This article explores the impact of worldview on a people's approach to dealing with conflict and compare the worldviews underlying specific Western and Indigenous approaches to dealing with conflict. It suggests that power imbalances in conflict resolution research and practice perpetuate colonization through ontological violence, marginalizing…

The international implementation plan for the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) identifies four elements for the achievement of sustainable development through education: (1) recognising the challenge; (2) collective responsibility and constructive society; (3) acting with determination; and (4) the indivisibility of human…

Economic rationalism is a major driver of the education system in many parts of the world. In the scramble to facilitate economic rationalism, the education needs required at national level to keep nations, like Australia, competitive into the twenty-first century have not been fully considered. Such countries have ignored the needs of education…

This first book in the new OECD Insights Series examines the increasing economic and social importance of human capital--our education, skills, competencies, and knowledge. As economies in developed countries shift away from manufacturing, economic success for individuals and national economies is increasingly reliant on the quality of human…

How developed countries train, recruit and retain their schoolteachers is an area of considerable interest in education today. In this paper we consider how the US is addressing the issue of teacher quality by holding schools and school districts accountable for ensuring that all teachers of core subjects are "highly qualified" by the…

The United States is falling behind other developed nations in terms of the share of its population with a college degree, and the gap will widen substantially unless the nation makes postsecondary education much more accessible, according to a report released last week by Jobs for the Future, a Boston-based research organization. If current…

Through successive rounds of negotiations, the World Trade Organization (WTO) encourages countries to commit their higher education system to the mandates of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). The WTO is an organization committed to the aggressive trade liberalization of services like higher education. This ideology, known as…

Since the start of the current millennium, experience and expertise in the development and delivery of mobile learning have blossomed and a community of practice has evolved that is distinct from the established communities of "tethered" e-Learning. This community is currently visible mainly through dedicated international conference…

South Africa needs to reexamine responses to some basic questions if it is to develop a robust push that would enable the higher education sector to maximise the benefits of internationalisation in the context of the "knowledge society" and to serve local needs while being an integral part of the global community. In responding to these…

While evidence from developed countries suggests that communities may contribute to school effectiveness and efficiency, there is a need for more systematic reviews of such practice in developing countries to inform international policy. Research suggests that community participation through school councils could produce opposite outcomes: it can…

The issue of what determines subjective well-being has been at the centre of a recent flurry of research in the economics field. A necessary part of this understanding is the role relative positions (economic, social, geographic) of economic agents, particularly individuals, play in life (commonly referred to in the literature as rivalry). In this…

The purpose of this paper is to suggest an improved measure of financial poverty, based on household consumption and wealth as well as income. Data come from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics Australia (HILDA) Survey, which appears to be the first national socio-economic panel survey to provide longitudinal data on all three measures of…

In the United States, developing "human capital" for both economic and social benefit is an idea as old as the nation itself and led to the emergence of world's first mass higher education system. Now most other nations are racing to expand access to universities and colleges and to expand their role in society. Higher education is…

The variety and growing number of continuing training providers in France have led the government to question whether these bodies constitute full-fledged service producers functioning in a market situation. In the absence of quality standards and rules governing competition, many questions arise as to the ways it is to be implemented and…

This paper examines the conception of functional literacy advanced by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a 29-member organization of leading industrialized countries, as part of its 1994 International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS). The paper suggests that embedded within this conception of literacy and the discourse…