This article focuses first on fundamental trends weakening the European--specifically, the Slovenian--economy and social structure, which are creating a two-class system consisting of an undereducated/uneducated population unable to compete for employment in an economy increasingly requiring more education to update employees' skills. Learning and…

How widespread is the production of food in old and new member states of the European Union and what is the social meaning or logic of such activities? We show that growing food is (a) more widespread in former communist countries than in traditional market economies and (b) is predominantly a hobby or recreational activity in affluent countries,…

In investigating the place of consumption in education it is necessary to question both critical theory's language of manipulation and neo-liberalism's language of rational action as ways of explaining the significance of consumption in people's lives and where it has assumed a central status in the contemporary social order. This paper argues…

Information, communication, and educational technologies hold promise to connect geographically isolated rural communities, offering adults greater access to educational, financial, and numerous other resources. The Internet and computer-based network technologies are often seen as remedies for communities in economic decline, but they also have…

Factors identified by 16 participants during in-depth interviews as influencing selection of speech pathology as a career were described using the Systems Theory Framework (STF, Patton & McMahon, 2006). Participants were highly likely to identify factors from the individual and social systems, but not the environmental-societal system, of the STF…

In this article, the authors argue that those who consider schools in an instrumentalist way alone are clearly deceived by the problem, whether elegantly or not. This position is dangerous and leads to a continuing dismal plight if one expects that educators should work within the confines of conditions as they presently exist, conditions that…

This article reflects on the historic tensions of education under capitalism, arguing that they have been exacerbated in our era of neo-liberal globalisation. Government drives for greater "accountability" and "effectiveness" are a blinkered response to the threefold global crisis we face: poverty and debt; a collapse of the…

"Globalization" is a term that, over the past twenty years, has been very frequently used yet remains vague and changeable with respect to the phenomena it refers to and what specifically it connotes. Discussions encouraging globalization have quickly sprung up, spreading the use of terms such as "postindustrial society,"…

This article argues that the issue of religious control of schools is becoming more and more important with every day that passes. We have a situation where one-third of our state schools are faith schools, and the New Labour Government seems intent on increasing their number. It is the author's contention that the state should not be allowed to…

Facing the trend and pressure of globalisation, the history curricula of Hong Kong and Shanghai have been undergoing reforms in order to better equip the youth for coping with rapid contextual changes. At the same time, there have been attempts to reposition nationalism in the changing contexts. This paper aims to compare and contrast how the…

This article traces the role of the non-communist, late Tsarist, "new education" movement in shaping early Soviet views of teacher-training. Comparing the teacher-training approach of one of the leaders of this Tsarist educational movement--Stanislav Shatskii--with that of the Soviet Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros), the…

The Chinese nationality is a great one, possessing a glorious tradition of patriotism. Patriotism is the banner that mobilizes and inspires the Chinese people to unite and struggle, a great force that moves the social history of the nation forward, and a common spiritual component of all of the country's nationalities. Now, the nation's people are…

This paper is an attempt to review the state of environmental education from the viewpoint of one involved in international and national strategies for its development. It relates environment and education to the whole system of human environment relationships and sees environmental education not as a separable package but as a movement for…

The argument of this paper is that the learning society, as presented by the dominant discourse, has emphasised scientific rationality and work-life learning to the exclusion of both a comprehensive understanding of lifelong learning and also the breadth of human experience and knowledge. This is because global capitalism has emphasised scientific…

The Chinese Communist Party's Fifteenth Congress established Deng Xiaoping Theory as the guiding school of thought and propelled China's construction of socialist modernization into the 21st century. Comrade Deng Xiaoping's breakthroughs in the theory of economic construction have pushed research on the relationship between education and economic…