Emotional regulation skills are key predictors of individual long-term well-being. The current study explored how students' perceptions of school institutional justice are associated with their emotional regulation skills, and examined whether perceived teacher support and peer support mediated this process. Data were collected from 62,723 students from across 50 primary, junior and senior middle schools in Xi'an, China. The construct validity of the measures was confirmed through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) based on pre-test data from 405 students. To account for the clustered structure of the data, a two-level structural equation modeling approach was used. The results showed that school institutional justice was positively associated with students' emotional regulation skills, and that this association was primarily indirect. Teacher support emerged as the primary pathway linking school institutional justice to students' emotional regulation skills. Peer support contributed less as a mediating pathway, but played an additional role in a chain pathway from teacher support to peer support and then to students' emotional regulation skills. The direct association between school institutional justice and students' emotional regulation skills remained significant but was small. These findings highlight the positive roles of school institutional justice, teacher support, and peer support on enhancing students' emotional regulation skills.
Debates about artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education are often polarised between technological optimism, alarmist concern about academic integrity, and pragmatic managerial responses. While these perspectives highlight important issues, they frequently fail to address a more fundamental question: what is the purpose of a university education in an age of increasing automation? This article argues that AI-related challenges expose the limitations of assessment- and efficiency-driven conceptions of higher education and invite renewed attention to its formative aims. Drawing on a neo-Aristotelian account of character education, the article proposes a model that prioritises the development of moral, civic, intellectual, and performative virtues as a human-centred response to AI-enabled disruption. By synthesising literatures on character education and AI in higher education, the article demonstrates how a virtue-based framework can address concerns relating to integrity, agency, epistemic responsibility, civic formation, and wider questions of educational purpose. The paper concludes by outlining practical implications for curriculum design and assessment, showing how universities can respond to AI in ways that support both individual flourishing and the public good.
This paper distinguishes the activity of educational criticism which works in service of education as indicated by the suffix -al, from education criticism which does not. The latter approach is prepared to doubt the mission of education as it is manifested in education institutions and in the broader cultural formation and maintenance of educated subjectivities. An education criticism does not assume that education institutions should be improved or that the production and maintenance of adult educated subjectivity is necessarily good or desirable. As such, it is prepared to risk the environment which makes its criticism possible, drawing from the arts and literature in which artists and writers have set out to perturb and question the epistemic and ethical attachments of their audiences.
