Mandarin Chinese is the fastest growing foreign language by number of students in the world [Ding and Saunders 2006. "Talking up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language." "East Asia" 23 (2): 3-33], but little is known about how it is taking hold in compulsory education in…

In the long march from manual training, the subject which today is called technology education has always had to contend with the question of its legitimacy as valid school knowledge. In this regard, it shares a similar history of struggle with other subjects whose initial entry into the curriculum was based on a utilitarian rather than an…