Describes the political development of post-colonial Africa. Continuing tension has existed between single party and multi-party solutions to political organization and between mass movements and elitism. While Africans have been responive to socialist rhetoric, the primacy of ethnicity and the weak class structure have militated against genuine…

Suggests that the notion of "reverse discrimination" is a cultural belief representing a racial ideological process. Describes how the notion (1) emerged from past racial belief patterns; (2) differentially influences policy on the allocation of privileged economic roles among social groups; and (3) reintegrates cultural beliefs into…

Situational obstacles stemming from cultural and economic circumstances (migrant status, time away from school for work, etc.) were observed to have at least as much influence on the Mexican American child's educational and occupational aspirations as the more commonly stressed family interaction variables such as parental aspiration and emphasis…

Collection of reviews of the controversial book "The Bell Curve" includes an annotated bibliography of 36 reviews in professional journals, edited books, and the popular press; a critique of the book's statistical appendixes; comments from John Goodlad, Howard Gardner, and others; discussion of heritability estimates; and summaries of a…

Culturally derived barriers to participation--such as negative social-structural forces and culturally insensitive programs--hinder minority participation in literacy education. Effective programs empower learners to become critically reflective citizens aware of the structural forces affecting their lives while helping them acquire needed skills…

Addresses issues of culture, cultural politics, social power, and television audience in cultural studies. Argues that cultural studies as a field tends to analyze all cultural interpretation in terms of struggles between dominant and subordinate groups and that the text-centered approach of cultural studies misses much of television viewing's…

Uses a structural deterministic perspective to explain the overrepresentation of African-Americans in the lower levels of the American social system. Discusses the negative impact of racism, classism, and sexism on the Black family and the socialization of Black youth. Urges the formation of community coalitions to provide youth activities and to…

Presents boarding schools as educationally integrative and culturally innovative. Examines historical examples of eastern Hungarian Kollegium, Institutions, England's 18th century public schools, and Israeli youth villages. Boarding schools seen as potential accelerators of change in social structure and culture. Considers schools' autonomy and…

Discusses the sociohistorical approach to tools and change. Explores the possibilities of computer-supported cooperative work. Discusses formative experiments on the educational environment as research opportunities. Illustrates the organizational impact of school technology by describing a project intended to create an environment for…

The Polish economic crisis is distorting conventional relationships between education and the socioeconomic structure. Case study data and the literature revealed that devaluation of jobs requiring higher education has led to (1) the feminization of education, (2) a decline in educational aspirations, and (3) deleterious implications for teachers'…

Describes the sharp contradiction between the ideal of autonomy in democratic educational thought and the prevailing closed school structure, indicating the contradiction as having stemmed from considerations valid in industrial societies. Suggests a model of a flexible school designed to operate according to the considerations of postindustrial…

Data from the 1988 National Family Growth Cycle IV are used to identify individual, family, sociocultural, and social structure factors that influence pregnancy resolution decisions of first conception among African American and Hispanic American adolescents aged 15 to 21 years. The discriminating power of variables differs with race and…

Gathered data on arcade use in adolescents (n=460). "Regular" arcade visitors varied sufficiently from the more "casual" visitors in their orientation to, and experience in, arcades. Regular visitors were more likely to score positively on indices screening for addiction. Raises questions about children's access to potentially…

This first in a series of essays on electric writing focuses on communication efforts of the preceding oral, written, and print cultures. Topics discussed include face-to-face versus distant communication; political power; correlations between social structure and access to information; information accumulation; costs; authorship; and the content…

Discusses several models for lifelong learning, including permanent education, lifelong education, recurrent education, learning society, and deschooling society. Describes practices of lifelong education throughout the world. Includes a selected bibliography providing a chronological overview of works representing the lifelong education discourse…