It’s special and it’s specific: understanding the early childhood education experiences and expectations of young Indigenous Australian children and their parents

Whilst early childhood education is regarded as important for young Indigenous Australians and it has been a feature of policy since the 1960s, it does not receive the same attention as compulsory schooling for Indigenous Australian students. A serious lack of large-scale research contributes to the devaluing of early childhood education for young Indigenous Australians by some stakeholders such as governments, academics and research, but not for the main stakeholders, namely young Indigenous Australian children and their parents. This paper aims to address this by drawing on large-scale qualitative and quantitative data from the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children. First, it will analyse data pertaining to the experiences of Indigenous Australian children to uncover what they believe to be special about their early childhood education. Second, it will analyse data pertaining to the specific choices made by their parents regarding their early childhood education. The paper concludes by discussing the role of research in strengthening areas within Indigenous Australian early childhood education and identifying areas where it is valued to the same level as compulsory schooling.     

In search of educational equity for the migrant children of Shanghai

Around the world there is a growing consensus that migrant children's rights must be protected, regardless of where they have emigrated from. One of these rights is the right to a public education of equal quality to that granted to non-migrant children regardless of where one's family is registered or pays taxes. This article focuses on migrant children schooling in Shanghai. It will show that three main problems are still impeding migrant children from getting a high-quality education. They are: the inferior quality of migrant children schools; the lack of access to a public school and the much higher costs of schooling; and the high mobility of migrant students. Our conclusion: the education rights of migrant children have become contingent on the wills of urban local governments, public attitudes, and available space in local public schools.     

Navigating a treacherous game: conceptualising parental engagement in contemporary Queensland schooling

Parent engagement in schooling has long been held as a vital component of the successful navigation of the schooling process and, consequently, governments often invite such engagement via policy implementation. However, at times, contestation arises about parent engagement, with some parents seemingly ‘crossing the line’ when attempting to be involved in their children's schooling. This paper investigates the possibility of parent engagement in schooling in Queensland, Australia, conceptualising it as a game of social and systemic practice. The author examines this notion using an example of contestation between parents at a regional government school and the education authority. Policy directives about parent engagement are explored, with the rhetoric of such policy applied to the example in question. The work of Bourdieu and Foucault is used to argue that the invitation to parents to engage is framed and thus often misrecognised, resulting in unintended conflictual relationships between parents and governing authorities.     

美国大学“共治”的两难处境及发展趋势

大学"共治"是20世纪60年代以来指导美国大学内部权力分配的重要理念与实践原则,但近年来大学"共治"对不断产生的新问题的回应不力而受到各方的质疑与责难。对此,美国联邦政府、各州政府和大学采取了促进政府与大学融合、通过立法确定大学的多重使命、建立大学与州政府的伙伴关系、重视大学的市场性行为、组建大学生组织以扩大大学"共治"的参与面等应对措施。因此,美国大学"共治"呈现出以下趋势:政府管制逐渐弱化,形式更加多样,外部影响因素不断增加,教职参与性不断降低,参与人员各司其职等。     

Waging War on Children and Youth through Schooling Disruption

Education and its subsequent schooling component are among the most formative developments experienced by children and youth. It is an extremely important instrument for developing cognitive skills, for cultivating mechanisms of acceptable societal functioning and for ideological orientations. This factor is recognized by international treaties and conventions which guarantee that children and youth are entitled to a positive and safe schooling experience. However, the twentieth century began and ended with conflict. This societal propensity creates havoc on education systems in terms of two strategies: one, the total destruction of schooling or, two, schooling where an oppressor takes over governing and attempts re‐indoctrination. The question posed in this research paper is: How does schooling become disrupted due to political conflict situations? Historical antecedents indicate that a consistent evolution of the factors leading to repetitious schooling disruption emerges due to political conflict. This pattern is characterized by basic common macro factors but with some micro variables due to geographic locations. In this paper it will be argued that political conflict causes schooling disruption. The steps that unfold toward schooling disruption will be identified as a pattern that feeds the Richardson Schooling Disruption Model (RDSm).     

基于输入地政府视角的农民工子女教育研究——以浙江为例

输入地政府以多种途径解决农民工子女入学的同时,也面临“解决越好、新增生源越多、地方承载压力越重、问题越突出”的循环矛盾,正规公办学校的教学资源仍难以满足快速增长的农民工子女就学的需求。解决农民工子女教育问题需要建立起中央与地方互动、输入地与输出地相互配合的协调机制。     

制约国企改制的主要因素之我见

国有企业由传统的管理体制和经营方式向现代企业制度转变 ,是市场经济发展的客观要求。目前 ,制约国有企业实现这一转变的因素主要有三个 :一是政企关系没有理顺 ,二是改制过程中的利益调整问题没有妥善解决 ,三是企业负担重。     

再谈构建和谐社会私营企业劳资关系的问题

目前,我国私营企业劳资关系存在的主要问题是:政府思想认识上的偏差以及缺乏观念上的转变;不合理的工资报酬以及拖欠农民工的工资;缺乏法律保护的合同内容以及员工合法权益的维护;缺少人文关怀以及对员工的信任与尊重;不规范、不健全的工会组织等等。为此,必须找寻主要思路构建私营企业和谐劳资关系:一是各级政府必须转变观念、亲历亲为,为私营企业的发展有所为;二是工会组织必须建立健全,规范管理,为私营企业的发展有所行;三是全社会、全体民众必须齐心合力,加强监督,为私营企业的发展有所动。     

Politics and pedagogy: a case study in appropriation

During the last half‐century, the view of most governments, supported by the United Nations and other international agencies, has been that as far as possible schooling should be free of charge. Financial factors have not always made this feasible, but the policy has provided an attractive social and political goal. In recent years, financial stringency has bitten more deeply. Most governments still seem to adhere to the old philosophy, but there are signs of a change of heart among some governments and in at least one major international agency. The policy is thus coming under fire on both practical and ideological grounds.     

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: Pornography, censorship, and male sexuality Offensive Literature: Decensorship in Britain 1960–82, John Sutherland Working-class resistance to schooling Hooligans or Rebels?, Stephen Humphries. Basil Blackwell Publisher Incompletion Homosexuality: a New Christian Ethic, Elizabeth R. Moberly, James-Clarke     

Fuzzy books and sideways looks: discourses of schooling on Australian television advertisements

Media constructions of schooling provide suggestions about what should be expected of the school experience. Studies on discourses of schooling have examined how the school is framed in media discourses, but few have examined how it is formed mundanely and repeatedly in advertisements promoting products that are not directly educational. This paper examines how the school is constructed in a range of television advertisements that sell products that are not directly educational such as cereal and broadband Internet, focusing on how schools come to be framed negatively in advertising narratives. The television advertisements often use the technique of governmentality, whereby they attempt to direct the conduct of viewers by suggesting that self-improvement is achievable through personal enterprise. These advertisements position parents as agentive consumers of education, whose consumption habits are central to their children's scholarly success within problematic educational spaces.     

Social trust and the growth of schooling

The paper develops a simple model to examine how social trust might affect the growth of schooling through lowering transaction costs associated with employing educated individuals. In a sample of 52 countries, the paper thereafter provides empirical evidence that trust has led to faster growth of schooling in the period 1960–2000. The findings are robust to the inclusion of a set of control variables and being estimated using an instrumental variables approach.     

Private‐sector provision of schooling: an economic assessment

In many countries the school choice agenda has promoted increased inter‐school competition as a means of creating stronger incentives for state schools to raise measures of average pupil attainment. Privatization of the provision of schooling takes market‐based reforms a stage further. We identify the factors that have increased governments' concern with educational outcomes and why these concerns have led to greater interest in privatization. The rationale employed for such policies elsewhere in the public sector has been based upon efficiency gains, in that existing government failures were more harmful than future market failures. More recently it has been argued that contracting or improved regulation can control the market failures associated with privately provided schooling. Given the multiple outputs generated by education providers, privatization may be particularly attractive to governments who find that the professionalism of teachers and their public service motivation generate severe agency problems. We critically review each of these propositions and question the current practice of separating issues concerned with government funding of schooling from those concerned with its provision.     

Education policy and schooling attainment in Malaysia and the Philippines

Aggregate schooling levels have risen greatly since the 1960s in Malaysia and the Philippines. This paper examines the extent to which the family background of individuals and education policies of the government together influence schooling levels. The results suggest that education policies in either country have significantly affected levels as well as the relative distribution of schooling among its demographic groups.     

Why Brazil fell behind in college education?

Brazil fell behind in higher education attainment for the cohorts born in the 1950s and 1960s. We jointly model educational choices, labor force participation and wages, and compute the average, marginal and internal rate of returns to schooling after controlling for changes in ability composition at all levels of education. We find very high returns to college, which indicate that the disappointing trend in higher education could reflect binding credit constraints, psychic costs or uncertainty about future earnings gains from schooling.     

Within the European Periphery: education and labor mobility in twentieth‐century Spain

The essay presents a novel estimate of human capital in Spain during most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as measured by average years of schooling at the three main educational levels. The new estimate confirms long‐term, regional and gender trends already identified by literacy levels. It shows that most of the human capital embodied in the Spanish population until well into the second half of the twentieth century was due to expanded primary schooling rather than to secondary or university studies and it identifies the Civil War of 1936 as one of the most serious setbacks during two centuries of slow and irregular human capital accumulation. Primary schooling determined labor mobility in twentieth‐century Spain during the 1920s and the 1960s as people moved away from agriculture and into industry and services. The decision to migrate was a household rather than an individual one: the education of those who did not emigrate – elder males and females of all ages – was as relevant as that of the actual emigrants. The Civil War and the early years of the Franco regime, by contributing to the depletion of the stock of human capital, had negative effects upon labor mobility as recently as the 1960s.     

Justifying Compulsory Environmental Education in Liberal Democracies1

The need for education for (as opposed to about) sustainability is urged from many sides. Initiatives in this area tend to focus on formal education. Governmental, supra‐governmental and non‐governmental bodies all expect much of this kind of education, which is to transform children—and through them society—in the direction of sustainability. Due to the combination of great transformative expectations or ambitions and a focus on schooling (the idea of) compulsory environmental education poses potentially severe problems for governments committed to liberal principles, in particular the principle of state ‘neutrality’ with respect to ‘comprehensive conceptions of the good life’. The central question of this article is whether liberal governments can make environmental education of this kind compulsory without coming into conflict with the liberal principle of state neutrality. I discuss three defences of the compatibility of compulsory environmental education with liberal neutrality, namely those put forward by Derek Bell, Andrew Dobson, and Simon Hailwood, as well as some problems inherent in these defences. In the final section I sketch a form of compulsory environmental education that realises at least some of the aims commonly stated for Education for Sustainability and Education for Sustainable Development, and can be justified on the basis of liberal principles.     

国外基础教育管理及财政体制改革分析

不论是发达国家还是发展中国家,都不同程度地遇到了教育经费不足、经费使用效率不高、教育机会不均、教育质量无法使人满意等问题。为此,各国政府积极探索改革教育管理及财政体制的有效措施,包括下放中央政府对教育的管理权,扩大地方政府的统筹权;扩大学校的办学自主权;增加家长选择学校的权力和参与学校管理的机会;发展私立教育;采用市场机制,吸引私营企业参与办学等。仅仅依靠市场机制无法实现教育资源的有效配置,适度和适当形式的政府干预和社会调节是必要的。政府可以采取多种方式对教育市场进行干预与治理,包括财政、管制和公共设施建设手段,以实现公平、效率、选择和社会凝聚等多项社会目标。     

追求高品质的学前教育

高品质学前教育是人获得可持续发展的基础,实现学前教育机会、学前教育过程以及学前教育结果的高品质是学前教育发展的主题。随着知识经济时代的到来,越来越多的人们对儿童能否获得高品质的学前教育给予了较大关注。政府、学前教育机构、家庭对实现高品质的学前教育应承担各自的责任。     

Away with all teachers: The cultural politics of home schooling

In the United States and a number of nations, one of the most powerful dynamics of educational 'reform' involves the movement toward home schooling. The national media have spoken glowingly about it and the number of children being schooled at home is growing rapidly. In large part, this is stimulated by the circulation of anti-statist discourses and by the continuation and expansion of claims about school failure. In these accounts, the sources of educational problems are multiple: teacher education institutions produce teachers who are unprepared academically and unskilled in teaching the 'basics'; state funded (public, in the US sense of the word) schools have been taken over by 'progressive' models of teaching that are unworkable; these same schools do not teach 'traditional' cultural and religious knowledge, beliefs, and values; and public schools do not listen to conservative parents and are much too bureaucratic. Supporters of home schooling are usually religious fundamentalists who have increasing power in the USA and elsewhere. They have formed a national coalition and have joined in a tense rightist hegemonic alliance with neo-liberals and neo-conservatives, an alliance that seeks to reconstruct our common-sense about education and about all things social. The article shows how the movement toward home schooling has become more extensive and more dangerous than has usually been thought. In the process, home schooling is situated within the larger conservative and authoritarian populist ideological, religious, and social movements that provide much of its impetus. Connections are suggested with other protectionist impulses and connections are made to the history of and concerns about the growth of activist government. Finally, the article points to how it may actually hurt many other students who are not home schooled.