What roles can and should teachers' unions play in the deliberations, debates, and conflicts over school reform in a time when education sits at the center of so much of our economic, political, ideological, and cultural tensions? Lois Weiner's new book, "The Future of Our Schools: Teachers Unions and Social Justice," speaks…

Examines the university as it has become, studying its function in present society. The paper discusses author Allan Bloom's views in "The Closing of the American Mind" and looks at three social issues to which the university has responded somewhat successfully (university as moneymaker, mythmaker, and guardian of social…

D. F. Halpern and her colleagues criticize overly narrow scholarship and examine the economics of scholarship and the criteria for evaluation. Psychology needs a historically grounded, open-minded, and theoretically sophisticated view of scholarship that emphasizes the responsibilities of educational institutions in meeting the needs of society.…

Smelzer's book deals with the institutional provision of education, rather than education as in and of society, arguing that the relative strength of competing interest groups concerned with popular education determined how rapidly a state-controlled system came to win out over a denominational one in England. (SLD)