This article provides a historical and comparative study of the role that management of inequalities has played in the formation and evolution of educational institutions in three countries: Costa Rica, Cuba and Guatemala. This particular focus shows that this function has played a determining role, even if its organization has varied deeply in…

Is California's Imperial Valley a watershed? If so, at what level and by what topographic logic? Is it a region? If so, at what level and by what geographic logic? Are its boundaries natural, political, or multivalent on different scales? In short, this essay looks at the special (re)production of environmental conditions within a cyborg world.…

The author begins by discussing David Geoffrey Smith's analysis of the enantiomorphism inherent in the rhetoric of New American Imperialism. He goes on to examine critically Smith's defence of Enrique Dussel's advocacy of transmodernism as a way of understanding this enantiomorphism and of moving beyond what are seen as the constraints of both…

Environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) are playing an important role in environmental education in South-eastern Europe. Although some organisations appeared to compromise themselves by becoming political parties, others did useful work in debating ecological issues, working on environmental projects and increasing public awareness.…

In the course of exploring critiques of globalisation, this essay will focus on two postures--each with its range of arguments--that have emerged as alternatives to globalisation, namely, the delinking position and the subverting position. The first argues for standing "outside" of globalisation and its educational cultures and apparatuses. It…

Germany's well-established, and often envied, public elementary schools of the early twentieth century, encompassing the years from the late German Empire through the Weimar Republic, were both centers of reform pedagogy and sites of persistent confessional religious education. This article uses schoolbooks, curricula and pedagogical literature to…

The Department of Education's announcement of new leeway in meeting federal teacher-quality demands was praised as welcome relief by many education leaders. But others, including two pivotal congressional Democrats, charged that the action would lower expectations for teachers in rural communities. Facing widespread complaints about the…

Plato wrote that higher order thinking could not start until the student had mastered conventional wisdom. The American educational establishment has turned Plato on his head with the help of a dubious approach to teaching developed by one Benjamin Bloom. Bloom's taxonomy was intended for higher education, but its misappropriation has resulted in…

The article questions why experienced MEd students, on a course in pedagogy in social justice education, resorted to actions that clashed with this approach. Drawing on student and staff accounts of the course, the authors, teachers on this course, pose questions as to whether these reactions resulted from increased safety in the class, from…

In this working paper, the authors review the literature on college students' political attitudes and behaviors. It is hoped that this review will help to refine research questions and ultimately lead to a larger follow-up research study on college student political engagement. The literature review was based on the following three questions: (1)…

This study analyzes national polling data to assess public opinion on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and examines the political activities of states and localities to evaluate political resistance to the act. After an introduction, this paper is organized into five sections. The first section reviews national polling data on NCLB. Opponents to NCLB…

What is the role of the social scientist in public affairs? How have changes in the structure of the university system and the culture of academia reshaped the opportunities and constraints facing contemporary scholars? "The Social Scientist as Public Intellectual" addresses these and other questions by reviewing the ideas of seminal…

The year 2006 has been a year in which a decision on the introduction of middle schools has been made by the Labor government of the Northern Territory. The initial impetus for the change came from the 2003 Secondary Education Review "Future Directions for Secondary Education in the Northern Territory," chaired by Gregor Ramsay. There…

This essay describes service learning as a space for civic dialogue. In the project-oriented course discussed below--an oral history of a south-side African-American neighborhood in Chicago--civic dialogue took shape when middle class students from a range of backgrounds at the Illinois Institute of Technology interviewed residents of different…

This article is based on a keynote paper presented to the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER), University College Dublin, 5-9 September 2005. The massification of education in European countries over the last 100 years has produced cultures and societies that have benefited greatly from state investment in education. To maintain…