Exclusive boarding schools in social environments where the meritocratic norm is prevalent are faced with a tension between parents' desire to give their children a head start in the competition for educational qualifications, social prestige and jobs on the one hand and the powerful social norm of advancement by merit under conditions of…

This article adopts the skill ecosystem approach to the comparative analysis of skill mismatch across European regions within different skill formation regimes. Institutional arrangements of skill formation regimes are designed at national level. However, they are enacted in regions with very different Labor market and socioeconomic conditions,…

This article argues that the classical dualism between public and private universities turns out to be a terminological handicap for scholars who explore the current complexity of higher education landscapes. It focuses on the Cypriot public and private universities in order to illustrate specific manifestations of hybridity. The latter arise as…

For the last 30 years international assessments have become more widespread and systematic, and their influence on education policy has increased: the OECD through the PISA tests has played a major role in this process. This article reflects on the case of the countries of the Southern Cone: Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. It analyzes the…

PISA allows for comparisons and contributes to the distribution of certain types of capital among countries, which is converted into soft power. Education has been considered an important pillar of the increased status and power China holds globally. However, Chinese participation in PISA differs from other countries, whereby only some of China's…

European Higher Education (HE) systems have been undergoing reforms for quality assurance and accreditation (QAA) in response to the Bologna process. Through the comparative exploration of the recontexualizations of European policy discourse on HE QAA in the Republic of Cyprus and Greece, we illustrate the differentially centralized and increased…

Based on oral and written testimony of pupils and teachers, this essay examines the lived educational experience of the school-age cohort of children in Stalin's Russia from 1931 to 1945. The state alone determined the structure and curricula of the nation's schools. However, Soviet youngsters, their parents, and teachers responded to the center's…

Utilizing the minutes of preparations of a manuscript textbook on the history of medicine (1948-1953), the authors reconstruct how it was decided to depict the history of world and Russian medicine; in so doing sacralizing the Soviet state and wildly overstating its care for the health of Soviet people. The archival documents allowed the authors…

This article discusses how an increased interest in the global, the international and the cross-national may be informed by the recently renewed focus upon the social and economic history of education. The history of school buildings in a comparative framework offered here illustrates how such approaches also have important contributions to make…

One neglected aspect of the Gorbachev perestroika era in Russia [1985-1991] was the remarkable "pedagogy of cooperation" (or pedagogika sotrudnichestva) movement, a renewal of the experimental tradition in education. Central to this was Edward Dneprov, a brilliant and forceful individual whose views and personality substantially shaped…

How and why did Russian education go from the enthusiastic liberalization in the early 1990s to the restoration of a Soviet-style system in the new century? Attempting to answer this question, the authors reassess and advance a theoretical model that they initially proposed fifteen years ago. While most research on education in transitional…

The article shows how stigmatization of misspelling predated modern German and Russian orthographies and how this attitude was imported to Russia from Prussia in the 19th century. Rules were difficult to learn and to teach, making mistakes inevitable. Grading based on the number of errors helped to control and discipline students and to manage…

The articles in this cluster explore the past and present trajectories of educational change in Russia from the 18th century to the present day. The authors focus on the multiple social actors, visions, forces, and changes that in combination brought about Russia's modern educational realities. The emphasis in these contributions is put upon the…

Over the past nearly 30 years, Russian universities have been buffeted by external forces necessitating attempts to adjust to a fast-changing academic climate, both globally and regionally. Based on informally structured interviews of university faculty of different age groups and ranks, academic fields and regions of the country conducted between…

This essay considers the evolution of the historiography of eighteenth-century Russian education, emphasizing recent shifts in the dominant paradigm of secularization. It identifies three wide vectors (1) the place of the state as prime institution builder; (2) the pace of standardization; (3) the problem of "reflexivity," or laying bare…