Over the period of this journal's life the education of adults has been changed and developed in a wide variety of ways: the same phenomenon--adult learning--has been given a variety of meanings and the education of adults has assumed many titles. The aim of this paper is to unravel some of the changes that have occurred in this field during…

Today the modern Silk Road between Asia and Europe is increasingly well-travelled in both directions by students, academics and policy makers. Over the last decade the European Union (EU) and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) have been making more attempts to shape this route by creating an educational partnership through an…

Both in China and internationally, educators and policy makers claim that vocational education and training (VET) is essential for the sound economic development of a country and the physical and social well-being of its population. However, China looks back upon a century-long history of rejection when it comes to popularising VET, despite…

Japanese "community" is falling apart. This is caused by the combination of two problems: on the one hand, people are feeling their existence to be less and less stable and their reality is being shaken; on the other hand, the sense of values in the society is becoming more and more diversified and fluid. In the background of the two problems are…

On the basis of official statistics, poverty has halved in Ghana over the period from 1991 to 2005. Our objective in this paper is to assess how far this fall was linked to the creation of better paying jobs and the increase in education. We find that earnings rose rapidly in the period from 1998 to 2005, by 64% for men and by 55% for women. While…

Faith ethos education has subjective elements in it that are elusive to planners and administrators of national and international systems. This paper looks at how Sikhs, a minority group both in India and in other countries to which they have migrated manage to retain their faith-based education programmes successfully and yet relate to the…

More than four decades ago, Philip J. Foster (1927-2008) published an essay on the "The vocational school fallacy in development planning," drawing on research on schools in Ghana. That essay has been reprinted in numerous texts and remains frequently quoted in recent research literature. What were his main general insights about vocational…

How do unattached Jamaican youth regard their educational and employment prospects? We investigate perceptions by out-of-school, unattached youth, ages 14-24, who are neither employed nor attending training program. From a human capital theoretical perspective, and based on surveys of Jamaican youth, we explore the prevalence and variability of…

This paper explores whether polytechnic and university graduates are affected in the same way by gender differences in the graduate labour market in four countries: the Netherlands, Finland, Norway and Switzerland. Using data from the Research into Employment and Professional Flexibility (REFLEX) graduate survey, the analysis is based on…

Research on educational policy borrowing has mostly focused on explicit transfer processes, often highlighting how explicit reference to the international has served legitimatory purposes in the borrowing country. In contrast, this paper focuses on "silent" borrowing, i.e. non-acknowledged processes of policy transfer. The paper argues that…

This article revisits a topic central to the past and the present of comparative education: the theme of "transfer". It outlines four ideas. First, that comparative education as a field of study, having begun in the study of "mobilities", became diverted by other anxieties. Second, the article notes that the theme of "transfer" is far broader than…

The article discusses the entry of standardised measurement into the educational systems of Sweden and Germany and the processes of shape-shifting associated with this process. In the first part of the article, we investigate how standardised measurement challenged existing ways of conceiving education in Sweden and Germany during the first half…

This article is an initial attempt to illustrate how patterns of academic mobility in the history of universities have been framed by the international politics of particular time periods. The article briefly looks at "the medieval period" and then at the emergent colonial and nationalist periods, including the ways that institutions as well as…

This article uses international comparisons to examine the ways in which national differences in educational philosophies and policies have affected trajectories through education for immigrant and second generation students and their succeeding socio-economic, civic and political integration. By looking at various settings such as classrooms,…

The purpose of this article is to explore "the mobility of national identities" with reference to the field of education. It argues that as products of multimodal discourse, national identities can move across or between geopolitical settings, and in the process of their movement they tend to shift and change their shape in certain ways. To test…