Between 1960 and 2010, Singapore's real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita skyrocketed from $4,383 to $55,862, while Jamaica's barely increased from $6,417 to $8,539. It is plausible that differing rates of GDP growth are associated with differences in the development of education systems but causally the linkage is not well understood. Using…

Bhutan is a "small state" according to the World Bank, and therefore categorized as fragile and vulnerable to local and global challenges. However, since the 1960s, when the country first engaged in "modernization" development and global politics, Bhutan has been anything but fragile and helpless. The Royal Government's focus on sustainable…

The world faces pervasive poverty and inequality. Hundreds of billions of dollars in international aid have been given or loaned to developing countries though bilateral and multilateral mechanisms, at least, ostensibly, in order to do something about these problems. Has such aid helped? Debates around this question have been ongoing for decades,…

The logic behind international aid to development has typically centered on economics. Notwithstanding the variation in focus--from macroeconomic monetary and trade policies, to economic wealth programs aimed at creating jobs, to supply- and demand-side reforms--the central discourse on international aid has been dominated by a political…

In the introduction to his article, "Aid, Development, and Education," Klees (2010) poses the question, has the "hundreds of billions of dollars in international aid... loaned to [or otherwise targeted to "assist"] developing countries through bilateral and multilateral mechanisms... helped?" He then posits the question to be "too complicated to…

Recent works that assess whether development has been well-served, or served at all, by international aid, are overwhelmingly pessimistic in their assessment and in favor of the market as the antidote to international aid (Klees, 2010). The author finds that Steve Klees' essay focuses on the neoliberal and liberal frameworks that represent the…

While there are areas of disagreement in the responses to this author's earlier article [Klees, "Aid, Development, and Education," "Current Issues in Comparative Education," v13(1) 7-28 2010], he finds that the disagreements are much less important than the commonalities. He tries to detail both in this reply, but he focuses on how he and his…

Critiques that seek to examine cosmopolitanism as a concept suffer from a severe popularity problem. Rather than engage in this pro/con debate, we are interested in demonstrating that cosmopolitanism can wax and wane, ebb and flow, and has appeared as a grounding ideology for educational programs before, only to be torn asunder by those seeking to…