Politics Of Education

Non è stata ancora del tutto superata l’emergenza sanitaria determinata dalla pandemia che una nuova, terribile crisi sta squassando le condizioni della nostra vita quotidiana: mai, dalla fine della Seconda Guerra Mondiale, lo spettro di una nuova, indicibile tragedia è apparso in tutta la sua angosciosa evidenza. Non è questa la sede per entrare nel merito di eventi così diversi, ed anzi la leggerezza con la quale certi temi sono stati trattati è uno degli aspetti sui quali vorremmo soffermarci per le conseguenze che ne derivano da un punto di vista educativo. Tuttavia, non ha senso, post factum, dare sfogo, come sta avvenendo, a lamenti sui livelli dell’educazione formale (ignorando, per di più, quanto tali livelli procedano di pari passo con le esperienze di educazione informale) al cui confronto quelli di Geremia potrebbero essere scambiati per battute fra adolescenti.
Molto si dovrebbe riflettere sull’incapacità del sistema educativo di contrastare la devastazione causata dalla pandemia. E speriamo di non doverci cimentare in ragionamenti non troppo diversi in un futuro non lontano. Sarebbe necessaria una ricognizione critica alla quale recassero il loro apporto i genitori, le scuole e quanti altri soggetti siano interessati, a carattere individuale o collettivo, allo sviluppo dell’educazione. Per quel che mi riguarda, non posso che prospettare l’opportunità che tale ricognizione sia effettuata, e che rappresenti il punto di avvio per l’elaborazione e la revisione di modelli e procedure per l’educazione rivolta non solo all’infanzia e all’adolescenza, ma anche alle successive età della vita.

This article deals with the Ukrainian-Russian encounters in the field of school history education in 1990s-2010s. The theme investigates the context of the state-and nation-building processes in both countries. Three major topics are considered: history education and textbooks as a tool of civic education and citizenship building, the problem of unification and homogenization of the representations of the past in the light of citizen education, the attempts of Russia to promote a common vision of the past with neighbors, and Ukrainian responses. The major theme ends with the highlights from the most recent developments in the field of school history curriculum and textbooks in both countries in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and war of 2014-2021.

Empirical research has described how school leaders with social justice orientations investigate, understand, and address issues related to marginalization. These studies detail many of the heroic efforts of principals and their dedication, persistence, and skill. Theoretical and empirical writings have often presented social justice leadership as a “cure-all” to inequities rather than politically situated leadership orientation that in its practice is dilemma-laden. This article draws upon previous research on effective leadership as well as highlighting key aspects related to special educational policy in U.S. public schools to cultivate a more in-depth understanding of the practice of social justice leadership for inclusion. This analysis is presented to prompt a more in-depth and practice-oriented discussion, analysis, and understanding of the challenges associated with social justice leadership. Recommendations for future research and a more community-oriented and activist approach to social justice leadership are presented and justified at the conclusion of the article.

School Food Politics: The Complex Ecology of Hunger and Feeding in Schools Around the World (P. Lang, 2011) compares struggles over what at first glance appears to be benign programming to feed children. The essays in School Food Politics explore the intersections of food and politics on all six of the inhabited continents of the world. Including electoral fights over universally free school meals in Korea, nutritional reforms to school dinners in England and canteens in Australia, teachers’ and doctors’ work on school feeding in Argentina, and more, the volume provides key illustrations of the many contexts that have witnessed intense struggles defining which children will eat; why; what and how they are served; and who will pay for and prepare the food. Contributors include reformers writing from their own perspectives, from the farm-to-school program in Burlington, Vermont, to efforts to apply principles of critical pedagogy in cooking programs for urban teens, to animal rights curriculum. Later chapters shift their focus to possibilities and hope for a different future for school food, one that is friendlier to students, 'lunch ladies,' society, other creatures, and the planet.

School Food Politics won the 2012 Critics’ Choice Book Award of the American Educational Studies Association for making an outstanding contribution to scholarship in the Social Foundations of Education. See reviews in Teachers College Record and Food, Culture, & Society in the Papers section.

Svar på oppgaven: Nasjonale og internasjonale prøver i grunnskolen.
Studentene skal individuelt skrive et historisk orientert notat over oppgitt tema. Notatet skal være på maks. 6 sider.
- Redegjør i korte trekk for den historiske bakgrunnen for bruken av nasjonale og internasjonale prøver i grunnskolen.
- Hvordan brukes slike prøver i dag?
- Drøft hvordan slike prøver kan forbedre elevens læringsutbytte og hvordan slike prøver kan være til hinder for et godt læringsutbytte hos eleven.

The contemporary Left almost universally takes for granted that some form of education is a good thing. Consider the slogans of “defend public education” and “education not incarceration.” I contend that this romanticizing of education creates problems for the Left’s projects. Paraphrasing Audre Lorde, they attempt to “use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.” In this paper, looking at two theorists of modern government, Hobbes and Locke, I show how the purposes of their theories of education were tied up with proto-capitalist, counter-revolutionary reactions to anti-feudal struggles. Comparing them, I reveal how the counter-revolutionary character of education that was clear in Hobbes continues in Locke but in a more surreptitious way that sets up some of the basic elements of education as we know it today. Locke promotes education as a technology of the self for individualizing, privatizing, and de-politicizing the problem of managing the contradictions of the modernist/colonial world order. Through education’s collaboratively constructed emotional credit/debt economy, the ‘self’ is supposed to become autonomous, sovereign, and independent enough to self-govern its own boundaries. Divisions of gender, class, and race allow Locke to set up a bounded subject for the educator. Those who are excluded from this subject-form are the co-constitutive Others of education.

Il lungo percorso compiuto attraverso i molti livelli della valutazione ha toccato aspetti normativi, organizzativi e didattici dell'attività educativa. A ciascuno degli aspetti considerati corrisponde un'attività di giudizio, più o meno formalizzata, tramite la quale diventa manifesta quale sia la cultura educativa cui le scelte fanno riferimento, per ciò che riguarda sia la proposta di apprendimento rivolta agli allievi, sia i fondamenti teorici, storici e scientifici dell'attività delle scuole.

Queste riflessioni sui fenomeni involutivi che stanno investendo la capacità di scrivere di bambini e ragazzi, e che a seguire riducono il repertorio simbolico a disposizione degli adulti, è stato pubblicato in "Vita dell'infanzia", LXIV, 9-10, 2015.

Er heeft zich in de jaren negentig een wending voorgedaan in de onderwijspolitieke en onderwijsrechtelijke verhoudingen in ons land. Terwijl de overheid steeds minder voorschrijft en regelt op personeel, materieel en financieel gebied, krijgt ze meer greep op de inhoud van het onderwijs, op de leerdoelen, de leerstof en de didactiek. Illustratief zijn de invoering van de kerndoelen basisonderwijs en basisvorming, de plannen voor tussendoelen en leerlijnen en de vernieuwing van het tweede fase voortgezet onderwijs (met name het studiehuis).
De zeggenschap en de controle van de overheid over de inhoud van het funderend onderwijs nemen toe. Een bekend risico is dat het ten koste gaat van de onderwijsvrijheid. Een minder vanzelfsprekend risico is dat het ten koste gaat van de onderwijskwaliteit. Voor deze onverwachte keerzijde van overheidszorg vraagt dit boekje de aandacht.
Dat overheidszorg niet altijd goed is voor onderwijs blijkt uit onderzoek naar de totstandkoming van twee generaties kerndoelen, analyse van de huidige kerndoelen en kritische beoordeling van educaties, studiehuis en de politieke invloed van onderwijskundige modes. Alles bijeen genomen is er sprake van maatschappelijke overvraging en pedagogische ontmanteling van de school. De conclusie is: de overheid bemoeit zich te veel en te rechtstreeks met de inhoud van het onderwijs; de pedagogische professie wordt gemarginaliseerd; klassieke pedagogische principes worden veronachtzaamd.
In het laatste hoofdstuk wordt een praktisch voorstel gedaan voor verbetering van de relatie tussen enerzijds politiek en overheid en anderzijds pedagogiek en opvoeding. Institutionalisering van cultuurpedagogische discussie lijkt uitkomst te kunnen bieden.

A cent'anni dalla nascita di Aldo Visalberghi si può tentare un primo bilancio del contributo recato allo sviluppo in Italia di una cultura dell'educazione. Visalberghi fu tra quanti si impegnarono per far uscire la pedagogia italiana dalle angustie nelle quali era rimasta impaniata nella prima metà del secolo. Ma soprattutto si deve a Visalberghi aver introdotto in Italia nuove linee di ricerca, integrandone le indicazioni con le esigenze emergenti dalle trasformazioni politiche e sociali in atto. C'è stato, dal punto di vista dello sviluppo della conoscenza educativa, un decennio aureo, che ha visto profilarsi nuove interpretazioni, anche attraverso un inconsueto impegno in progetti di ricerca internazionale. Ed è su tale decennio aureo che si soffermeranno i contributi che saranno proposti nell'incontro di cui qui si presenta il programma.

Main ethnomusicological theories relate traditional songs to ethnicities, and these ethnicities are used as elements of political claim. The contribution of this investigation is the analysis of these politicized relations in the present context and in the school framework. This study is based on the existence of a taxonomical paradigm defined by a hegemonic power group. This paradigm considers some ethnicities that are supported on their corresponding patrimonies which have been created so as to authenticate them. Once the power group realizes that his hegemony is at risk, then it stimulates part of his patrimony to guarantee his preeminence. An illustrative case is analyzed: the political activation of the traditional song in the Catalan school. The results permit to stress the great patrimonial value of these songs and the importance of the social context in the educational policy.This type of investigation pretends to clarify the relations between politics, culture and education; it pretends to show the creation play of ethnicities in the present school; it pretends to know the policy hidden behind pedagogy. These problems are now in the agenda of the educational anthropology.

Las principales teorías etnomusicológicas relacionan las canciones tradicionales con las etnicidades, unas etnicidades que son utilizadas como elementos de reivindicación política. La aportación de esta investigación es el análisis de esas relaciones politizadas, en el contexto actual y dentro del marco escolar. El presente estudio se fundamenta en la existencia de un paradigma taxonómico definido por un grupo de poder hegemónico. Ese paradigma contempla unas etnicidades que se sostienen en sus patrimonios correspondientes; unos patrimonios que se han creado con el fin de legitimarlas. Cuando
el grupo de poder ve peligrar su hegemonía, activa parte de su patrimonio para asegurar su preeminencia. Se analiza un caso ilustrativo: la activación política de la canción tradicional en la escuela catalana. Los resultados permiten resaltar el gran valor patrimonial de esas canciones y la importancia del contexto social en la política educativa. Este tipo de investigación pretende esclarecer las relaciones entre política, cultura y educación; pretende mostrar el juego de creación de etnicidades en la escuela actual; pretende conocer la política que hay detrás de la pedagogía. Unas problemáticas que la antropología de la educación actualmente tiene sobre la mesa.

Politics of Integration of Cultural Heritage in Education
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The first study of this Issue was conducted by Dr. Saeed Al-Masri under the title “Policies of integration of cultural heritage in education”. This study is an attempt to identify the nature of the gap between the cultural heritage and the present in the Arab world. This gap manifests itself in the dissimilarity and the dual relationship between the policies of the cultural heritage and those of the education. The study also focuses on how to deal with this relationship through cultural policies able to integrate the heritage in the education system and by analyzing the nature, the historical roots and the factors that contribute to the aggravation of the situation. Moreover, it introduces alternatives to the policies of integration of cultural heritage in education.
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  عندما أطلقت اليونسكو دعوات متكررة منذ السبعينيات من القرن الماضى لضرورة تعزيز العلاقة بين التراث الثقافى والتعليم كان ذلك إدراكا منها لأهمية الدور الذى يلعبه التعليم فى المحافظة على التراث الثقافى من التهديدات التى يتعرض لها. وإذا كان التراث الثقافى يعيد إنتاج نفسه بصورة مستمرة بآليات متعددة تقوم على التعلم سواء بالحذف أو الإضافة ، فما المغزى الحقيقى من هذه الدعوات ؟ من الواضح أن الدعوة لحماية التراث كانت انعكاسا للقلق العميق لدى كثير من الشعوب الغربية على وحدة النسيج الاجتماعى والخوف من أن تؤدى الصراعات بين الجماعات العرقية إلى تفكك هذه المجتمعات . فالقلق على التفكك فى الوقت الحاضر نابع من إهمال لتركة الماضى من التراث الثقافى وعدم حسم الموقف منه . ومن ثم فإن دعوة الحفاظ على التراث الثقافى من خلال التعليم تعبر عن سياسة للتعايش والتسامح والتفاعل بين الثقافات المتعددة وكذلك أيضا بين الماضى والحاضر باعتبارها السبيل الوحيد للعبور نحو مستقبل أفضل. وقد وجدت هذه الدعوة صداها الواسع فى كثير من المجتمعات الغربية وطُرحت بشأنها مشروعات وبرامج ومبادرات متنوعة ومشروعات على الأجندة الثقافية والتنموية للحكومات الغربية .
غير أن هذه الدعوة تواجه تعثرا حقيقيا فى قبولها والتفاعل الإيجابى معها من جانب كثير من الدول النامية التى تعانى من تحديات مرتبطة بالتنوع الثقافى وبصفة خاصة البلدان العربية. ويبدو أن كثير من البلدان العربية تشهد تحديات بصورة أو بأخرى نابعة من انقسامات عرقية ودينية ومذهبية وطائفية . ومع ذلك فإن السياسات الثقافية والتعليمية الرسمية العربية تنكر هذا التنوع الثقافى رغم حدة الصراعات الناشئة عنه والتى يتم قمعها والتعتيم عليها بصورة مستمرة . ولا توجد سياسات ثقافية لاحترام التنوع داخل خريطة الاهتمام الرسمى بالتراث الثقافى ولاتوجد سياسات تعليمية رسمية أيضا قابلة للتفاعل الإيجابى والمتوازن مع تنوع  الجماعات وتنوع التراث الثقافى المرتبط بها . هذا على الرغم من وجود اهتمامات حكومية وأهلية متنوعة بالتراث الثقافى فى مختلف البلدان العربية . إلا أن زاوية الاهتمام الرسمى السائدة منصبة على اهتمام شكلى ببعض عناصر التراث دون غيرها و لأغراض احتفالية أو سياحية.  كما أن الاهتمام الرسمى بدراسة التراث الثقافى فى مؤسسات التعليم ما زال محدوداً وقاصراً وأغلب الجهود فى هذا الشأن ذات طابع فردى وتتعلق بخيارات أفراد أكثر من كونها سياسات لمؤسسات حكومية. فى مقابل ذلك فإن عناصر من التراث ذات طابع إسلامى تجد الطريق ممهدا لها للتوغل بقوة فى بعض مقررات التعليم  بموجب سيطرة بعض مظاهر التعليم الدينى على مؤسسات التعليم ذات الطابع المدنى. يأتى ذلك على حساب النظرة المتوانة لعناصر التراث الثقافى المختلفة وعلى فرص الاندماج الاجتماعى بين الفئات والجماعات المتباينة عرقيا ودينيا ومذهبيا. 
هذا يعنى أن هناك تباين كبير بين ما تهدف إليه السياسات الثقافية والتعليمية العربية  من ناحية وأوضاع الإنقسام الاجتماعى والثقافى الراهنة داخل المجتمعات العربية من ناحية أخرى . وقد انعكس ذلك سلبا على اتساع الفجوة العميقة بين الماضى والحاضر والتى تتجلى فى تباعد وازدواج العلاقة بين سياسات التراث الثقافى وسياسات التعليم . وعلى ضوء ذلك تسعى هذه الدراسة إلى التعرف على طبيعة هذه الفجوة وكيفية مواجهتها عبر سياسات ثقافية قادرة على إدماج التراث فى التعليم  وذلك من خلال عرض لطبيعة الفجوة الراهنة بين التعليم والتراث الثقافى وجذورها التاريخية والعوامل التى ساهمت فى تفاقمها . يلى ذلك طرح أهم بدائل سياسات دمج التراث الثقافى فى العملية التعليمية  وفقا لزوايا النظر المختلفة للتعليم ولما يمكن أن تتجه إليه المسارات المحتملة للتنمية والاستثمار البشرى فى التعليم بالمنطقة العربية..

There has been a continuous attack on education, particularly alternative, progressive, democratic and liberatory forms of education that seek social justice and an equality of opportunity for all to develop.  In the UK this has led to an attack on educators as 'the enemies of promise' by the Secretary of State for Education.  However, what is being proposed by policy makers are the old 'know your station in life' strategies of managing inequality.  These have always resulted in a violation of the intelligence of people.

Bu çalışmanın amacı, vakıf üniversitelerinde okuyan öğrencilerin “vakıf üniversitesi öğrencisi” olmaya dair açıklamalarının incelenmesidir. Bu amaçla, vakıf üniversitelerinde okumakta olan öğrencilerle derinlemesine görüşmeler yapılmış ve öğrencilerin açıklamalarına kaynaklık eden söylemlere bakılmıştır. Çalışma kapsamında; çoğunluğu 20’li yaşlarda olmakla birlikte, 18-45 yaş aralığında 19 vakıf üniversitesi öğrencisi ile görüşülmüştür; 12 öğrenci ile bireysel görüşme yapılmış, diğerleriyle de 2 ayrı odak grup görüşmesi yapılmıştır. Görüşmeler yarı-yapılandırılmış tarzda yürütülmüş ve ses kayıt cihazı ile kaydedilmiştir. Kaydedilen görüşmeler, söylem analizi tekniği ile analiz edilmek üzere yazıya dökülmüştür. Görüşmelerin analizi sonucunda; katılımcıların açıklamalarının “vakıf üniversitesine dair söylemler” ve “vakıf üniversitesi öğrencisi olmaya dair söylemler” şeklinde iki başlık altında toplandığı görülmüştür. Vakıf üniversitesine dair söylemler başlığı altında iki temaya ulaşılmıştır; “eğitim kalitesi” ve “erişim kolaylığı”. Benzer şekilde, vakıf üniversitesi öğrencisi olmaya dair söylemler başlığı altında da iki farklı temaya ulaşılmıştır; “başarısız/yetersiz öğrenci” ve “ayrıcalıklı/zengin öğrenci”. Ayrıca katılımcıların açıklamalarında “kendini olumsuzlamaya karşı kendini eşitleme” şeklinde bir ideolojik ikilemin söz konusu olduğu görülmüştür. Analiz sonuçları bir bütün olarak ele alındığında, “vakıf üniversitesi”nin ve “vakıf üniversitesi öğrencisi”nin öncelikle olumsuz bir şekilde anlamlandırıldığı görülmektedir. Her ne kadar vakıf üniversitelerinin bazı açılardan olumlu yönleri veya avantajları olduğu söylense de özellikle “eğitimin kalitesi” ve “akademisyenlerin niteliği” bakımından devlet üniversitelerine kıyasla daha olumsuz değerlendirildiği; bununla bağlantılı şekilde vakıf üniversitesi öğrencisinin de devlet üniversitesi öğrencisine göre daha “başarısız/yetersiz” olarak konumlandırıldığı söylenebilir.
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EN: The aim of this study is to examine the explanations of students studying in a private (foundation) university on being a “private university student”. Within this scope, in-depth individual and focus group interviews were conducted with 19 students from different private universities so as to find out the discursive resources of their explanations. Interviews were recorded and then transcribed. Interview texts were analyzed through discourse analysis. As a result of the analysis, the explanations of the participants were separated into two main categories; “discourses on the private university” and “discourses on being a private university student”. Within the first category, two themes were obtained; “the quality of education” and “accessibility”. Within the second category, two themes were obtained; “unsuccessful/insufficient student” and “privileged/wealthy student”. Additionally, a typical ideological dilemma was seen in the explanations of the participants; “self-negation versus self-equalization”. The results of the study manifest that the participants explain “the private university” and “being a private university student” within a negative framework. Even though some advantages of private universities were mentioned, they were mostly described more negatively than public universities with regard to “the quality of education and academicians”. Relatedly, private university students were described as “unsuccessful/insufficient students” in comparison with public university students.

Pressured by the European Commission and the European Central Bank, governments across Europe have adopted policies which demand that their own populations pay the price for the banking failures of 2008. Much more is involved here than a clampdown on spending - savage though that often is. For governments of right and centre-left, the financial crisis presents an opportunity to reshape social and educational provision. The gains made after 1945, or after the fall of the dictatorships in Southern Europe in the 1970s, are threatened more than ever.

Featuring contributions from England, France, Greece, Italy and Spain - as well as overviews of EU policy, this book brings together, as no other work has yet done, a critical analysis of education policy across the continent, with an account of the struggles that have broken out against it.

Kankor is a national university entrance examination in Afghanistan. All
students from across Afghanistan at the end of their secondary school in case of wishing to enter public universities, free of cost, are required to take the Kankor examination. Every year on average 200,000 students from 34 provinces of Afghanistan attend the Kankor examination between February and April. In Afghanistan, Kankor examination is the only way through which Ministry of Higher Education, the responsible entity for administering Kankor examination, can evaluate secondary school graduates to determine whether they are capable to undertake undergraduate courses at higher education institutions. The findings of this paper demonstrate that the current Kankor examination system does not help university entrants obtain admission in their desired disciplines. Moreover, the findings echo that not considering students’
interests in giving admission to higher education institutions leads to many other challenges for students once they enter universities such as (a) lack of preparation for the admitted major, (b) increasing dropouts, and (c) low academic performance. Hence, the current study aims to discover the existing issues with the current Kankor examination in Afghanistan and propose a new Kankor examination model for Afghanistan’s Ministry of Higher Education.

O presente trabalho foi apresentado em 26 de agosto de 2015, no  III Encontro da Associação Nacional de Pesquisa em Financiamento da Educação - FINEDUCA, em Gramado/RS.
O artigo traz resultados parciais de pesquisa de pós-graduação em educação (mestrado) sobre gestão financeira escolar e os recursos financeiros descentralizados que são transferidos diretamente às escolas públicas municipais de São Paulo. O foco da pesquisa é investigar sobre os programas e procedimentos que transferem recursos financeiros às escolas da rede municipal de ensino de São Paulo de forma descentralizada, verificando suas origens, procedimentos legais, montantes e destinos.
O artigo apresentará uma pequena introdução aos aspectos teóricos fundamentais que norteiam a pesquisa, principalmente acerca da relação entre os recursos financeiros descentralizados transferidos às escolas públicas e a gestão democrática da escola. Posteriormente, são apresentados alguns dos resultados parciais trazidos pela dimensão empírica da pesquisa. Primeiro, foca-se nos aspectos financeiro-legais do estudo, trazendo as características principais de cada um dos programas que transferem recursos financeiros às escolas municipais de São Paulo (Programa Dinheiro Direto na Escola, PDDE, Programa de Transferência de Recursos Financeiros, PTRF e Verba de Adiantamento). Em seguida, apresentam-se dados e informações levantados a partir de pesquisa em campo, realizada em quatro escolas municipais de São Paulo, de diferentes modalidades de ensino, trazendo quadros síntese de análise sobre os montantes e as aplicações anuais desta seleção de escolas dentre o período de 2007 a 2013, com o objetivo de contribuir, finalmente, para o debate sobre o aporte adequado dos recursos financeiros destinados à escola pública.

Through an educational reading of Édouard Glissant and Peter Sloterdijk, this article draws out and develops latent pedagogical philosophies that bear distinct relationships to colonialism and struggles against and beyond colonialism. In particular, it identifies two related educational philosophies that propel colonization and, in turn, proposes a theory of errant learning that might undergird decolonization. It focuses on Glissant's minor remarks about different conceptions of understanding in order to identify the grasping drive (and its relationship to opacity and transparency) as the educational foundation of the colonizing apparatus. After articulating the other form of understanding he offers, giving-on-and-with (which turns away from enclosures and opens into Relation), I point to a potential contradiction in this division as it relates to his overall project. By freeing grasping from the grasping drive, I reconfigure the relationship between grasping and giving-on-and-with in a way that allows for certain kinds of enclosures. This introduces the question of peda-gogical form, a question explored in Sloterdijk's sphereological investigations. Reading the colonizing phase of globalization through Sloterdijk's notion of lordly imagining-which I link with the grasping drive-the article draws out how different educational processes produce different kinds of spheres. Finally, it articulates errant learning as a pneumatic process of grasping and giving-on-and-with that values opacity over transparency to produce foam formations with attention to the history of inequality and injury through immune deprivation.

Vorrei interpretare aspetti della realtà attuale dell'educazione nel modo che, a mio giudizio, sarebbe stato proprio di Aldo Visalberghi. È un intento non facile, e probabilmente non privo di presunzione, ma mi sostiene nel mio proposito l'esperienza acquisita in una frequentazione che è durata 45 anni, e cioè dal 1962, quando Visalberghi fu chiamato alla Cattedra di Pedagogia della Facoltà di Lettere dell'Università di Roma ed io iniziavo i miei studi in quella sede, e il 2007, quando ci lasciò, all'età di 87 anni. Per cominciare, credo che Aldo Visalberghi non avrebbe per niente gradito il manifestarsi nel confronto educativo di atteggiamenti come quelli che periodicamente affiorano nei mezzi di comunicazione, e dei quali il minimo che possa dirsi è che si ripetono argomenti ai quali non corrisponde mai un'interpretazione più meditata. Continuiamo, invece, a subire la stanca ripetizione degli stessi luoghi comuni che un inteprete illuminato come Visalberghi aveva già respinto al loro primo apparire, agli inizi degli anni Settanta. Mi riferisco alle banalità sulla valutazione che accompagnano la diffusione di dati rilevati in ricognizioni sul campo, più o meno estese. Agli inizi tali ricognizioni avevano un intento fondamentalmente conoscitivo, e da esse ci si proponeva di trarre argomenti per migliorare la proposta di educazione scolastica.

John White’s new interdisciplinary study of private schools in Britain asks if there are good reasons for their continued existence. Drawing on philosophical, historical and recent policy data, it questions well-known objections to them. Its central concern is the danger they pose to a democratic society: their traditional dominion over leadership positions in sphere after sphere still continues. In recent years they have benefited from a deliberate blurring of the divide between the concepts of private and public education – most notably via the academies programme in England. Their growing strength has to be seen against the wider background of a single hierarchical system. Private schools and top state schools are at the apex of a new pyramid created by examination-focused curricula, league tables and parent choice.The book ends with proposals for abolishing private schools or curbing their power.

Compared to the few public higher education institutions in the prewar era, postwar Somalia boasts a large number of academic institutions at the tertiary level, mainly as privately owned universities. Although these community-initiated academic establishments are making tremendous contributions to the higher education sector, particularly in the absence of an effective national government, one can argue that much still remains at stake in terms of evaluation and quality assurance, key elements necessary for institutional accreditation and acceptance of credentials by other educational establishments issuing the same level of certificates. In this essay we aim to provide an overview discussion of the trends of higher education in Somalia and the way forward for newly emerged institutions, which have taken the bold initiative of changing the landscape of Somalia’s higher education.

As we move to discuss the nature of development targets post 2015, it is timely to consider what lessons can be learnt from 50 years of experiences of attempts to link education and development in Africa. This paper offers a historical account of key themes in African education and development and raises questions particularly about who sets targets and priorities and for whom.

This article addresses the paradoxical nature of 'pedagogic governance' (Singh 2015), developed from Bernstein's 'pedagogic device', that is, the use of pedagogic means (including knowledge) to govern entire populations in a 'totally pedagogised society'. While knowledge structures have received extensive coverage, not much attention has been given to the tensions between/within the distribution and evaluation of curricular knowledge. Through Derrida, I elaborate on the nature of distributive rules, theorising why a weakly framed curriculum is always open to transgression, that is, the 'potential discursive gap'. However, the subversive power of knowledge is hamstrung by the evaluative rules through high-stakes public assessment and legal-juridical regulations, over which the state is attempting to wield greater influence. Constant struggles between distributive and evaluative powers entail the paradox of pedagogic (mis)governance. To illustrate my argument, this article draws on the politics of curriculum reform in postcolonial Hong Kong as an example.

Although a great paucity exists in scholarly studies on education in Somalia, the scarcity is more evident in the English studies area, particularly English as a Second Language (ESL) or English as a Foreign Language (EFL) (used interchangeably in this study), where almost none had existed until Mohamed Eno's MA TESOL Dissertation in 2005 and his recent article in the Journal of Somali Studies in 2017. Influenced by both the paucity and the latter study in 2017 1 , which recommended further examination of ESL/EFL area studies, this research investigates EFL students' perceptions of what they consider as more motivating or most motivating skill among the four second language acquisition (SLA) skills of reading, listening, speaking and writing. 2 Consequently, the results reveal that learners do not perceive more listening as a very motivating factor compared to more speaking, identified as the most motivating skill and ahead of more writing in the overall ratings. With very low results on the whole, more reading, on the other hand, is much below both speaking and writing in significance, though ahead of listening as a potential motivator. Interestingly, the findings also reveal persistent learner misunderstanding of the interlinkedness of the four skills, with a misperception that acquisition of one skill is independent of the others, as captured from an analysis of the vagaries in their responses.

While the theoretical framework of this chapter is preserved from our earlier article published in a special edition of Canadian Ethnic Studies (Galczynski, Tsagkaraki, & Ghosh, 2012), all of the media reports included previously have been replaced with more recent news stories — thus adhering to the authors’ commitment to drawing on “current” events, as well as illustrating the regularity with which news media is founded upon multicultural themes. As in our previous work, this chapter deconstructs six Canadian- and American-based news stories, allowing us to continue exploring the politics of difference and to further unpack the concept of multiculturalism within the classroom.