfil all its professional ethical codes. It has more direct access to the Government than is usually known. It was not quiescent when the Post‐master General increased book and newspaper postage; with other folk of influence it went to see him. It is not idle when posts are advertised at rates unsuitably parsimonious; it protests to the authorities issuing them invariably, and it makes it clear to chartered librarians that in applying for such posts they undersell and betray us all. Unfortunately these, the only lawful methods open to the Association, do not influence certain members. In fifteen cases, twelve were filled by those who will remember all their lives that they “let down the side” and probably at least five times as many were also their competitors. This is merely an explanatory word to those who complain of inaction.

THESE are grave days, and perhaps especially grave for those who are workers in books, in art and in the things of the mind and spirit. They are days which may make, or may mar, much that such people as the readers of THE LIBRARY WORLD have striven for through a century or more. In war the material things, money, food, clothes, cease to be ordinary problems; they become urgent; and all the graces of life, even education itself, are endangered. We have yet to experience the full impact, let alone the reactions, of the drastic war taxation recently imposed. Necessary it is, no doubt, but that will not lessen its effects.