Portrait of an Indian education

Chipping away at layers of nostalgia solidified by time, distance and the compromises of adulthood, my memories of school life in Bombay come back, fleeting and episodic at times, but increasingly clear and not particularly benign. What I recreate here is therefore not meant to be representative of every Indian educational encounter. On the contrary, the educational experiences of rich and poor, rural and urban children in India are so vastly different that to claim to talk about them all would be folly. However, in the course of this past decade I have interviewed young people in Bombay who are at school now, as I write, and some who were at school during the 1980s and 1990s. I found that my recollections, of secondary school in particular, were both comfortingly and alarmingly familiar to all of them. So, although the perspective and inflection is mine, some of this account is not simply my individual story either. It is probably similar to the experience of several hundred million lower‐middle‐class school students of this generation in urban India.     

Creativity through a rhetorical lens: implications for schooling,literacy and media education

This article, which is speculative in outlook and emerges from an extended literature review on this subject, takes as its basic premise the notion that the idea of ‘creativity’– whether in relation to literacy, schooling or the economy, is constructed as a series of rhetorical claims. These rhetorics of creativity emerge from the contexts of research, theory, policy and practice. Initially, we distinguish 10 rhetorics, which are described in relation to the philosophical or political traditions from which they spring. The discussion then focuses on four rhetorics – play, technology, politics/democracy and the creative classroom – which have most relevance for understandings of literacies and the way in which these are nurtured, encouraged and expressed in different social settings. This article aims to summarise the rhetorics and their major concerns, while considering how selected ones might apply to an instance of media literacy. Key questions addressed in this article ask whether creativity is more usefully understood as an internal cognitive function or an external cultural phenomenon; whether it is a ubiquitous human activity or a special faculty; whether it is necessarily ‘pro‐social’ or should be dissident; and what the implications of a culturalist social psychological approach to creativity might be for analyses of the media literacy of children and young people.     

From American city to Japanese village: a cross-cultural investigation of implicit race attitudes

This study examined the development of implicit race attitudes in American and Japanese children and adults. Implicit ingroup bias was present early in both populations, and remained stable at each age tested (age 6, 10, and adult). Similarity in magnitude and developmental course across these 2 populations suggests that implicit intergroup bias is an early-emerging and fundamental aspect of human social cognition. However, implicit race attitudes toward favored outgroups are more positive in older than in younger participants, indicating that "cultural prestige" enjoyed by a group moderates implicit bias as greater knowledge of group status is acquired. These results demonstrate (a) the ready presence, (b) early cultural invariance, and (c) subsequent cultural moderation of implicit attitudes toward own and other groups.     

A Comparison of Athletes and Non-Athletes at Highly Selective Colleges: Academic Performance and Personal Development

Student-athletes were studied over 4 years at a highly selective liberal arts college and an Ivy League university. Students spending 10 or more hours per week in athletic activities had lower entering academic credentials and academic self-assessments than non-athletes, but the academic performance of athletes was not below what would be expected based on their entering profiles. Athletes surpassed non-athletes on sociability/extraversion and self-reported well-being in each annual wave of the study. Athletes were not isolated from the rest of the student body; they spent over 50% of their time with non-group members and belonged to non-athletic extracurricular groups every year. Athletes perceived group membership to pose greater difficulties to academic performance and involvements outside the group than did members of other types of extracurricular groups. Athletes drank more heavily on weekends that non-athletes, but did not differ in growth or well-being. Comparisons by athletic status were similar for men and women.