The regional universities in Russia are an important resource for the development of Russian society, but more needs to be done to increase their effectiveness, including tackling corruption and leveraging local competitive advantages.

This paper explores the concepts of "community" and "community education," traces the growth of different models of community education in the United Kingdom, and highlights some of the issues, weaknesses, and problems arising from its development. Two separate movements, evolutionary and revolutionary, are…

The current directions of elementary school programs for American Indian children are varied, dynamic, demanding and, often, experimental. This booklet presents the trends and expectations of programs offered both in federal and provincial schools attended by Indian and Inuit children in Canada. A brief look at the educational experiences of…

Chinese "people-managed schools" began in the 1940s as popular voluntary village schools providing flexible relevant education to rural peasants, but are regarded today as low status and low quality. This change reflects the Chinese Communist Party's incremental move away from both decentralized decision making and populist education to…

Five decades of international assistance for economic and educational development failed because of top-down management and the questionable premise that defined development problems, interventions, and human factors solely in economic terms. In contrast, the Inter-American Foundation (IAF) supported communities' capacity to formulate their…

China's "minban" (people-managed) schooling was an important instrument for delivering educational and political values to poor areas during Mao's era. Despite national policy aimed at eliminating poorly-qualified minban teachers by 2000, rural communities have been reluctant to dismiss such teachers, given the rural teacher shortage and…

Available evidence suggests that Islamic (or Quranic) schools, as the primary contemporary example of indigenous schooling, have made major changes in various countries where they remain active. These include changes in the nature of instruction, style of teaching, and teacher corps. In general, these changes have been made in response to social…

This paper examines the Botswana government's objectives and implementation strategies in the development of community secondary schools. With a population of 1.5 million and an annual growth rate of 3.5 percent, Botswana is one of the fastest growing countries in the world. Recent dramatic economic growth, largely due to diamond revenues, has not…

This book is a compilation of the edited versions of a representative selection of papers on school and community presented at a European conference involving more than twenty countries. The papers are arranged in three sections. The first section of six papers lays the framework for the discussion which follows. Section 2, comprised of six papers…