Lifelong learning and age discrimination in employment

Age discrimination in employment can be perfectly lawful in the United Kingdom. Older workers are discriminated against when they seek employment and whilst they are in employment, as well as being encouraged to leave the workforce. One of the purposes of a programme of lifelong learning is to aid the employability and career progression of individuals within the workforce. There is, however, little evidence to show that those who enter or return to higher education as mature students fare any better than other workers in avoiding discrimination based upon their chronological age. The Government introduced a voluntary code of practice on age diversity in employment and resisted legislation on the subject. There appears, however, to be a contradiction between this resistance and the Government's encouragement of the principle of lifelong learning.     

The Use of Administrative Discretion in Implementing the State Children's Health Insurance Program

States have exercised administrative discretion in at leastsix different ways during the intergovernmental implementationof the State Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) provisionof the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. States have used this flexibilityto determine when to submit their plans and when to put theCHIP program into effect. After describing the problem of uninsuredchildren in America and the politics of program adoption, multivariateanalysis is used to attempt to answer the following question:Why have some states moved more quickly than others to get plansfor introducing CHIP submitted, approved, and implemented? Thenature and extent of a relationship between a state's economic,political, and health-need characteristics, on the one hand,and the timing of submission and implementation, on the other,are examined.     

The Elements of the Concept of Ideology

This article, based upon an extensive examination of the literature on the concept of ideology, identifies some 27 definitional components or 'elements' which are discussed in turn to ascertain their utility and coherence as definitional criteria. On the basis of this examination a number of these elements are found to be essential to the concept, and are built into a definition which allows consideration of, among other things, the expressive and justificatory dimension of beliefs often ignored in other definitions.