Unintended Lessons of Revolution

In the 1920s, Mexico established rural normales—boarding schools that trained teachers in a new nation-building project. Drawn from campesino ranks and meant to cultivate state allegiance, their graduates would facilitate land distribution, organize civic festivals, and promote hygiene campaigns. In Unintended Lessons of Revolution, Tanalís Padilla traces the history of the rural normales, showing how they became sites of radical politics. As Padilla demonstrates, the popular longings that drove the Mexican Revolution permeated these schools. By the 1930s, ideas about land reform, education for the poor, community leadership, and socialism shaped their institutional logic. Over the coming decades, the tensions between state consolidation and revolutionary justice produced a telling contradiction: the very schools meant to constitute a loyal citizenry became hubs of radicalization against a government that increasingly abandoned its commitment to social justice. Crafting a story of struggle and state repression, Padilla illuminates education's radical possibilities and the nature of political consciousness for youths whose changing identity—from campesinos, to students, to teachers—speaks to Mexico’s twentieth-century transformations.

REFORMS IN THE FIELD OF SECONDARY SPECIAL EDUCATION IN UZBEKISTAN AND ITS IMPORTANCE

In the second half of the twentieth century, the education system was separated from the progressive achievements of world civilization and the historical roots of our people. Radical changes in the system of secondary special education in Uzbekistan, changes in the system, democratic changes in the country and the requirements of a market economy, the creation of a legal framework for educational institutions, the acceleration of educational reforms issues were analyzedIndex Terms: Secondary Education, Secondary Special Education, Vocational Training, Teachers, Education Reform, Education Law, National Training Program, Junior Specialist.

Patterns of actorship in legitimation of educational changes: The role of transnational and local knowledge

This paper examines how different meanings of knowledge (transnational, comparative, statistical, local, and personal) relationally stabilise the agential position for the legitimation of educational reform across state and non-state actors. Analysing the materiality and systems of reason of proposals to reform education in the pre-election debates in the Czech Republic, the focus is placed on different patterns of legitimate and legitimating actorship, assembled from global and local relations. Through an ecological conceptualisation the research identifies the problematisation and decomposition of actorship into contradictory assemblages of both traditional actors (teachers and politicians) and relatively new ones (NGOs). The relationship of the civil sector and the state structures allowed the emergence of new non-state, non-professional actors (NGOs) who aggregate their expertise from transnational data and legitimate both their position as experts and the particular educational change. This has consequences for non-experts as politicians and teachers. The transnational and European context penetrated into the Czech educational sphere not through an elite class of system actors but through the representatives of NGOs. Rhetorically saving education from degradation, NGOs engage in spreading the transnational data and externalise the legitimation of educational reform and thus become the bearers (although agentially limited) of the European space.

Revolutionizing Education

The chapter discusses equity and educational reform as it relates to minority students in the United States. Historical information is presented along with a synopsis of the current state. Recommendations to equalize learning opportunities and reform education are presented. Students in schools all across America have been shortchanged. They are drowning in a bottomless ocean with the waves and currents pulling them further and further into the depth of a sea of confusion, a sense of hopelessness, and an emptiness that has shattered their dreams.

O Projeto de Educação de Jovens e Adultos de Assentamentos de Reforma Agrária do Piauí (Proejapi) no contexto do Pronera

The National Agrarian Reform Education Program has advanced in relation to the policies historically developed in Brazil for the education of countryside populations, representing a paradigm shift. This article was directed by the following research problem: how did the implementation of Pronera materialize in the State of Piauí, through the Youth and Adult Education Project of Agrarian Reform Settlements? The objective is to analyze the Pronera implantation process in the State. The investigation was based on literature review, document analysis and interviews with different subjects from the institutions and movements involved in the implementing process of the Program. The results indicate that this process involved difficulties related to the structural precariousness of the settlements; the level of monitors training; the bureaucratic aspects of the process processing; the discontinuity in the release of the installments agreed in the work plans and the delay in pedagogical activities, elements that interfered in the dynamics of the Project's execution. The problems faced were being overcome by the engagement of the pedagogical team and the social and union movements involved, revealing that Pronera played a central role in expanding the processes of schooling and training of the people engaged in the struggles for the right to education and social transformation.

Petrus Ramus and Ramism

Petrus Ramus was considered a controversial professor in Paris in the middle of the 16th century, and he remains so among scholars today. He is mostly considered to have been an unimportant philosopher, yet his ideas about how philosophy should be understood, and how it consequently should be taught and, most importantly, to what benefit it should be undertaken, had an enormous impact on northern Europe and New England in the Early Modern period. Ramus was born in 1515 in the north of France. He came from a noble but destitute family. Ramus spent his youth in hardship before he secured the opportunity to study in Paris. He later adopted as a motto the words of Virgil “labor improbus omnia vincit,” i.e., insatiable work overcomes everything, which reflected his pride in his ability to surmount his difficulties and obtain a masters of arts degree in 1536. Ramus won a reputation for criticizing deficiencies in the curriculum and the teaching at the university as well as for blaming Scholasticism for it. His ideas on how to reform education were not appreciated by most of his colleagues, and he was for a time banned from teaching. Modern scholars of Ramism are divided between those who think that Ramus’s departure from the Aristotelian tradition stemmed from a Platonic ontological outlook, which he never abandoned, and those who thought that his childhood’s hardship engendered in him a striving for a new and shorter educational program, one that led him to abandon the traditional Scholasticism. One argument for the latter explanation is that it easily explains all the variations found in his system of textbooks. In 1551 he was appointed to a royal professorship through which he succeeded in distancing himself from the university. And ten years later he took a further step away from scholarly circles when he converted to the Reformed faith. As a Huguenot, he lost the support of the Roman Catholic Church. Eventually he left Paris and spent time in Germany and Switzerland. He tried, although he failed, to obtain a chair in Heidelberg and in Strasbourg. In 1570 he returned to Paris and to his royal professorship, but still without the right to teach at the university. Ramus was assassinated in the immediate wake of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres in 1572, and for many Protestants he became a martyr.

Early Attempts at Revival in Massachusetts

This chapter focuses on schooling in Massachusetts between the Revolution and the reforms commonly associated with Horace Mann and the Common School Awakening. After surveying the legislative history, especially focusing on laws passed in 1789 and 1827, it looks at two specific efforts to reform education in the 1820s. The first involved Lancasterian schools. After William Bentley Fowle’s success in launching a monitorial school in Boston, Josiah Quincy, the city’s mayor, attempted to implement this method on a broader scale. The second reform examined is James Carter’s campaign to found a state-sponsored teacher training college. Both of these efforts at reform failed. Notably, these campaigns lacked strong religious components. This chapter thus serves as a negative example, a foil that throws into relief the religious appeals treated in other chapters.