The role of elite education in social reproduction in France, Belgium and Chile: Towards an analytical model

Using a societal analysis perspective that articulates structural, institutional and cognitive dimensions, this article outlines a model examining the contribution made by the schooling system to the social construction of elites. The model is put to the test by a comparative study of elitist educational pathways and their contrasting organisational modes in France, Belgium and Chile. The article shows that both the education of elites, and the role played by school in providing access to privileged social positions, continue to be marked by the distinctive historical construction of each society and education system, despite cross-cutting trends that are linked to globalisation.

Children’s Rights, Student Voice, Informal Learning, and School Reform

Children’s conceptions and experiences of learning greatly influence how and what they learn. Traditional forms of schooling typically position learners at the periphery of decisions about their own learning. Curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment practices emphasize the attainment of system-mandated learning outcomes, and this emphasis predetermines much of what is deemed by adults to be important or worthwhile student learning. Children consequently come to view their school learning in fragmented, individualistic, and narrowly adult-defined and controlled ways. Many state schooling system settings permit only limited choice and decision making by children. However, the history of compulsory education also contains numerous instances of schoolchildren organizing and taking collective action against the wishes of adults on issues that are of concern to them; and of states, communities, and individual schools where radically different schooling approaches have been attempted, both inside and outside the publicly funded system. These “free,” “alternative,” or “democratic” schooling initiatives are part of long-standing “progressive” education counter-discourses that aim to demonstrate the benefits of child-centered and even child-determined schooling. Such initiatives have encountered both resistance and support in schooling systems and consequently offer useful lessons with regard to contemporary discourses around children’s rights and student voice, as well as their contribution to schooling system reform. In recent decades, the combined effects of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and growing scholarly interest in “student voice” research and reform efforts in ordinary schools have increased expectations that children should have a meaningful say in their learning at school. The UNCRC underpins polity efforts to facilitate young people’s active participation in decision making in areas that affect them across the social agencies. Although contemporary “student voice” initiatives offer some promise for more of a “partnership” between adults and children in the ordinary school, they are often conceptualized and enacted at a superficial or tokenistic level. In continuing to position children simply as students who need the protection and direction of adults, schools fail to give adequate attention to the rich ways in which out-of-school learning contributes to a child’s holistic identity, to the learning strategies young people use in their day-to-day lives outside of compulsory schooling settings, and how these might help shape children’s agentic participation in meaningful decision making about what and how they learn while at school. A greater focus on the discursive processes of informal and everyday learning in family and community, and on the learning strengths or funds of knowledge children acquire in these settings, encourages the kinds of school and classroom conditions in which children and young people actively explore aspects of their world that interest them, experience agency in and commitment to their learning, and make choices about who they spend time with and what they prioritize in their learning. Informal learning affords young people the ability to naturally self-assess their learning and develop sophisticated understandings about what works for them and why. When young people actively engage with physical, technological, and social spaces, to advance their learning, they also learn to appreciate the utility of the tools and people around them. All these competencies or capabilities have relevance for what occurs in formal schooling settings also. Getting to know about the informal learning experiences of young people outside school influences the ways teachers think about who their learners are, learning as a phenomenon, and about the pedagogical repertoire they use to develop and enhance children’s capabilities. These pedagogical insights enable teachers to subtly or radically change their approaches to learning, the interactional framework of the classroom, and the teachers’ relations with families and with the local community that children negotiate each day.

Examining the Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Online Education: Reviewing the Indian Schooling System Based on the Perspective of Major Indian E-tutoring Platforms

The COVID-19 pandemic has halted the typical schooling methodology and forcibly shifted the mode of learning online. This article investigates into the inherent concerns faced by the Indian education system and strategizes ways in which online methods could plug the gaps in India. The spiralling growth witnessed by the major supplemental educational providers testifies the acceptability of a blended approach in India. The literature review highlights how the education process could be more effective based on their strategies, perspectives and benefits.

Trust in Schooling System Governance and Reform

Since the 1980s there has been significant reform in the development, delivery, and evaluation of all areas of public policy and services provision, including schooling. The reforms are prompted by a general “turn” from direct government determination and provision of public services to indirect governance undertaken by a mixture of public, private, and philanthropic actors. Orthodoxies about public sector governance and schooling system reform have shifted over this time from a preference for bureaucracy to preferences for markets, contracts, and most recently social networks. Schooling system governance in many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries has seen devolution of substantial statutory powers, responsibilities, and accountabilities to local parent communities or shared-interest coalitions, both for-profit and not-for-profit. Schooling policy, governance, and services provision work is now distributed across multiple state, parastatal, and nongovernmental actors. Trust in the actions of others within devolved and distributed systems is identified as an essential social lubricant of contemporary schooling governance and reform. Studies of the role played by trust in schooling systems remain relatively rare.

Race and Queerness in the U.S. Schooling System

Despite the ubiquity of categories of race, sexuality, and gender in K–12 schools in the United States, there is limited research documenting how these categories influence the experiences of students, reflecting constraints on knowledge production, particularly with respect to queer of Color theories in education. Within the research that exists, scholars have used varying paradigms of difference, some of which erase and others of which recognize and theorize the relationships between race and queerness. Many studies have described intersecting structures of domination in U.S. schools and the lack of attention to intersectionality in school-based supports for queer youth. Fewer studies document examples of student resistance and activism, suggesting needs for future theorizing, research, and practice. Although the bodies of students, educators, staff, and family members in K–12 schools have been and continue to be understood through categories of race, sexuality, and gender, there is limited empirical research discussing the ways that race and queerness are co-constitutive of people’s experiences in the U.S. schooling system. In part, scholarly knowledge production has been constrained because of schools’ hostility to queer research and critical projects more generally, with queer research, and especially queer of Color research, often producing oppositional knowledge in tension with schools as state-sanctioned institutions. When research has been conducted about race and queerness in U.S. schools, scholars have used three main paradigms to conceptualize, or problematically erase, the relationship between race and queerness: discrete, additive, and intersectional perspectives. Discreteness suggests that race and queerness are separate, disconnected identities. The other two perspectives recognize interrelationships. An additive perspective suggests that identities are a sum of parts, whereas an intersectional perspective suggests identities as co-constitutive and resulting in unique, qualitatively different experiences. Research attending to the relationships of race and queerness has revealed that U.S. schools are unwelcoming if not outright hostile to queer youth, resulting in negative consequences such as lowered academic achievement and poorer psychological well-being. The particular experiences of and reactions to such marginalization vary with respect to intersections of race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and social class. Although school-based supports such as supportive educators, inclusive curriculum and policies, and extracurricular clubs are beneficial, too frequently these supports lack attention to intersections of race and queerness, limiting their beneficial impact. These tensions show the need for intersectional coalition building approaches to a key element of anti-racist queer educational activism. Importantly, queer youth enact resistance and activism in schools in ways that are individualized and collective. Some resistance has been school-sanctioned (such as writing) and other instances beyond what schools sanction (such as violence). Collective forms were most common as queer youth of Color often drew on embodied and community knowledges to advocate for themselves and peers. In the absence of broader support, queer youth often used privilege, such as whiteness, as protection and thus reified oppressive values and practices. Future educational research needs to focus further on the intersections of race and queerness to help inform educational theories and practices to help queer youth, both white and of Color, learn and flourish in U.S. schools.

Mistrz, bakałarz, belfer: What was an individual who teaches others called throughout the history of the Polish language?

The article presents vocabulary describing a person who teaches others, recorded in dictionaries of the Polish language from the earliest times to mid-20th century. It arranges the collected material chronologically and semantically, describing the history of particular lexical units as reflected in dictionaries. The author pays attention to the genetic, morphological and stylistic diversity of the collected words, and considers the unusually high number of lexemes as a linguistic validation of the lack of a unified organizational schooling system in parallel with a long tradition of home schooling. The numerous common nouns represent a linguistic reflection of low qualifications and requirements for those teaching in elementary schools, especially in rural schools. It is demonstrated that many of the names used in the history of the Polish language in relation to a rural school teacher demonstrate a lack of social appreciation for the profession.

Sirach in the Lutheran and Anglican Traditions

The early German-speaking Lutheran and Anglican traditions used Sirach, a book in the Apocrypha, in their worship and catechetical life. Despite criticisms, they intentionally printed Sirach in their official Bibles and believed that it modelled and witnessed to Scripture. Theologians and clergy in both traditions frequently cited, quoted, and taught from Sirach. Both traditions read Sirach in their worship services. Lutheran popular piety employed Sirach in its schooling system, popular level handbooks, sermons, and engravings.

Ability, Inequality and Post-Pandemic Schools

Alice Bradbury discusses how the meritocracy myth reinforces educational inequalities and analyses how the recent educational developments of datafication and neuroscience might challenge how we classify and label children as we rebuild a post-pandemic schooling system.

Optimist about Education, Pessimist about Schools: People’s Perception Regarding the Schooling System

The article elaborates on people’s perception regarding the importance of education. In doing so, it explores the role of schools and teachers, opinions about schooling system and the comparison between private and public schools. A total of 28 indepth interviews were conducted with key stakeholders students, parents and teachers. While in general parents and students value education but they showed little hope in the system. A comparison between private and public schools seemed inevitable and formed a major part of all the discussions. Blame attribution emerged as a prominent dimension; the children and parents blame schools and teachers over low quality of education while teachers view parents’ lack of interest as a hindrance to effective education. To conclude, education is realized as a collective benefit for which collective effort is required.