One way that people learn to recognize themselves as members of a nation-state is by participating in the ritual of a national census. In the United States acquaintance with such enumerations is cultivated during childhood by the federal government's "Census in Schools" (CIS) program, which distributes a variety of educational materials…

Democratisation is an important component of current globalisation trends, and education is commonly thought to lead to greater democratisation. Thus, education holds a prestigious place in political development discourses. Are policies that promote this belief grounded in research-based evidence, or simply the propagation of institutionalized…

The literature on school commercialism, despite a number of successes in battling advertising and marketing in schools, has often seemed to only scratch the surface of corporatization of K-12 education. While condemning corporations who seek to sell brand-name products to kids in schools is a relatively straightforward matter, critiquing corporate…

This project offers a close look into the meaning-making practices of the Bulgarian socialist state with regard to the conception and enactment of childhood. Held for the first time in 1979, on occasion of the UN declared "International Year of the Child", the International Children's Assembly "Banner of Peace" emerges as a…

The social studies profession has always been at its weakest in dealing with the analysis of racism and class (Ladson-Billings, 2003; Marshall, 2001), and the new technocratic atmosphere and discourse generated by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) will serve to make such analysis completely absent, despite the rhetoric of the National Council of the…

Teachers in the English and Welsh State education system have experienced a changing and turbulent relationship with the State in recent decades. This article adopts a historical analysis and argues that the concept of "partnership" is key to understanding the relationship between teachers and the State in the period since the Second…

The purpose of this paper is to describe the Hong Kong (HK) school curriculum, especially the general curriculum for civic education and other social subjects, in relation to the political events of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, the 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident, and the return of HK's sovereignty from the United Kingdom (UK) to the…

The author begins this article by suggesting that in the United States late 20th century immigration patterns have been perceived by some who consider themselves American natives because they were born in the country (even though their ancestors are of European stock) as threatening to soften the glue that preserves their vision of the right and…

According to the "fragmentation objection" to multiculturalism, practices of cultural recognition undermine political stability, and this counts as a reason to be sceptical about the public recognition of minority cultures, as well as about multiculturalism construed more broadly as a public policy. Civic education programmes, designed to promote…

This book argues that schools were a driving force in the formation of social, political, and financial capital during the market revolution and capitalist transition of the early republican era. Grounded in an intensive study of schooling in the Genesee Valley region of upstate New York, it traces early sources of funding and support for…

We raise questions about young people's participation in light of findings from a project ("Democracy through Citizenship") funded by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Limited, and managed by the Institute for Citizenship. Following a six-month feasibility study the project took place over a three-year period in one local authority in the…

Counselor educators can utilize the ideas of philosopher Michel Foucault in preparing preservice school counselors for their work with K-12 students in public schools. The Foucaultian ideas of "governmentality," "technologies of domination," "received truths," "power/knowledge," "discontinuity," and "archaeology" can contribute to students'…

As a participant-observer, the author relates observations, interviews, and surveys from her experience in a Cuban Escuela al Campo ("School to the Countryside," or EAC) camp located on a collective farm outside of the city of Havana. The Pioneers, the youth section of the official Cuban Communist Party, organize the EAC program…

Based on Foucault's discourse on freedom and empowerment, this article addresses his understanding of power and knowledge. By critically examining the negative impact of the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001" on education, the author discusses the transformative power of Foucault's pedagogy for educational reform in which students,…

This article is concerned with theorizing a curricular response to what has become known in Australia as the "history wars" (Macintyre & Clark, 2003). The central debate in the history wars is over the representation of the colonization of Australia. Because History curriculum serves as an apparatus for the social (re)production of…