Reforming Education In Developing Countries

Underpinned in the stream of thought named ‘communitarianism’, Reforming Education in Developing Countries argues that developing countries need educational reforms that are tightly entwined into their cultural, social, and organizational contexts. It questions the applicability of neoliberal reforms in developing societies, through an analysis of the main elements of neoliberalism in education. It highlights the critical role of the community and suggests new and alternative lines of thought for the practice of reform initiation and implementation in developing countries. The book criticizes major neoliberal ideas in education, illuminates the distinctions between current neoliberal reforms and the characteristics of traditional societies, analyzes major educational ideologies in the developed world, and emphasizes the key role of local communities in this world. It proposes a dynamic model of reforming education in these countries that includes three major phases and integrates both modern and traditional (indigenous) educational purposes and values. Evocative ponderings are outlined throughout the book to promote critical thinking and reframing of educators' views towards educational reform and change. This book will be of great interest to researchers and students in the fields of educational leadership, educational policy, educational change, comparative education, political science, and sociology. It will also appeal to educators, supervisors, and policymakers.

The first book in a two-volume series designed to help those working, or preparing to work, as educationchange agents in developing countries, this volume will help change agents acquire a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of the policy process and how it can be influenced.

Policy-Making for Education Reform in Developing Countries aims at helping policymakers in developing countries better understand the processes and strategies for education reform, and the policy options available to them. This text focuses on the content of reform-options and strategies for achieving educational improvement at different levels of the system, e.g., primary, secondary, tertiary; for different sub-sectors, e.g., management, teachers; and for different purposes with which education systems are tasked, e.g., reaching peripheral groups of students, linking youth and employment. A holistic approach is increasingly recognized as essential to realizing the promises of education for the development of social and human capital-innovation in a global economy, sustained economic growth, social harmony and greater civic participation, decreased achievement gaps, and increased equity.

This book focuses on how politics shapes the capacity and commitment of elites to tackle the learning crisis in six developing countries. It deploys a new conceptual framework to show how the type of political settlement shaptes the level of elite commitment and state capacity to improving learning outcomes.

Al-Bataineh and Nur-Awaleh's (both education, Illinois State U.,) text is designed for undergraduate and graduate students who want to improve their understanding of educational systems, formal school institutions, and educational reform worldwide. The text compares and analyzes systems and reforms in both developed and developing countries in several Islamic, Latin American, and African countries, and covers a number of themes, including the current systems, contemporary reforms, the historical development of educational policy and schooling, the role of national and international agencies in education, and post-public education in the developing world. Also suitable as a reference for researchers, educators, governmental and educational agencies, and university international studies programs. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

This book provides a provocative but carefully argued addition to the theory and practice of education in developing countries. The book provides an ethical and empirical justification for support of formalistic teaching in primary and secondary schools in developing countries. It also refutes the application of progressive education principles to curriculum and pre- and in-service teacher education in such contexts. The central focus of this book is the formalistic teaching prevalent in the classrooms of many developing countries. Formalistic (‘teacher-centred’, ‘traditional’, ‘didactic’, ‘pedagogic’) teaching is appropriate in the many countries with revelatory epistemologies, unpopular and old-fashioned though these methods may seem in some western, especially Anglophone, ones. Formalism has been the object of many failed progressive curriculum and teacher education reforms in developing countries for some 50 years.

Globalization and Low Income Economies: Reforming Education, The Crisis of Vision is a thought provoking book which critically examines bureaucracy, politics and international aid in the Low Income Economies with a view to using formal education as a tool of empowerment. The author with his long experience of serving as an academic, a researcher, university teacher, development worker and International Development Advisor to governments and development agencies in Asia illustrates the failure of the General Education and the School Model to empower the poor in the Low Income Economies. In his analysis, the author points out how Globalization could also fail to empower the poor in the LIEs because the bureaucrats and the politicians in the LIEs and the assisting International Development Agencies have failed to perceive the Human Resource Development perspective of the new economic order. Globalization has been perceived only from a commodity perspective.

This work, the first to apply contingency theory to education reform planning, is particularly useful in that it has applications to planning both in developing countries and in the United States and Europe. The basic approach applies to a wide variety of development programs and will influence project management and policy administration.