During recent renovation work at the Collin County Courthouse in a suburb of Dallas Texas, workers discovered "for colored" and "for white" signs underneath layers of plaster above the bathroom doors. The discovery has ignited controversy between citizens who are concerned with the eventual fate of the signs. Some residents of…

This paper discusses inclusion of global literature in social studies curricula, especially in teaching about women of the world. It analyses the attraction of, and difficulties with, a popular work of young adult fiction, "Shabanu," often taught in US middle-school social studies and humanities classrooms. It uses the framework of post-colonial,…

Over 2,000 years ago, Aristotle wrote a treatise on ethics in which he proposed that there were both intellectual and moral virtues to be developed in the human being. Virtue ("aristeia") was roughly equivalent to the English word "excellence" and the unifying virtue that was both a moral and an intellectual virtue was…

Unlike most other fields, business school Ph.D. production has declined in the last decade. Data from the National Science Foundation (NSF) reveal that business and management doctorate production decreased by 6.9 percent between the first and second half of the 1990s. Over the same period, humanities (18.9 percent increase) and life sciences…

Educators expect students to question, explain, hypothesize, and devise tests to determine validity concerning science and its applications. The traditional approach of presenting individual courses concentrating on single disciplines and ignoring linkages to other disciplines is abysmal. If we expect students to understand how science is related…

A 20th-century discipline in American universities, communication has struggled with questions of academic identity: generically, as to whether it is a "humanities" or a "social science", a "practice" or a "technology", and theoretically, as to what sorts of axioms, theorems, research methods or logics, and problems should form its core. This…

The humanities department of the community college where the author teaches has a long-standing policy regarding the demand for sentence-structure correctness in all the composition courses that they provide. That policy holds students accountable for total control over the rules that govern sentence structure. Any student paragraph or essay that…

Many researchers in the field of education aspire to influence what actually happens in schools and classrooms. They entered their profession aware of the need to improve educational practice; many of them want to make a difference. Yet few observers would claim that the results of education research are eagerly awaited by teachers, school…

Universities in South Africa face the challenge of redressing past (and continuing) inequalities in higher education by increasing accessibility to previously (and currently) disadvantaged students. One means of doing so is through 'access' or 'bridging' programmes. This article explores successful students' perceptions of one such programme at…

Most Americans actually understand the importance of an education rich in arts, science and humanities. But what they may not realize is that their children are not getting enough. Each day more and more of the arts and humanities are being drained from our nation's school curriculums. Studies have shown that the arts play a stimulating role in…

Choice of institution and field of study for a bachelor's degree in Israel was found essentially meritocratic although influenced by socioeconomic status (SES) as well. As expected, students of higher ability attend universities and those of lower apply to academic colleges. However, among students of higher ability, those of higher SES opt for…

Many educators lament the UNESCO study showing that by the time the average teen graduates from high school he or she has spent more than fifteen thousand hours watching television and only eleven thousand in the classroom (Gorebel, 1998). Rather than regretting this "condition," colleges, universities, and educators of adults and children should…

This article describes a successful interdisciplinary collaboration among chemistry, humanities and English faculty members, who utilized poetry and artistic illustration to help students learn, appreciate, and enjoy chemistry. Students taking general chemistry classes were introduced to poetry writing and museum-type poster preparation during one…

This research report examines the data collected in The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) for 1992, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. The study also provides a context for interpreting the data with a comparison to a similar survey of 1982. Jazz was defined as the respondents saw fit. Findings of the survey include:…

This book highlights case studies from Providence, Rhode Island, of history and social studies classes in grades 7 through 12. Rather than use textbooks to study history, the students used documents and primary sources to construct history, acting as historians and drawing their own conclusions from the past. Accounts of classroom lessons,…