This article sheds light on a paradox in the Soviet educational landscape: the development of specialised foreign-language schools in the context of a purported egalitarian society. These schools endured, and even thrived, through the collapse of the Soviet Union. First, a historical overview for Soviet-era development of specialised-school…

This paper explores relations between literacy education, ideology and politics, based on an analysis of educational reforms during Soviet and US military occupation in North and South Korea. Following the end of the Second World War, anti-illiteracy campaigns in the two Koreas became important means of political socialisation for Koreans amid the…

Universities elsewhere have been changing its purposes, functions, roles, and pursuits in society. This study is a case study of Mongolian higher education in which institutional changes are taking place incrementally. The purpose of this study is to explore institutional isomorphism or homogenization of a case university in Mongolia in two…

In this creative article, the reader is invited into an a/r/tographic chronotope, through which the author remembers her learning and schooling experiences in the Ukrainian USSR. The purpose of remembering is to render an elusive meaning of dialogic pedagogy in the soviet compulsory schooling with a focus on the child's lived experience of…

This historiography of Hungarian higher education focuses on the evolution of academic freedom and institutional autonomy at Hungarian institutions of higher education. Through an exploration of trends in higher education policy, structure, and funding, the evolution of institutional autonomy and academic freedom provided a framework for…

This paper studies transformations in the role of higher education in Russia as represented in official Soviet and post-Soviet policy documents between the 1950s and 2013. The focus is on the categories defining the purposes and tasks of higher education in the larger context of society and economy. There is a basic dichotomy in relation to the…

The Popular Front line made the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) a more hospitable place for "brain workers." The emphasis the line placed on mass ideological and cultural struggle against fascism meant that they became important allies to be won for the working class. As the principal transmitters of ideology and culture to the…

This paper analyses the current state of student representation in Russia as deeply rooted in the institutional structure of the Soviet higher education system. The study traces the origins of existing institutional arrangements for student representation at the level of university governance and analyses how representation practices have been…

The New Social Studies movement was an effort by social scientists to reform US social studies/history curriculum at all levels during the 1960s and early 1970s. In the end, more than 50 different projects attempting to revitalise social studies were developed. Many of the projects focused on inquiry-based teaching practices and curriculum.…

This article proposes a framework within which the question as to the purposes of open universities should be examined. It argues that the question has become submerged over time through the establishment of so many open universities that have become natural elements in a higher education landscape rather than remaining radical and innovative…

This study focuses on the Soviet introduction of local studies to Ukrainian schools during the 1920s. It argues that, through their efforts at pedagogical reform, educational planners sought a fundamental re-imagining of place. The Ukrainian Commissariat of Education asked teachers and their students to engage the "productive" world…

As is well known, in the mid-twentieth century education in Russia experienced a powerful upsurge, rising to a position of leadership in the world. Interpreting this extraordinary phenomenon is vital in order to both understand the characteristics of Russia's social and historical development and to map out a strategy for the nation's long-term…

This article will examine a little known but long-standing group, the Lisle Fellowship, that endeavored to open the world to college students and foster international understanding--or "world-mindedness," as the organization's founders called it--ultimately with the goal to contribute to the ideal of world peace. It will also, in…

The essays in "Globalization on the Margins" explore the continuities and changes in Central Asian education development since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Reflecting on two decades of post-socialist transformations, they reveal that education systems in Central Asia responded to the rapidly changing political, economic, and…

During the first decade of post-socialist transformation in Eastern Europe, the majority of education reform projects focused on in-service teacher education. Governments, international agencies and non-governmental organizations prioritized various in-service teacher education programs to help teachers deal with rapid changes in schools. This has…