The Education for All and Millennium Development Goals commit national governments, international agencies and civil society to ensure that all children are provided with basic education. In South Africa this would mean full attendance in Grades (1-9). The achievement of universal primary education and gender equity across low-income countries are…

This article is an initial attempt to illustrate how patterns of academic mobility in the history of universities have been framed by the international politics of particular time periods. The article briefly looks at "the medieval period" and then at the emergent colonial and nationalist periods, including the ways that institutions as…

Since their political reorientation that started in the late 1980s, the Baltic states have experienced profound social reforms to rebuild their democratizing societies. Education has featured as a key vehicle to this transformation process of overcoming the limitations of the Soviet past. National legislative frameworks were therefore soon…

Lifelong learning has become a (still) increasingly popular slogan in the field of EU educational policy. Embedded in an international and historical account of the discourse on lifelong learning since the 1970s, this paper describes how lifelong learning has emerged as the central strategy in EU education and training policy, and provides a…

This article examines the resurgence in popularity of character education in the USA and Canada. It links this renewed interest to insecurities about academic achievement, economic competitiveness, civic engagement, personal safety, moral decline, and the loss of a common culture. Conceptualising policy as rhetoric, the article shows how character…

The EU's lifelong learning policy has emerged as an overarching educational reform policy intended to address a wide range of issues, including education, employment and competitiveness. The question has been raised as to whether the resulting policy is merely a catch-all concept that can be applied to any needs or whether it is underpinned by a…

In this paper we examine state and indigenous education in Bolivia. Focusing on debates about the hidden curriculum, we conceptualize the school as a political space where tensions between the overlapping jurisdictional powers of the hispanicizing state and indigenous authorities are played out. Our analysis of these tensions highlights the…

This paper describes three multigrade school reforms in Latin America: (1) Colombia's "Escuela Nueva", (2) Guatemala's "Nueva Escuela Unitaria", and (3) Chile's MECE-Rural. Each reform endowed primary teachers and students with special training and instructional materials, and encouraged new kinds of instruction in rural…

To what degree are nations "rewriting" citizenship by expanding discussions of human rights, diversity and cultural pluralism in modern civic education, and what explains variation between countries? This study addresses these issues by analysing the intended content of civic education in Costa Rica and Argentina. Over time, civic…

Since Independence in 1963, Kenya has launched three Free Primary Education programmes: the first in 1974, the second in 1979 and the most recent in 2003. Using historical data, this paper first outlines each initiative in turn, and discusses why, in the case of the earlier initiatives, impressive initial gains in improved access proved difficult…

It is argued that the ambitious programme "Education for All", launched by UNESCO, could be seriously undermined by its reliance upon the achievement of numerical "targets". Evidence from existing attempts by countries to impose educational targets reveals undesirable side-effects and distortions of educational systems. The paper explores some of…

This article traces the construction of the educational dimension of the global development agenda over the period 1990 to 2006. It argues that the multilateral agencies, and notably the World Bank, UNICEF, UNESCO and UNDP, played vital roles in designing the architecture of this world agenda, supported at a key stage by the Development Assistance…

This paper explores how African learners and educators work with difference and diversity in schooling populations. Using a Ghanaian case study the paper offers lessons on/about how local discourses relating to "inclusivity and nation building", "minority" and "difference" can inform debates about educational change…

For the past 10 years the Ministry of Education of Mongolia has periodically oscillated between decentralization and recentralization policies. On paper, it has consistently and enthusiastically subscribed to decentralization, but in practice has given these policies low priority. This study attempts to explain the discrepancies between policy…

The absolute priority given by UNESCO to the promotion of universal literacy is understood as a key policy driver shaping the Organization since its inception in 1946. Grounded in human rights, the commitment has taken concrete form in many and diverse ways, but it is as a shaper of ideas that UNESCO's overall contribution is best judged. In…