The community separation of the school system in Northern Ireland limits opportunities for daily cross-community interaction between young people. The deployment pattern of teachers is largely consistent with this divide. Pupils are therefore unlikely to be taught by a teacher from a community background other than their own. Nonetheless, recent…

This article reports on research into the influence of teachers' religious beliefs in religious education. Drawing on accounts from eleven teachers in Controlled Schools in Northern Ireland, it shows the contested space many of them occupy in relation to handling personal beliefs, teaching about diverse religions and articulating a public…

While Northern Ireland strives to build a shared society, the current reality is that everyday experiences are still shaped by division along ethno-religious lines. This is particularly pronounced in the education system, where more than 92% of pupils attend separate schools. Within the predominantly separate education system, however, exists a…

In 1910 some 1200 delegates from Protestant missionary societies came together in Edinburgh, Scotland to attend a World Missionary Conference. In preparation for this event eight commissions were established to research various topics of importance to missionary societies. Commission III was dedicated to 'Education in Relation to the…

In 1998, Byrne and McKeown examined the churches' roles in Northern Ireland's (NI) schooling system. NI was then governed by direct-rule from the UK's Westminster Parliament. The authors concluded that the desire of the Protestant churches to re-establish their influence in schools was "unlikely to succeed." This was contrasted with the…

Education was an instrument in Christian missions' and colonial powers' civilisation projects. At the same time, education was also instrumental in fostering opposition. This article approaches perceptions of education mainly from the perspective of Norwegian Lutheran missionaries in French colonial Madagascar during the 1940s. The focus is on how…

Education is a key mechanism for the restoration of inter-community relations in post-conflict societies. The Northern Ireland school system remains divided along sectarian lines. Much research has been conducted into the efficacy of initiatives developed to bring children together across this divide but there has been an absence of studies into…

Northern Ireland is now a post-conflict society but one of the legacies of the "troubles" is an education system which is defined by religious affiliation/identity. A parallel system of schools continues to exist where Catholics largely attend "maintained" schools and Protestants "controlled" or state schools. While…

There has been growing interest by British policy-makers in the importance of acknowledging the role of migrant children's background in their educational progress. Therefore, this article draws on studies of language-ethnicity and of language-religion to understand the linguistic and the religious heritage of four groups of Brazilian migrants in…

The work of the Australian mission in the southern part of Korea during the first half of the twentieth century has been a relatively undeveloped subject in scholarly research. By focusing on the educational work of the mission between 1910 and 1941, this article provides an overview of how the missionaries interacted with the Japanese colonial…

During the period under investigation (1825-1862), Egypt was a dominion of the Ottoman Empire and attracted the attention and interest of all European states that had been displaying their military and commercial superiority for a long time. In the nineteenth century, Egypt was not only destitute of schools, but had also entered a rapid…

It is generally accepted that education has a significant role to play in any society transitioning from conflict to a more peaceful dispensation. Indeed, some have argued that the education system potentially represents the single most effective agent of social change with the capacity to bridge ethnic division in conflict affected countries.…

The purpose of this article is to review four educational issues introduced by this author in previous articles (Beyer 2004, 2015) that faced the Kingdom of Hawai'i in order to investigate the educational policies taken to address these issues by the White Architects of Hawaiian education. The American Protestant missionaries, who arrived in…

Using data from the USA, the study demonstrates that an individual's completed years of schooling later in life is positively related to his/her frequency of religious attendance during youth. Using the propensity score matching technique, the study shows that this relationship is causal. This conclusion remains valid for youths of different…

Transferring education policy from one country to another, or between supranational bodies and national administrations, is common practice, and the potential benefits for educational quality and standards are evident. Despite these advantages, the dominant approaches to policy transfer have been criticized for, among other things, neglecting…