Attitudes towards education vary between regions and countries. These differences cannot be fully explained by socio-economic inequalities or direct inputs such as teachers or class size. The persistence of historical institutions is also an important issue. In this paper, regional differences in attitudes towards education are investigated in…

Alison Stephen, who has wrestled for many years with the challenges of teaching emotional and controversial history within a multiethnic school setting, relished the opportunity to link her school's teaching of the Holocaust with a comparative study of other genocides. As she reports, her aim was to not create a hierarchy of suffering or…

What do we know about Socrates and the teaching method that, having taken his name, has become widely used from kindergarten through postgraduate seminars? The practitioners employing so-called Socratic methods include vastly different styles, the author says, noting that "we may be mistaking common phrasing for common practice." The differences…

In the last 15 years, writing center scholars have increasingly called for more evidence to validate writing centers' practices. Work by Paula Gillespie (2002), Neal Lerner (2009), and Isabelle Thompson et al. (2009) underscore this need. Missing from these discussions, however, is a thorough understanding of the past and current research…

In this essay, Paul Smeyers and Nicholas Burbules reexamine the concept of "practice" and propose a new way of conceiving it that does justice to the idea that education is in some sense an initiation into practices without endorsing either the conservative and reproductive conception of what initiation entails or the radically social…

Reviews "American Collegiate Populations. A Test of the Traditional View," by Colin B. Burke, 1982, New York University Press (distributor, Columbia University Press). Indicates that the book (considering such topics as college foundings, enrollment levels, graduates' careers, regional differences) improves the numerical record and exposes…

This paper, written in outline form, summarizes the history and current situation of special education in China. The paper begins by listing milestones in Chinese special education from 200 B.C. to 1990 A.D. and noting that currently there are an estimated 6,500,000 children (ages 7-15, with disabilities, of whom 70,000 are being served in special…