Search Results

This chapter discusses key developments in higher education in Ireland during the period from 1793 to 1908. It suggests that the development of Irish higher education in the nineteenth century was marked by three major movements: the gradual secularisation of university education; the democratisation of higher education; and the broadening of university curriculum to include modern languages, the social sciences, and the pure and applied sciences.

This chapter focuses on universities which, unlike secondary schools that were important in the creation of national uniformity, split the nation again. They did this in two ways, by breaking it up into specialist groups, and by enabling students to establish themselves as the leaders of the emergent new class that young people now came to form. A sizeable proportion of the country's intellectual and technical leaders passed through the institutions of higher learning, which may explain why their general structure and organisation remained largely unchanged. The esprit de corps of their graduates and the conservatism (in professional, as distinct from political, matters) of most of their teachers, preserved their privileged, almost oligarchical, character. They claimed they were democratic because the élite they created was recruited by examination, but there was no real equality of opportunity to pass the examinations.

This chapter examines the historical development in pre-university education in Ireland during the period from 1870 to 1922. This period was characterised by three brief flashes of optimism against a background of educational inertia and disappointment. These moments of optimism include the approval of a parliamentary grant for academic secondary schools in 1878, the establishment of the Irish technical school system in 1899, and the revision of the national school curriculum in 1900. The chapter also describes the educational innovations in intermediate schools during this period.

This chapter examines why educational leaders and businessmen in the United States thought it was a good idea to establish business schools in the first place. The answer often offered at the time was that American business itself had grown so big and complex by the turn of the twentieth century that a new university-level education was now required for the new world of managerial work. However, the more powerful rationale was that businessmen wanted the social status and cultural cachet that came with a university degree. The chapter then looks at the Wharton School of Finance and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania, which was founded in 1881 and became the first business school in the United States. All of the more than six hundred business schools founded in the nearly century and a half since descend from Wharton.

This chapter, the last to deal with schooling, explores the complex educational ties between Britain and the Caribbean after the Second World War. It suggests that the value West Indians placed on British-style schooling continued to affect the nature of Caribbean education into the post-war period, from curricula and textbooks to exams and administrative structures. At the same time the social and political circumstances of wartime and the immediate post-war period created a situation in which West Indians and native Britons forged new connections (economic, social and cultural) in education, even as they attempted to withdraw from each other's influence. In secondary and university education, which were particularly bound up with West Indian ideas of status, these ties remained particularly strong, but even after independence the legacy of Britishness remained potent in all levels of education in the region.

This chapter examines the works of several poets who formed part of the artistic movement called modernism which started in 1919. These poets include T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Unlike other poets, Eliot and Pound completed their university education and they wrote their poems brimming with academic training. Thus, their poetry registered longing, a jagged sense of pain, accompanied by a heavy load of postgraduate learning. This chapter also suggests that their works are examples of thoroughgoing poetry of knowledge.

People invest in university education in the hope that, once they graduate, they will be able to find high-paying managerial and professional jobs. Also, these graduates have to view their careers as a portfolio of jobs rather than having a permanent job. This chapter concentrates first on the expectations of graduates and their perspectives on the job market and identifies the factors, such as higher education, race, and ethnicity, which could possibly contribute to success in work. Secondly, the chapter explores the employability strategies that university graduates use to land jobs by conducting interviews with a sample set of graduates. The study distinguishes and compares the approaches of the two ‘ideal types’ — the ‘Players’ and the ‘Purists’ — and shows how the latter approaches the labour market aggressively while the latter uses a more conservative approach.

During Bulgaria's political and economic transition, changes in its political institutions have been rapid and fundamental. However, Bulgaria's socioeconomic systems have changed much more slowly mainly due to the inherited backward structures from pre-socialist and socialist times, the locational disadvantage of the country, general instability in the Balkans and discontinuities in the government's process of privatisation and orientation to a market economy. During Bulgaria's period of transformation, two major tendencies in its education system developed: the phenomenon of students dropping out from school emerged and has resulted in a group of citizens with little or no education; and an increased interest in university education. The transition period has negatively affected the welfare system — its resources are very limited and have decreased during the period of transformation. Bulgaria's welfare system could not compensate the groups experiencing declining living conditions with the economic difficulties that began in the 1990s.

This chapter assesses Lyon Playfair's views on universities. Playfair was a Scottish scientist who became an administrator, a university professor, and a politician. He has been praised as ‘one of the chief architects of the system of technical education in Great Britain as it exists to-day’. As a Member of Parliament (MP), he had to engage with practical university problems, in England and Ireland as well as Scotland, as they arose on the political agenda. But his starting-point was Scotland, and in putting Scottish problems in a wider British and European context, Playfair was part of a distinctive nineteenth-century discourse. Scottish academics and intellectuals were stimulated to think in comparative terms by the obvious contrast between Scottish and English universities; by the need to adapt university education to new social needs; by discussions which surrounded major legislation in 1858 and 1889; and by the widely shared feeling that Scotland had a national system of education closer to continental than to English traditions.

This chapter discusses how the Jewish doctor was vilified as a medical outsider, denounced for his charlatanism and his reliance on practical experimentation. He was accused of not being grounded in theory because he lacked a university education. By the end of the nineteenth century however, that situation had changed completely. University trained and no longer professional outsiders, Jewish physicians were targeted precisely because of their increasing and formal presence within German medicine. That presence was indeed palpable, that at the end of the eighteenth and at the turn of the nineteenth century, Jews constituted approximately two percent of Germany's doctors. By the turn of the twentieth century, Jews, who composed just over one percent of the total population, now made up 16 percent of all physicians in Germany. So fundamental had medicine become to the social structure and thus self-perception of German Jewry that nearly one half of all Jews attending universities in 1900 were there to study medicine.

Catholic sociology in Ireland changed significantly during the 1950s and 1960s. This change had four principal strands. First, the joint action of the Maynooth Professor and Muintir na Tire to secure European and US help in fostering rural sociology. Second, the use made by Archbishop McQuaid of his power within UCD to establish social science teaching in the state’s largest university. Third, the tension between useful and critical social science that emerged as the growing number of Irish Catholic immigrants in an increasingly secular Britain became a focal point for research proposals. Finally, the manner in which Ireland’s initially abundant, but later faltering, supply of religious vocations and the maximization of its clergy’s contribution to worldwide Catholic missionary efforts was studied. All of these strands are tied together by a broad turn away from exclusive preoccupation with ethical principles and towards increasing involvement in empirical social investigations.

This chapter is a description of the leadership role played by the International Christian University (ICU) in developing service-learning programs in Asia. It furnishes a brief history of service-learning in the region. The chapter considers how the service-learning curriculum and various service-learning programs have been institutionalized at the ICU and how networking with Asian institutions has been developed. The forms of international service-learning currently operate at ICU and the lessons drawn from the institutionalization of service-learning that may be useful to other institutions are also discussed.

From colonial Bombay where she spent most of her adult life, Atiya Fyzee travelled to Britain for university education. Atiya had the distinction of being the only one among almost 30 million Indians to travel overseas in the century between 1830 and 1930. Although her stay in Britain ended prematurely after just a year for reasons that were unknown, she took the opportunity to visit Heidelberg and Munich in Germany and Paris in France before going home to Bombay in 1907. A year later, Atiya went to Europe with her elder sister and her husband. Atiya’s journeys can be understood metaphorically through the lens of biography to highlight the important role of Muslim women in shaping world history. It offers a gendered critique of imperial culture stimulated by her experience of travel and expressed in the context of the most everyday of activities.

Japan's Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU) is in the process of developing an area studies program that is not simply an add-on to an existing program or department, but the raison d'être of a whole university. This chapter discusses how this project fits in with the development of university education both in Japan and internationally, the problems of defining the Asia Pacific, and the related problems of implementing an Asia Pacific studies program at an international university in Japan. It begins by reviewing definitions of the region, and identifies a core Pacific Asia and extended Asia Pacific, or “amoeba-like regions.” Definitions become critical when one considers the impact on resources involved, especially bibliographical and linguistic, and also the nature of the research questions asked. Other specific problems with the new area studies include the lack of coherence in the new curriculum and the limited recruitment of foreign students.

This chapter reviews The Palfrey Notebook: Records of Study in Seventeenth-Century Cambridge, authored and/or compiled by George Palfrey, and edited by C.J. Cook. The volume itself consists of an edition, with very full annotations—though no translations—of a Latin notebook maintained by Palfrey at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, for some period up to October 1623. Here, the chapter largely describes the editorial features of the book as well as its own publishing history and the intellectual context within which the orations, maxims, and disputations recorded in the original manuscript had been written. It also points out some of the flaws and errors evident in the book. Beyond the book itself, however, the chapter also goes in-depth on the wider context of seventeenth-century university education and the glimpse of it that Palfrey’ manuscript has provided and this edition illuminated.