Largely unknown to most of the world, Kyrgyzstan has a flourishing higher education (HE) sector, with more universities per head than other countries with similar populations. Kyrgyzstan is also a major regional importer of international students in Central Asia. This paper opens up this understudied country in three ways: first, through a brief…

China has the largest population and largest labor force in the world. It has been highly successful in rapidly expanding both secondary and higher education to a significant fraction of the youth cohort. However, educational opportunities and standards across China are highly uneven. China has abundant labor power, but it will need a far more…

Academies are now a part of the English school landscape. Future policy should focus on learning the lessons from the growth of academy schools. In this "NFER Thinks," the author presents the case that any future expansion in the number of academies should be motivated by a clear vision of the long-term outcomes for learners that…

The article deals with the problems of content and technological modernization that arise in the process of transition from the information paradigm of education to the activity one. A combined training model of class teaching using information, practice-based activity and visual components is offered as an example and a result of innovative…

This essay discusses past and current thinking about the globalization of higher education (from a U.S. point of view in particular) and a new model we are attempting to develop at the University of California, Berkeley. This essay begins with a brief narrative of the historical evolution of efforts to internationalize education, from the…

The educational system has witnessed a number of laudable programs since inception in both formal and non-formal systems of education programs that were set up to empower adult educational skills, knowledge, decision-making processes.Correspondence education transformed into distance education which--with the advent of information and…

The aim of this article is to examine and assess Africa's higher education effort. The theoretical framework employed distinguishes between three dimensions of the higher education project: the quantitative dimension (measured in terms of higher education enrollments and enrollment ratios), the qualitative dimension, and the equality dimension.…

This article introduces a special section on moral development. We claim that the field is now undergoing a resurgence of theoretical and methodological innovation after the eclipse of paradigmatic moral stage theory. Although research on prosocial development, moral emotions, and social domain theory has sustained interest in moral development,…

This paper reflects upon international arts education action and relative local in-action. The first half of the paper provides a brief narrative of the World Alliance for Arts Education's advocacy work and the development of the UNESCO Seoul Agenda: Goals for the development of arts education. The second half of the paper highlights a dance…

This article takes as its inspiration Ian Grosvenor's conjectural essay presented for the symposium "Historiography of the Future: Looking Back to the Future" held at the International Standing Conference for History of Education (ISCHE) 33 in July 2011 in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. It contributes to a sensory history of schooling by…

The historical developments of infant schools in Great Britain and "salles d'asile" in France--both precursors of present-day preschools--were interconnected. However, historians have not yet analysed specifically how transnational exchange influenced the growth and nature of these institutions. Drawing on archival data and secondary…

The importance of public education has never been greater as we enter the dawn of a new millennium. Innumerable efforts have been focused on improving public education, but the unfortunate result has been an array of fractured, piecemeal efforts. What is needed is a systemic approach to go from "tweaking" to "transforming"…

In this commentary, the 3 review papers by Reynolds et al. (this issue), Muijs et al. (this issue), and Hopkins, Stringfield, Harris, Stoll, and Mackay (this issue) on "educational effectiveness", "teaching effectiveness", and "school and system improvement" are discussed. In the text, the 3 papers are occasionally…

In 2002 a high-level economic review committee recommended that Singapore position itself as a "global schoolhouse". An ambitious target was set to attract 150,000 international students to Singapore by 2015 and to lift the education sector's contribution to GDP from 1.9% to 5% in the same timeframe. The global schoolhouse was viewed as…

The anatomical theatre played a pivotal role in the evolution of medical education, allowing students to directly observe and participate in the process of dissection. Due to the increase of training programs in clinical anatomy, the Institute of Human Anatomy at the University of Padova has renovated its dissecting room. The main guidelines in…