Advocacy From the Ground Up

The history of education in the United States abounds with double themes and purposes for education: schooling for democratic citizenship and schooling for second-class citizenship. Although African Americans encountered significant legal barriers and threats of death while trying to obtain an education, their yearning for knowledge and opportunities served as a catalyst for education advocacy in their communities. In spite of various obstacles, researchers posit that African Americans erupted from slavery with a philosophy of education and perseverance that served as a precursor to the establishment of advocacy in education that would serve their needs and provide hope for a better education system. As a result, African Americans erupted from slavery with a philosophy of education and perseverance that served as a precursor to the establishment of universal schooling that would serve their needs and provide hope for a better life.

Colonization, Education, and the Formation of Moral Character: Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s A Letter from Sydney

Edward Gibbon Wakefield proposed a scheme of “systematic colonization” that he claimed would guarantee the formation of civilized moral character in settler societies at the same time as it reproduced imperial class relations. The scheme, which was first hatched after Wakefield read Robert Gourlay’s A Statistical Account of Upper Canada, inverted the dominant understanding of the relation between school and society. Wakefield claimed that without systematic colonization, universal schooling would be dangerous and demoralizing. Wakefield intervened in contemporary debate about welfare reform and population growth, opposing attempts to enforce celibacy on poor women and arguing that free enjoyment of “animal liberty” made women both moral and beautiful.

La Situation Des Enfants En Dehors Du Systeme Scolaire En Côte d’Ivoire

One of the goals of Education for All (EFA) was to ensure that by 2015 children, specifically girls, vulnerable children and those belonging to ethnic minorities, have access to compulsory and free quality primary education and follow it to completion. However, at the end of 2015, Ivory Coast had not been able to achieve the objectives set, particularly the universal schooling of children and adolescents. The country faces many constraints related to its education system, notably school exclusion. The problem of access and maintenance of children in the system, whether they relate to the demand for or supply of education, remain important. The 2002 political crisis has exacerbated the obstacles to children's schooling because of the massive displacement of populations and the lack of infrastructures. What are the main factors behind school exclusion? how many children and adolescents are out of school? what are the economic implications? To answer these questions, we rely on data from the national survey of out of school children and adolescents conducted in 2015. The study reveals that 1,550,586 children aged 3-5; 1,123,674 children aged 6-11, 797 137 of 12-15 years are out of the school system. In order to achieve economic emergence, the country must imperatively address the problem of access to education with the utmost speed.

Conclusion

This chapter contains summary themes. First, it shows that the material side of hinmin life was excruciating, marked by inadequate income and terrible living conditions. Second, it argues that at the mental and spiritual level, hinmin felt like outsiders, a fact reinforced by the slums where many of them lived and their exclusion from institutions such as the schools. At the same time, it shows that they identified with modern society and sought to be part of it: they built it, they took part in city life, and they were political activists. The third section looks at how contemporary poverty differs from late-Meiji poverty, noting the absence today of slums and the presence of universal schooling, a welfare system, and a widespread belief in equality. A concluding section argues that hinmin were essentially “ordinary” human beings placed in extraordinary circumstances.

Jan Amos Comenius

Jan Amos Comenius (b. 1592) is widely recognized as a pivotal figure in the history of educational thought. Living during a period of great turmoil he promoted universal schooling as the means to engineer a perfectly harmonious world. His argument turned upon claims to scientific knowledge and a didactic method that could instill truth in all minds. As the ever expanding scholarship on Comenius demonstrates, many still find inspiration in this visionary project. But Comenius’ work must be read in the context of Early Modern thought. Convinced that life was situated in the divinely crafted cosmos pictured in the Book of Genesis, his overarching goal was to restore “the image of God in man” and realize the Golden Age depicted in prophecy. The school was to be a workshop for the reformation of mankind, a place to manufacture of right thinking and right acting individuals. I explore these epistemological and pedagogic arguments and demonstrate their role in his hugely successful Latin primer, Orbis pictus (1658). Comenius, I conclude, was a revolutionary thinker who married subtle observations about the process of learning with sophisticated instructional practices. However, given current views about human nature and the social good, these principles cannot be applied uncritically to contemporary educational problems.

Great projects and crude realities

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the circumstances that have conditioned the development of education in Spain from the enlightenment to the present day. Design/methodology/approach – Multidisciplinary scientific approach that combines the interpretation of the legal texts with the revision of the doctrinal and theoretical contributions made on the issue. Findings – From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the history of education in Spain has been marked by constant fluctuations between the reactionary instincts, principally maintained by the Catholic Church and the conservative social classes, and the progressive experiments, driven by the enlightened and the liberals first, and the republicans and the socialists later. As a consequence of that, the fight for finishing with illiteracy and guaranteeing universal schooling underwent permanent advances and retreats, preventing from an effective modernization of the Spanish educative system. On the one hand, renewal projects promoted by teachers and pedagogues were inevitably criticized by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, obsessed with the idea of preserving the influence of religion on the schools. On the other hand, successive governments were weak in implementing an educational policy which could place Spain at the level of the other European and occidental nations. Originality/value – At the dawn of the twenty-first century, although the country has overcome a good part of its centuries-old backwardness, increasing economic difficulties and old ideological splits keep hampering the quality of teaching, gripped by neoliberal policies which undermine the right to education for all. The reading of this paper offers various historical clues to understand this process.

The Place of Religion in Public Life: School Ethos as a Lens on Society

The place of religion in the English education system has always been an issue of debate, ever since the establishment of universal schooling around the turn of the 20th Century. Such questions have often focused on the extent to which religion should be viewed as a public or private affair, and hence whether or not it should have a role in state schooling. This article presents qualitative research that examines the role of religion in the ethos of two different schooling models and the associated construction of state institutional space and home/civic space in each. Drawing on Davie’s (2007) concept of ‘vicarious religion’, the article highlights the continued presence of certain types of religious and spiritual manifestations in the public sphere. In so doing, it contributes to wider debates about secularization and the role of religion in modern liberal democracies.

Stalin's populism and the accidental creation of Russian national identity

This article argues that the formation of a mass sense of Russian national identity was a recent, contingent event that first began to take shape under Stalin. Surveying the new literature on Russian nationalism, it contends that elite expressions of “Russianness” and bureaucratic proclamations of “official nationality” or russification should not be conflated with the advent of a truly mass sense of grassroots identity. Borrowing from an array of theorists, it argues that such a sense of identity only becomes possible after the establishment of necessary social institutions – universal schooling, a modern army, etc. Inasmuch as these institutions come into being only after the formation of the Soviet Union, this article focuses on how a mass sense of Russian national identity began to form under a rapid and unpredictable series of ideological shifts that occurred during the Stalinist 1930s and 1940s. This article's major contribution is its description of this development as not only contingent, but accidental. Drawing a clear line between russocentric propaganda and full-blown Russian nationalism, it argues that the ideological initiatives that precipitated mass identity formation in the USSR were populist rather than nationalist. In this sense, Stalinism has much more in common with Perónism than it does with truly national regimes.

Benthamites and Lancasterians—The Relationship between the followers of Bentham and the British and Foreign School Society during the early years of Popular Education

Much has been written about the Benthamite theories of education and their debt to monitorialism. Bentham himself, in Chrestomathia, based his blueprint for the schools of the future on the use of monitors, and James Mill, in his various articles on education, envisaged universal schooling within a monitorial framework. In more recent times, scholars, such as Burston, have discussed the influence of the theory of mutual instruction on Utilitarian educational thought. Yet in all this output, little attention has been given to relations between Benthamites and Joseph Lancaster, one of the foremost practical exponents of monitorial teaching in the early nineteenth century nor to the organization in Southwark which perpetuated his methods. When Lancaster himself has been referred to, it has usually been in unfavourable terms. Bentham expressed his contempt for the ‘self-styled Quaker’, who ‘so notoriously and scandalously abused’ his early reputation as a successful schoolmaster. Francis Place, abandoning his early enthusiasm for Lancaster, decided that he was ‘adapted to the teaching in the school and to nothing else’ and became ‘mischievous, ridiculous and childish’ after he was ‘caressed by the great’. Halévy summed him up as ‘a pure madman’.