Who are the satisfied South Africans 10 years into democracy? How do material factors contribute to their life satisfaction? These are the questions addressed in this paper. Earlier South African research has consistently found a close positive relationship between life satisfaction and material standards of living in the apartheid and…

The steps that a country goes through in passing from an underdeveloped to a modern nation are discussed. (CK)

This monograph examines the language planning situation in Sri Lanka with particular emphasis on the planning of Sinhala as an official language of the country. It explores the historical, social, ideological and political processes, changes in language policy decisions, as well as the complexities of the language policy and planning situation in…

The Han sphere, including Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China, adopted Han characters and classical Han writing as the official written language before the 20th century. However, great changes came with the advent of the 20th century. After World War II, Han characters in Vietnam and Korea were officially replaced by the romanised "Chu…

In recent decades, neoliberal reforms have spread across Latin America. Despite different accounts showing the adverse social impact of these reforms, what seems lacking are historical analyses of why and how neoliberal policies occurred in this region. For instance, there are only rare accounts of how dictatorships in the 1970s prepared the…

This article aims to present some interpretations on the development of the new school movement in Argentina, with special focus on its relationship with the cultural modernization processes and with the political currents of the 1920s and 1930s, on its elements of continuity and differentiation with regard to the pedagogic tradition of normal…

Provides historical information often missing from mainstream text and presents conceptions of political systems and vehicles for social change that are different than those usually thought about. Remarks are offered on one point of departure for movement toward an education for the liberation of both men and women. (JOW)

Many people in Russia feel that the intelligentsia is on its way out. This is something that writers sense more keenly than anyone else. Symptomatic of this is the headline of an article by Daniil Granin published in the newspaper "Izvestia" on 5 November 1997: "The Russian Intellectual Is Going Away" [Russkii intelligent…

Among several hundred indigenous languages, Bahasa Indonesia gained pre-eminence as the national language of Indonesia during the country's first 50 years of independence. The fall of Soeharto in 1998 and the subsequent devolution of power to the regions might have been expected to lead to a resurgence in use of local languages but instead it…

Since 1978 China's ruling Communist Party has moved China's economy increasingly toward capitalism and its foreign policy toward strategic partnership with its old enemies in the West. These changes have required Party leaders to reconcile the reforms rhetorically with continued homage to their predecessors, to Chinese traditions, and to…

In many nations educators are fighting to build a curriculum that reflects the knowledge and beliefs of all peoples rather than a dominant political power group. This perspective is particularly significant when examining school discourse in Taiwan, a country with a long-standing multicultural population and a diverse history of alien occupations.…

This paper aims to study the current challenges of Chinese language education in the multilingual societies of Hong Kong and Singapore through policy documents. After the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, the role of "Putonghua" is far more important than before due to political and economic reasons. However, the medium of…

This paper examines the development of educational theory in Japan from 1945 to the present in five time divisions: (1) postwar "new education" and its critics (1945-52); (2) revisionist educational policy versus the people's education movement (1952-61); (3) the formation of "postwar pedagogy" as a self-reflection of the…

Music education does not exist independently, but is influenced by changes in society. Music educators must be responsive to those influences. By relating music education to political, economic, social, cultural and educational developments in the Republic of Korea during the period from 1945 to 2005, this article aims to put that education in a…