Do early childhood education and care (ECEC) professionals make good advocates? Canadian advocates have fought for better child care policies since the mid-1940s. What has happened to this advocacy with the recent increased professionalization of the ECEC sector? How does increased professionalization limit, innovate or expand advocacy strategies?…

Drawing on representative household data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we examine the role of an early precursor of entrepreneurial development--parental role models--for the individual decision to become self-employed in the post-unified Germany. The findings suggest that the socialist regime significantly damaged this mechanism of an…

My point of departure in this essay is that student approaches to assessment appear to have become more instrumental, and that there has been a correlative propensity in my teaching practice to "teach to the test". Hence, both learners and teachers seem to have become more strategic in relation to assessment. This situation, I argue, is…

Despite the 1,000-year history of the church in Ukraine and the 800-year history of the university in Europe, Christian higher education has always struggled to survive in the territory that is now Ukraine. While one early Catholic university did exist in the territory of Ukraine when it was under Polish rule, only since Ukraine became independent…

Background: The classroom is a social system in which the teacher and the students interact as organizational members. The quality of classroom relations is dependent on the activities of both the instructor and the students. Several environmental conditions and circumstances often tend to either improve or depress the academic performances of…

In this paper, the author challenges stakeholders (i.e., administrators, educators, students) of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to examine how HBCUs can continue to serve as sites of resistance against the prevailing cultural norms of materialism, Western masculinity, and spiritual malefaction. The author traces his…

In the last few decades, in the wake of three major crises in political faith and the overall instability that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution, the post-Mao Chinese government has sought to improve the lives of its citizens and to restore political legitimacy through rapid economic growth that has focused almost exclusively on GDP.…

Writing and the power of the written word is a very important aspect of our literate society and writing is integrated into all aspects of our daily life. Good writing skills are paramount in social and educational institutions where textual production and related writing activities represent the main framework for knowledge production and…

This book is divided into four parts. In Part One the author considers the natural factors which have influenced the various national systems of education. They comprise racial, linguistic, geographical and economic factors. In Part Two he considers the contribution of religious traditions to education, more particularly those of the Catholic and…

London is the paramount example of a city that is not bounded by its geography and cannot be grasped in isolation. The U.K.'s national capital and the prime focus for business, finance and creative industries, London also transcends the U.K.'s borders as a hub of the world economy. This paper argues that London, a city riddled by the socioeconomic…

This essay explores how social psychologically the social structure of capitalist inequality has given rise to the Black-White achievement gap. This critical understanding is a reinterpretation of the "burden of acting White" hypothesis, and suggests that research on the achievement gap should focus on how the Black-White achievement gap is more a…

Unhappy with conditions in Second Life, educators are migrating to a developing virtual world that offers them greater autonomy and a safer platform for their students at far less a cost. OpenSimulator is an open source virtual world platform that schools can run for free on their own servers or can get cheaply and quickly--the space can be up and…

This article considers 8 critical hypotheses that circumscribe the development of U.K. education in the 21st century. They all derive directly or indirectly from the "Great Recession" and have radical implications for any notion of a "knowledge economy" and the nature of educational professionalism. The authors conclude that…

The "modernization" of Russian education is linked to the functioning of the entire social system of Russia, and reforms are proving difficult and contradictory. The use of the Unified State Examination in Russia, plus participation in the Bologna process, is causing concern about the ability of education to meet the needs of the…

The objective of this article is to analyse the process of institutionalisation of public elementary schooling associated with the political organisation of the constitutional monarchy and the legislation regarding citizen rights and prerogatives in Brazil, especially in the province of Minas Gerais, during the nineteenth century. During this…