Margaret Zoller Booth

Self-Esteem and Academic Achievement: A Comparative Study of Adolescent Students in England and the United States.

Utilizing mixed methodology, this paper investigates the relationship between self-esteem and academic achievement for young adolescents within two Western cultural contexts: the United States and England. Quantitative and qualitative data from 86 North American and 86 British adolescents were utilized to examine the links between self-esteem and academic achievement from the beginning to the end of their academic year during their 11th–12th year of age. For both samples, quantitative results demonstrated that fall self-esteem was related to multiple indicators of later year academic achievement. While country differences emerge by the end of the year, math appears to have a consistent relationship with self-esteem in both country contexts. Qualitative analyses found some support for British students’ self-perceptions as more accurately reflecting their academic experience than the students from the United States.

Adolescents’ Stage-Environment Fit in Middle and High School: The Relationship Between Students’ Perceptions of Their Schools and Themselves

This mixed-methods longitudinal project investigates the association between student perceptions of their schools and themselves. Findings from the first two waves of data analysis with 894 middle and high school students in a midsized Great Lakes city reveal similarities and differences between the grade levels (7th-10th) and their perceptions of their schools. Although 7th-grade students enter middle school with the most positive feelings about their schools, they lose this feeling of euphoria by the end of their academic year. In contrast, the 10th-grade females are the most positive of all students, recognizing school characteristics which assist with their self-efficacy. Results from quantitative analyses indicate that student attitudes toward school and a sense of school connectedness are linked to both self-esteem and academic self-efficacy.

Western Schooling and Traditional Society in Swaziland

This study analyses the actual and perceived significance of schooling on the lives of rural people in Swaziland. It compares and contrasts the Swazi publics attitudes towards and participation in Western education during the colonial period with the present day. Through interviews with Swazi parents, students and teachers, the study finds that, as during the colonial period, parents feel alienated from the school as an institution. As todays Ministry of Education strives to incorporate a stronger technical aspect to the school curriculum, parents view school as a place primarily for academics. These attitudes are directly related to their keen awareness of the strong correlation between education and modern sector employment. This is particularly notable because now, in contrast to the colonial period, all parents strongly desire a formal education for their children and have high professional aspirations for them.

The Impact of Parental Availability on Swazi Students' School Achievement: A Nine Year Longitudinal Study.

Abstract This paper constitutes a major part of the third phase of a longitudinal study in Swaziland investigating the short- and long-term effects of parental absence on primary children’s school achievement. In 1998, 42 of the original sample of 80 students who entered grade one in 1990 were found remaining in the educational system but varied in their educational attainment. While girls had a higher drop-out rate than boys, males repeated grades at a higher rate. Father absence from the home had a negative influence on boys’ participation in and successful completion of school. Generally, the study found school achievement to be highly impacted by social variables rather than academic ability for both boys and girls.

Settler, missionary, and the State: contradictions in the formulation of educational policy in colonial Swaziland

Since the end of the colonial period, historians of Africa have argued over the nature of British imperial design regarding the education of Africans. This paper will examine the case of Swaziland, which exemplifies the lack of design, and the ad hoc nature of educational development. Swaziland in turn can be seen as representative of the Colonial Office’s lack of a coherent educational development policy for all of its African territories. Swaziland was viewed by colonial strategists as an especially complicated challenge when it came to colonial education policy. Not only was its indigenous population increasingly divided along class lines beginning in the early 1900s, but it was also a European settler colony. Furthermore, competing ethnic loyalties and economic bases within the settler community had led to its progressive Balkanization, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century. The British Colonial Office archives quickly reveal the nature and extent of the debate regarding the role of education in colonial development policies. Those policies that did exist tended to be vague and theoretical, looking at colonies in blinkered fashion as composed of the colonizers and the colonized, and for the most part dismissive of the realities of individual territories and their geopolitical and historical realities. We shall see that this lack of individualization for the territories created a situation of what some colonial administrators referred to as a lack of rule rather than ‘indirect rule’, and thus a lack of educational or any other kind of development. While some educational theorists of Africa have taken the more ‘modernist’ interpretation, defending Western education as a means of necessary (scientific) ‘development’, others have analysed the educational process from a more ‘postmodern’, relativist perspective, rejecting all forms of ‘totalising reason, or grand theory’, especially originating from the West. Related to this latter interpretation, we have postcolonial theorists who align themselves primarily with postmodernists, challenging the universality of Westernization, and consequently the legitimacy of imposing Western education on African populations. However, postcolonialists (such as Edward Said), while supporting relativism, have also tended to espouse their own absolutes as they have viewed colonialization, and thus the spread of Western education, as a simple two-sided equation with the evil colonizer pitted against the colonized – a single ‘other’.

“Neither a borrower, nor a lender be”: Educational Reform through Transnational Borrowing and Lending1

When does it become time for a nation to resort to borrowing educational policy from abroad; when that time comes, who should do the lending, and what will the consequences for both parties be? Thomas Friedman argues in The World Is Flat that it is high time for the United States to begin borrowing educational policy from others. Furthermore, we might conclude that this borrowing should come from nations in the East, which, according to Friedman, are quickly surpassing the United States in educational outcomes, ingenuity, and technological engineering productivity. While some of Friedman’s readers may view him as an alarmist, those U.S. policy makers taking him more seriously are likely to recognize the immediacy in his world analysis as similar to other critical periods in the history of U.S. education, such as the late-1950s Soviet Sputnik era or the late twentieth-century obsession with Japanese schooling at the wellspring of its postwar economic miracle. However, if U.S. policy makers were to conclude that now is the time to begin borrowing, how would it proceed without making the all too common mistake of attempting to transplant educational policies in their entirety from afar without indigenizing them in the process? Answers to these and other questions regarding the lending/borrowing process are explored in the two volumes examined in this review essay, Educational Policy Borrowing: Historical Perspectives, edited by David Phillips and Kimberly Ochs, and The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending,

Education for Liberation or Domestication? Female Education in Colonial Swaziland

The issue of female education under colonial powers and the impact that it had on the cultures of the colonized is gaining in importance among colonial historians, feminist scholars, and education specialists. While academic research addressing the British and French use of formal educational systems as a means to gain power, produce a semiskilled labor class, and spread European culture has flourished, only recent research has examined different colonial philosophies regarding the education of females as distinct from males. Colonial educational policy, curriculum design, and targeted enrollments worked together to provide a different educational experience for boys and girls in many parts of Africa, including Swaziland. Furthermore, the interaction of these formal educational policies, together with Swazi traditional, patriarchal practices, may have worked cooperatively to weaken what power and status Swazi women had previously enjoyed in society.