Since the late 1970s, international education has steadily gained in popularity in China. An emerging middle class seeks to strengthen its position in China's rapidly stratifying society under its socialist market economy with the shift from wealth creation for all to wealth concentration for a few. Previously, a foreign qualification was…

Skill is a social construct that assumes different meanings in particular historical circumstances. This paper explains how the dominant concept of skill has shifted in twentieth-century Australia from being job- and content-specific to a more generic view (embracing cognitive, technical, and operational, social, and affective skills) that…

Implicit in the human capital approach of 20th-century educational rhetoric in Australia was the belief that schools imparted vocationally useful cognitive skills beyond basic literacy and numeracy. These skills were believed to be transferable to the workplace and to increase the productivity of the individual to the benefit of society. For…