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As Asian education systems increasingly take on a stronger presence on the global educational landscape, of special interest is an understanding of the ways in which many of these states direct their schools towards higher achievement. What is missing, however, are accounts that take seriously the particular construction of the strong, developmental state witnessed across many Asian societies, and that seek to understand the politics and possibilities of curriculum change vis a vis precisely the dominance of such a state. By engaging in analyses based on some of the best current social and cultural theories, and by illuminating the interactions among various state and non-state pedagogic agents, the chapters in this volume account for the complex post-colonial, historical and cultural consciousnesses that many Asian states and societies experience. At a time when much of the educational politics in Asia remains in a state of transition and as many of these states seek out through the curriculum new forms of social control and novel bases of political legitimacy, such a volume offers enduring insights into the real if not also always relative autonomy that schools and communities maintain in countering the hegemonic presence of strong states.
Focusing on Singapore’s education system from an equity perspective, Chiong’s book describes the often unheard perspectives of socio-economically disadvantaged families in Singapore. The performance of Singaporean students on international education benchmarking tests has been widely recognised. Relatively less known is how socio-economically disadvantaged families negotiate Singapore’s highly competitive, stratifying and meritocratic system. Yet, families’ perspectives can provide crucial insight in understanding how policy is ‘lived’ and experienced, and its effects on people’s lives. Drawing on 72 interviews with 12 families, this book traces the development of surprisingly close, collaborative relations between the state, schools and families on Singapore’s socio-economic margins. It demonstrates that in the 'strong' state of Singapore, families’ dependency on schools and the state facilitates the internalisation of individual and familial responsibility for future success. However, these very processes can injure, and perpetuate inequality. The analysis presented in this book has relevance in other contexts, in times where advanced capitalist states face growing inequalities and challenging relationships between institutional authority and the wider populace. As socio-economic and educational inequalities widen, this book asks timely questions and provides recommendations on what a more equitable state-citizen compact might look like. The book will appeal to researchers and students who are interested in the fields of the sociology and politics of education, social policy, and Asian culture and society.
This book examines the connections between public school reform in the early twentieth century and American political development from 1890 to 1940.
This book maps globally shifting relations between families, schools and the state across a range of nations (Australia, Germany, India, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, USA) in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Featuring contributions from leading international experts, the book’s eight chapters reflect upon the apparently vital responsibility of parents for choosing the rights sort of educational pathways for their children, offering comparative insights into several different kinds of state, with different contexts for the practices of ‘educational’ parenting. The contributors consider the proposition that a significant focus of the material, emotional and occupational investment of contemporary parents is the formal education of their children, re-shaping not only the relationship between parents and schools but also the nature of parenthood itself. Parents are analysed both as local actors in schools and as subjects of national and international policy regimes, particularly recent and contemporary imperatives of marketisation.. With a focus on social change, the chapters examine the operation of global educational programmes and ideas in national and local settings. The collected national and local studies attend to different confluences of local, regional and transnational, considering a variety of social and cultural patterns as well as national and local educational structures and policy regimes. Parents, Schools and The State: Global Perspectives will be a useful resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of comparative education, educational policy and leadership, educational research, history of education, sociology, research methods and politics. This book was originally published as a special issue of Comparative Education.
Critical Studies of Education in Asia features analyses that take seriously the complex postcolonial, historical, and cultural consciousnesses felt across societies in Asia, and that bring these to bear on the changing terrain of knowledge, subjectivities, and power relations constructed both within schools and across the public sphere. In documenting the multiple sites of conflict and contestation both between and within states in Asia and a host of pedagogic agents – ministries of education, state boards and agencies, schools, teachers and teacher unions, university departments of education, local interest groups, the media, international standards agencies, and global educational reform discourses – the chapters in this volume illuminate the struggles over knowledge, education, and the work of schools. Faced with emergent global and local forces that are determined to challenge ‘official’ knowledge and to offer alternative understandings of education and society in Asia, this volume offers critical insights for academic researchers, policy- makers, and graduate students seeking to understand the tensions and possibilities of educational change in the region. This book was originally published as a special issue of Curriculum Inquiry.
This book is a case study of policy translation at an elite Japanese university. Through an analysis of the implementation of government-funded reform policies, Black investigates the role of the university in society, the youth-to-work transition, and systems of organisational management operative at the university. Black was present throughout the initial adoption phase of the Super Global project, a policy project implemented at an elite Japanese university, the University of Tsukuba. Aligned with a basic critical realist perspective, the different components of his research are integrated in four levels of analysis: the macro level of policy, the organisation level of the university, the departmental level of the English Section, and the individual level of the student. The analysis and the different sources of data look at internal structures of the organisation and try to understand what the mechanisms of policy translation operative are in the integrated and overlapping complexity of the four levels of analysis. At the core of the research is the objective of understanding why things are as they are. The main theories to emerge from the case study serve to inform the judgements and decisions of practitioners or policy makers in this area. It is a telling case for internationalisation-focused education reform policy in Japan.
This edited volume examines the historical development of Chinese-medium schools from the British colonial era to recent decades of divergent development after the 1965 separation of Singapore and Malaysia. Educational institutions have been a crucial state apparatus in shaping the cultural identity and ideology of ethnic Chinese in Singapore and Malaysia. This volume applies various perspectives from education theory to heritage studies in dealing with the cultural legacy and memory of such schools as situated in larger contexts of society. The book offers comprehensive practice-based analysis and reflection about the complex relationships between language acquisition, identity construction, and state formation from socio-political-cultural perspectives. It covers a broad range of aspects from identities of culture, gender, and religion, to the roles played by the state and the community in various aspects of education such as textbooks, cultural activities, and adult education, as well as the representation of culture in Chinese schools through cultural memory and literature. The readership includes academics, students and members of the public interested in the history and society of the Chinese diaspora, especially in South East Asia. This also appeals to scholars interested in a bilingual or multilingual outlook in education as well as diasporic studies.
Since 1979, Ideology and Curriculum has been a path breaking statement on the relationship between cultural and economic power in education. The new edition of this now classic text has been updated by celebrated author and activist Michael W. Apple to include a full new chapter on the book’s lasting critical agenda in the context of the contemporary conservative climate. A new substantive preface introduces the fourth edition, reflecting on earlier arguments and developments from the intervening years while a concluding interview details the author’s background and continuing efforts toward building a more equitable society. In celebration of the 40th anniversary of its publication, this highly-anticipated new edition firmly situates Ideology and Curriculum as one of the most important education titles of our time.
Education in the Global City examines education in Singapore through the critical lens of ‘manufacturing’. The book brings together two disparate fields which inform each other, education and the ‘global city’; and the book’s contributors analyse and critique the manufacturing of Singapore education and Singapore’s global city formation. The collection covers vocational education, language policies, Higher Education, English education, critical thinking, sex education, creativity, and critical feminist scholarship. Collectively, the book pries open the ideology of the manufacturing education system, and points out the tension between the nation and its ideologies, and the ‘global city’ aspirations. It also asks how education contributes to, and is shaped by, the market realities of Singapore’s global city ambitions – which are at odds with the nationalistic local agenda and priorities of nation-building. In interrupting and speaking against the prevailing (and narrow) manufacturing of education for a teleological end, in spite of Singapore’s successful nation-building, this book is an important contribution to critical education scholarship.This book was originally published as a special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.
In 2008 the first in a series of symposia established a ‘social realist’ case for ‘knowledge’ as an alternative to the relativist tendencies of the constructivist, post-structuralist and postmodernist approaches dominant in the sociology of education. The second symposium focused on curriculum, and the development of a theoretical language grounded in social realism to talk about issues of knowledge and curriculum. Finally, the third symposium brought together researchers in a broad range of contexts to build on these ideas and arguments and, with a concerted empirical focus, bring these social realist ideas and arguments into conversation with data. Knowledge, Curriculum and Equity: Social Realist Perspectives contains the work of the third symposium, where the strengths and gaps in the social realist approach are identified and where there is critical recognition of the need to incrementally extend the theories through empirical study. Fundamentally, the problem that social realism is seeking to address is about understanding the social conditions of knowledge production and exchange as well as its structuring in the curriculum and in pedagogy. The central concern is with the on-going social reproduction of inequality through schooling, and exploring whether and how foregrounding specialised knowledge and its access holds the possibility for interrupting it. This book consists of 13 chapters by different authors working in Oceania, Asia, Europe, Africa and North America. From very different vantage points the authors focus their theoretical and empirical sights on the assumptions about knowledge that underpin educational processes and the pursuit of more equitable schooling for all.