The European Convention on Human Rights guarantees freedom of education, including opportunities to create and operate faith-based schools. But as European societies become religiously more diverse and "less religious" at the same time, the role of religious schools increasingly is being contested. Serious tensions have emerged between…

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…

The last few decades have witnessed both an expansion and a transformation of immigration flows, which pose significant challenges with respect to how people work with differences across culture and space. Against this background, this paper explores how some Chinese immigrant engineers respond to differences in the Canadian labour market. It not…

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…

This paper describes how the way the concept of learning is identified and managed in a societal context can provide a crucial clue to explaining how a form of culture as a complex mental organism is constructed and interwoven. Specifically, I argue the point by illustrating that the discourse of Confucianism has fabricated a specific form of…

Despite a long history of post-independence aid to education, Kenya's relationships with overseas donors have, until recently, been markedly fractious. Donors' concerns about transparency and corruption, in the context of a political regime which became increasingly authoritarian, led to sharp reductions in aid to Kenyan education during the…

Human capital and functionalist paradigms underpin the stance taken by most governments to education policy. These models have also had a profound effect upon the determination of education priorities in the poorest states and, indeed, upon aid policy. This paper argues, on the basis of evidence from the papers in this volume and from the wider…

This paper is a response to David Limond's exposition, "[An] historical culture ... rapidly, universally, and thoroughly restored"? British influence on Irish education since 1922, which appeared in "Comparative Education", Vol. 46, No. 4, November 2010, pp. 449-462. Limond's overall thesis is that "a post-colonial overhang affects Irish…

The promotion of "critical citizenship" has become a key objective of official school curricula around the world. Using an analytic framework developed by the authors, this paper identifies the diverse conceptions of critical citizenship that are promoted, by comparing the official school curricula for citizenship in England and France. The…

Comparative international tests of students' achievements have become increasingly popular over the past decade. An outcome of this widespread practice is the tendency of various countries to evaluate their national status according to their pupils' international ranking in such achievement tests, partly due to the common belief that high ranking…

This paper explores the major characteristics of school choice in the Chinese context. It highlights the involvement of cultural and economic capital, such as choice fees, donations, prize-winning certificates and awards in gaining school admission, as well as the use of social capital in the form of "guanxi". The requirement for these resources…

For decades the world society perspective has influenced comparative research on a broad range of issues across the social sciences. The perspective emerged to make sense of an empirical puzzle: why did nation-state after nation-state expand mass schooling after World War II? The perspective evolved to address broader issues such as the authority…

Just as the world has increasingly been compressed over recent decades through transnationally engaged actors or "carriers" such as mobile experts, international organisations, and seemingly globalised bodies of knowledge, so have China's politicians and academics increasingly "gone global" in various fields of social action, including education.…

While technical and vocational education and training (TVET) is re-emerging on the agenda of many development agencies and governments of developing countries alike, there remains a serious lack of theoretically grounded literature on how skills formation systems in developing countries change over time, and how these transformations are…