Search Results

From the beginning of World War II, elementary and secondary education in the Commonwealth of Kentucky struggled to keep up with national trends. Casting its lot with the South after the Civil War handicapped the state educationally, particularly in “following the color line”. As throughout Kentucky's educational history, there were, from time to time, moments of reform followed by regression. World War II once again stretched Kentucky's educational institutions to the limits. The improved economic conditions of wartime prosperity, coupled with manpower shortages, ended the need for New Deal programs such as the PWA, the WPA, the CCC, the NYA, and others, many of which had enhanced education in Kentucky. Throughout Kentucky's history, its schools had labored to keep up with national trends and norms. Consolidation and merger of the public schools of the commonwealth proceeded at an increasing rate and scale throughout the post-World War II era.

In his praxial philosophy of music education, David Elliott argues that music education must embody the essence of music as a worldwide array of social-artistic practices, as something that people everywhere “do” musically (as listeners and makers). This is especially the case in the education of children. Young children do not separate thinking, listening, doing, playing, and learning. Many approaches to childhood education stress the active participation of children in music making prior to learning theoretical concepts about music (Elliott's “formal knowledge”). This chapter examines the varied and dynamic world of elementary music education in relation to selected principles in Elliott's 1995 book Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education. It discusses Elliott's praxialism and its compatibility with many traditional approaches to elementary music education, teaching children about musicianship, composition, arrangement, and improvisation in music, use of technology in music education, conducting, movement, music listening, and myths about the education of children.

This chapter explores the sociological aspects of educational inequality in India. There is little coherent understanding of changing patterns of educational inequality, and few clear-cut pointers to explanations for continued non-participation in, and non-completion of schooling on the part of a significant number of children. The author believes that this state of affairs arises out of the theoretical inadequacies and political conservatism that characterizes much of the study of educational inequality. The author also critiques the new research agenda by analysing the issue of unequal educational access and attainment in elementary education, with a focus on those subordinated by caste, class, and gender, and identifies crucial areas that are missing in our understanding of the influence of social processes in student participation in education and in shaping the educational system. The author points to the need for a critical systemic exploration of the education system as a subsystem of society in which school structure, organization, and processes are to be placed in wider political economy and stratified social structure based on wealth and social status. The author concludes by stressing the need to open up the issue of educational inequality to wider debates operating at the level of economy, polity, and society, and to adopt wider perspectives in sociological studies of the education system.

The period from the 1890s to 1920 is often termed the Progressive Era, and for good reason. Kentucky's common schools of the nineteenth century slowly evolved into the graded public schools of the early twentieth century, this also happened in most other states. Throughout its history, education in Kentucky often seemed to take nearly as many steps backward as forward. After the Civil War, the movement for state-supported normal schools in Kentucky languished. However, most colleges soon added teaching programs or moves towards normal education, providing a service as well as producing revenue. Education in Kentucky appeared to be on the march, the state finally recognizing the need for a state-funded normal school program. Most Kentucky educators of the early twentieth century grew up in the same educational milieu they had entered as teachers in their late teens and early twenties. From the mid-1920s through the Great Depression, several battles were waged in public education, the most important being over free textbooks, equalization, and certification. Kentucky's educational system had been nearly studied to death from 1900 to the early 1940s.

This chapter evaluates the rights of children to development. Basic education meets the fundamental learning needs of children, the youth, and adults. Early childhood development (ECD) and adult basic education serve as supporting efforts to primary education. Modern States regard education as a legal duty and not merely a right. The Shiksha Karmi Project in Rajasthan, and Primary and Elementary Education Projects in Maharashtra are some of the programmes implemented during the 1990s, concentrating on enhancing the quality of primary schooling by developing supportive learning conditions. The Convention on the Rights of the Child guarantees the right to play and recreational activities to all children. The close connections between basic education and key civic, economic, and social goals of communities lend a special urgency to the effort to fulfil the promise of basic education for all.

Natural selection is the process responsible for the functional adaptation of biological organisms. Despite its basic and applied scientific relevance, it remains one of the most widely misunderstood concepts of contemporary science. In this chapter, the conceptual underpinnings of some of these misunderstandings are explored and it is argued that many of them have their roots in cognitive biases that are observable in preschoolers and elementary school children. Central among these is the teleological tendency to explain phenomena by reference to function. The chapter presents developmental work exploring this tendency and also reviews recent findings concerning the possible origins of the bias. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of this and other developmental research for early evolutionary education.

It is stated that the typical public school on the eve of the Civil War was a one-room structure with one teacher. After the decline of the common schools during the Civil War, public education again appeared on the rise. National Normal University in Lebanon, Ohio, had an impact on the development of normal school education in Kentucky. Public school education in Kentucky made advances as well as the occasional missteps in the late nineteenth century. The public high school in Kentucky followed the national trend growing out of the development of the graded school in urban areas. After the implementation of the 1891 constitution, education in Kentucky made little progress in the 1890s. Kentuckians slowly began to embrace the major national curriculum changes of the late nineteenth century. The chapter also describes the state of education in the Commonwealth of Kentucky at the turn of the twentieth century. There was hope for better things in the new century because a groundswell of opinion was urging improved teacher education via annual institutes and public normal schools.

Chapter 1 gives an overview of the history and current status of the education system in India. It identifies parts of the society whom Article 21A is primarily aimed at, and what the most pressing issues to be addressed in the field of primary and lower secondary education are. It is quite clear that those who might profit from having a right to education are those who do not have the means to already afford quality education for themselves by obtaining it from the private market and who are, therefore, dependent on some form of state action. Strangely, it will be shown, even after years of education being a fundamental right, decent-quality education is still not seen as a ‘public good’ that the state ought to provide for free but something that is supposed to be obtained from the market, with the government education system being considered as something ‘meant for (very) poor children’.

In 1789, Hannah More and her sister Martha (Patty) founded a Sunday school at Cheddar — the first of a series of schools in the Mendips — which marked a significant advance of elementary education in Somerset. The schools are chronicled in Patty More's Mendip Annals. Sunday schools were the latest fashion in philanthropy. The pupils were the children of farmers, miners, and glass-workers. The schools have been criticized by E. P. Thompson and scholars influenced by Michel Foucault, but it is argued here that the Mendip peoples were not the passive recipients of class patronage. The success of the schools led to the setting up of women's benefit clubs in Cheddar and Shipham. The school and club feasts became a distinctive part of Mendip culture. Because of the problems of finding suitably Evangelical teachers, the sisters sometimes had take the potentially dangerous step of recruiting teachers with Methodist sympathies.

The chapter begins by noting that while governments at all levels historically failed to give a big push to elementary and secondary education, the expenditure on elementary education has recently risen sharply reaching more than 3.5 percent of the GDP. It argues, however, that if the obligations under the recent Right To Education (RTE) Act are to be sincerely honored, much greater public resource allocation to the education sector will be necessary. The biggest challenge would be to see how a step up in expenditure could be done without threatening fiscal stability. The other serious concern with elementary education is the quality of education. While enrollments have climbed up, learning outcomes have steadily declined. In turn, this has led to increased shift into private schools. The student enrollment in private school increased from 18.6 per cent in 2006 to 28.3 percent in 2012. The chapter argues that the government needs to reintroduce a mandatory examination policy up to grade 8, which has been discontinued under the RTE Act.

This chapter describes the process of revising NPE, 1986, and offers an insightful account of the manner in which the Education Secretary Anil Bordia protected NPE, 1986, from the onslaught of the Ramamurti Committee which if it had its way would have done away with non-formal education, vocationalization of secondary education and total literacy campaigns, and of his outmanoeuvring the attempt made by the State Governments to divest the AICTE of its statutory regulatory powers. It elaborates the insightful analysis of educational finances by the Ramamurti Committee and its forward looking recommendations being given a short shrift in the revised NPE even though India slid ingot a deep macroeconomic crisis. It highlights the lack of policy perspective and strategic thinking in the making of NPE, 1986 and its revision as a result of which no steps were taken to stop the higher education systems in the States drifting into a deep abyss.

This chapter focuses on Gokhale’s education policies. In 1910, at the very first meeting of the ‘reformed’ Imperial Council, Gokhale proposed that ‘a beginning should be made’ in the direction of making elementary education free and compulsory throughout the country, and that a mixed commission of officials and non-officials be appointed to frame definite proposals. On 16 March 1911, he introduced his Elementary Education Bill, which incorporated most of the suggestions he had made in the Imperial Council a year earlier. Gokhale had known all along that because of the standing majority of the official bloc in the Imperial Council, the fate of his bill would ultimately depend upon the attitude of the government. In March 1911, that attitude seemed to him ‘cautious, but not unfriendly’.

This chapter explores certain lasting institutional arrangements and patterns of social interaction that characterize the Japanese school system from elementary to high school. More specifically, it considers three movements during the late 1990s and 2000s and their impact on Japanese compulsory education: the attempt to encourage more autonomous and creative learning; the subsequent renewed emphasis on conventional academic achievement; and the promotion of small class sizes and differentiated learning. The chapter first provides an ethnographic overview of the different stages of school education in contemporary Japan: elementary education, junior high school, and high school education. It then discusses significant disparities in motivation and academic chievement in Japanese schools, along with the trend toward internationalization (kokusaika) and especially foreign language education as part of Japanese educational reform in the 1980s.

This chapter explains the Milton Friedman's economic theory model for Jewish religious elementary education, proposing a set of standards for Torah elementary education and to fund poor families who send their children to qualifying schools. It presents a discourse on Yehoshua B. Gamla's ordinance involving religious educational standards, the Religious Education Subsidy Program (RESP), and competitions based on standards. It also sets out a proposal that urges the government to prioritize Torah education for the youth.

Goldin and Katz (2008) document the key role that the educational attainment of native-born workers in the U.S. has played in determining changing returns to skill and income distribution in the twentieth century. Understanding the forces driving the supply of educated workers is thus critical. This paper focuses on the role of elementary and secondary educational institutions in the United States, which have changed dramatically over the latter half of the century, in determining high school graduation rates. In part, these institutional changes have been formally legislated and implemented as specific programs, but the programs alone do not explain the full extent of the dramatic rise in spending. I review relevant literatures and policy history, and present original descriptive analysis of the role of income inequality in shaping graduation and spending from 1963 to 2007. Results suggest that inequality, which previous research establishes as negatively correlated with the establishment of public secondary schooling earlier in the twentieth century, was positively correlated not only with education spending levels but also with aggregate high school graduation rates at the state level. This relationship holds with inequality at the bottom of the distribution as well as at the top.