Robert F. Arnove

Revisiting the “Big Three” Foundations:

A review of the funding strategies and priorities of the Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford Foundations over the past twenty-five years indicates that although these major philanthropies have adjusted to changing international and national contexts, they continued to engage in the same activities identified by Arnove (1980) in Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism. These foundations claim to attack the roots causes of the ills of humanity; however they essentially engage in ameliorative practices to maintain social and economics systems that generate the very inequality and injustices they wish to correct.

Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) Facing the Twenty‐First Century: Challenges and Contributions

The beginning of a new century provides an appropriate opportunity to take stock of our field of study and common endeavor. In this presidential address, I examine challenges and contributions. The challenges relate to our knowledge base, our approaches to the study of education and society, and what we do with that knowledge. Our strengths reside in what we as academics, policy makers, and practitioners can contribute to knowledge creation and dissemination, to improvements in education systems at home and abroad, and ultimately to a global consciousness in the various constituencies we serve. In other words, as the theme of the year 2000 San Antonio conference queried: ‘‘What do we know? What can we contribute?’’ Very much in the tradition of Gary Theisen’s 1997 presidential address, I will attempt to stand on the shoulders of my predecessors—while also drawing inspiration from the writings of my contemporaries as well as those of new scholars.1 My address is based on past presidential addresses, especially those of the past 10 years, the overarching themes of our annual conferences in recent years, Comparative Education Review (CER) articles selected as the recipients of the George Bereday Award, dissertations chosen for the Gail P. Kelly Award, and commentary by the editors of CER in the 1990s.

Credits, curriculum, and control in higher education: Cross-national perspectives

Through an examination of the higher education systems in threecountries (Indonesia, Nicaragua, and Vietnam), the authors explore howthe use of academic credits for monitoring student progress has been andcontinues to be linked to policies and institutions associated withcapitalist, market-driven economic systems. The recent histories ofthese countries and their current social and political contexts areanalyzed in relation to three interrelated themes that have emerged fromthe analysis of the three cases. These themes are: (1) Linkages topolitical and economic systems: higher education as vocationaltraining, (2) Standardization, efficiency, andtechnocracy, and (3) Who controls the curriculum? Inconclusion, the authors suggest that the academic credit system,embedded within a network of other educational practices, hastransformed the university into an institution focused on relativelynarrow, utilitarian aims rather than a more universal pursuit ofknowledge.

Education as Contested Terrain: Nicaragua, 1979-1993.

Introduction - political and educational change in Nicaragua education under tha FSLN education under the Chamarro government pre-university education higher education literacy and adult basic education conclusions.

Issues and tensions in popular education in Latin America

Abstract This article examines a set of issues pertaining to the goals, content, processes, and outcomes of popular education projects in Latin America. Special attention is given to how these issues affect the status of women. Tensions in popular education projects in conservative and reformist societies are contrasted with those in a society undergoing radical change, Sandinista Nicaragua.

The Nicaraguan National Literacy Crusade of 1980

It is rare that a scholarly journal can publish an article that combines firsthand observation, an analytical approach, and a topic which has been in the newspaper headlines recently. Robert Arnoves discussion of the Nicaraguan literacy effort is one such article. We publish it in the belief that it will help us understand a contemporary educational issue. The role of education in a revolutionary society and one of the key means of mass mobilization--the literacy campaign-are both highlighted in Arnoves discussions. Clearly, all of the evidence is not yet in on the Nicaraguan experiment. However, what is now happening in that country is of importance to the understanding of nonformal education, literacy, and mass mobilization in the Third World. Editors

A Political Sociology of Education and Development in Latin America

This article argues that a political sociological perspective facilitates analysis of the potential and limitations of education to contribute to national development in Latin America. Such a perspective enables policy makers, practitioners, and researchers to take into account historical forces, institutional contradictions, and contextual factors, both national and international, that shape the possibilities of educational and social change occurring-and whether such change benefits the least privileged members of a society. A political sociology perspective necessarily involves an analysis of the role of the state and how conditioned capitalist development shapes education policy in the region. In particular, the authors examine how the structural adjustment policies recommend by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and national technical assistance agencies like the USAID have affected the governance, financing, and provision of education to various populations. Case studies of Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil illustrate how these policies have affected equality of educational opportunity and outcomes.

Reflections on comparative education and international development

Taylor and Francis CCOM_A_523258.sgm 10.1080/03057925.2010.523258 ompare: A Journal of Comparative Education 0305-7925 (pri t)/1469-3623 (online) Original rticle 2 10 & Francis 46 002 1 R bertArnove A nove@indi a.edu The relationship between international development and comparative education in the fields of scholarship and policy has been especially strong and significant over the past 50 years. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the field of comparative education focused on the relationship between levels of educational attainment and economic development. How else to explain the phenomenal growth of the German and Japanese economies despite the devastation wrought by war? Certainly, according to comparative education theorists, these countries were able to develop rapidly because of the stock of human resources that existed. When I was studying in what was to become the Stanford International Development Education Center (SIDEC) in the mid-1960s, economists such as Nobel Laureate Theodore Schultz (1967) were articulating the need to look at education as an investment in human capital (a notion to be revisited below) rather than as a mere consumption expenditure. At about the same time, political theorists such as James S. Coleman (1965) and Gabriel Almond and Sydney Verba (1963) were documenting that education was a key to political capacity building and the formation of a more tolerant civic culture in the emerging new nations of Africa, Asia and Oceania, as well as in the industrialised societies of Europe and North America. Beginning in the 1970s, my own writings on education and social change in Latin America favoured the point of view that political development was related to political participation. Depending on the nature of a particular political regime, education could be shaped to control people and limit their world views of what was possible or it could be an agency equipping individuals to question their existential realities and take action to improve their life circumstances and societies as a whole. I was greatly influenced, as were many of my peers, by the writings of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) provided a vision of a humanistic, liberatory education for the most marginalised populations of the world. Other theorists/activists who caught the attention of students of comparative and international education included economists Denis Goulet (1971) of the University of Notre Dame and Dudley Seers (1971) of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, who wrote about the ethics of development and about measuring development in relation to eliminating poverty and improving the quality of life of everyone. Literacy and education were essential components of what, in normative terms, could be considered to be development. Over the ensuing decades, notions of development were viewed in even more comprehensive terms related to the self-determination of individuals, their communities, and nations to pursue courses of action in accord with their values and vision of

World Culture in the Capitalist World-System in Transition.

World culture theory (WCT) offers an explanatory framework for macro-level comparative analyses of systems of mass education, including their structures, accompanying policies and their curricular and pedagogical practices. WCT has contributed to broader efforts to overcome methodological nationalism in comparative research. In this paper, we acknowledge the contributions of world culture theory in these terms, but develop the case for an alternative explanatory framework – world-systems analysis (WSA) – rooted in the historical development and contemporary crises of the capitalist world-economy. This case is built on two major points of critique of world culture theory: first, that its consensus orientation is inadequate for a macro-level accounting of social reality; and second, that its analysis of the economic functions of mass education, in isolation from the capitalist world-economy, further weakens its explanatory power. Working from this critique, we elaborate the capacity of world-systems analysis to overcome these shortcomings by providing a more comprehensive, historical perspective. This alternative approach incorporates the identification and analysis of shared cultural understandings underpinning policy and institutional practice, linked to the development of the capitalist world-economy. We conclude this paper by affirming the value of WSA as an alternative approach for comparative research, and its potential contribution to the development of more enlightened educational policy and a more just and democratic world-system.

Extraordinary Teachers, Exceptional Students

The interplay between master teachers and gifted students offers lessons that can be applied to all teachers who want to develop the potential of their students.