Creating the Educational Marketplace

Chapter 5 shows how, by the 1920s, public policies had forged a regulated educational marketplace in American cities. Catholic students frequently transferred between public and private schools. Effectively managing these shifts in school attendance required public officials to establish the standards, rules, and procedures to facilitate parental choice between the two systems. Public regulations standardized the diffuse curriculum and teaching practices of public and private schools. Parents transferred their children from public to private schools with the understanding that the latter fit within the state’s minimal education standards, and that their choice would not result in their child suffering academic or professional harm. New regulations tied public and parochial school governance together in ways unthinkable during the nineteenth century. Catholic school administrators and parents largely embraced these new laws, viewing them as essential for raising the status of Catholic education.

Student as Consumer: What Three Decades of Higher Education Policy Mean to K-12

The diminishing educational outcomes and academic rigor, which have come to define the American collegiate experience, result from a misguided economic policy that places students as consumers in an “educational marketplace”.

Axis of advantage: elites in higher education

The intention in this chapter is to offer a critical commentary on ways in which the educational marketplace works to the advantage of elite universities. It is these institutions that use their histories and traditions, image and reputation, to further preserve and reproduce their privilege, position and power. This is labelled as the axis of advantage. Elite institutions are well recognised and accrue esteem based on those who work or have worked there, those who study there or who have studied there, and by the philanthropic bequests received. This chapter argues that this roll call of individuals, alumni, benefactors and networks linked further disconnects elite institutions with the ordinary and the everyday.

Contemporary Buddhism and Education

Modern Buddhist education in Asia is an organic part of the project of Buddhist modernization pursued by a number of Buddhist reformers, often as a response to the challenges of imperialism, capitalism, and Christian proselytism. While in some cases (notably in colonial Burma) the resistance to colonialism could translate into the resistance of the monastery schools to the introduction of “modern” subjects, in most cases Buddhist educational systems attempted to reinvent themselves, using modern techniques of teaching and evaluation as well as modern institutional forms—for example, that of a sectarian Buddhist university. Such a reinvention brought considerable successes in many places, notably Japan and South Korea, but modernization success is rife with inherent pitfalls. Once integrated into standardized modern educational marketplace, Buddhist educational institutions risk quickly losing their specifically religious character, with religion remaining as simply one compartmentalized and professionalized subject. In the countries where modernization has been state-driven (typically, People’s Republic of China), Buddhist educational modernization often implies close cooperation with—and ultimately co-optation by—the state institutions.