James Anderson critically reinterprets the history of southern black education from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. By placing black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into black commitment to education, the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, and the conflicting goals of various philanthropic groups, among other matters. Initially, ex-slaves attempted to create an educational system that would support and extend their emancipation, but their children were pushed into a system of industrial education that presupposed black political and economic subordination. This conception of education and social order--supported by northern industrial philanthropists, some black educators, and most southern school officials--conflicted with the aspirations of ex-slaves and their descendants, resulting at the turn of the century in a bitter national debate over the purposes of black education. Because blacks lacked economic and political power, white elites were able to control the structure and content of black elementary, secondary, normal, and college education during the first third of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, blacks persisted in their struggle to develop an educational system in accordance with their own needs and desires.

In this previously untold story of African American self-education, Heather Andrea Williams moves across time to examine African Americans' relationship to literacy during slavery, during the Civil War, and in the first decades of freedom. Self-Taught traces the historical antecedents to freedpeople's intense desire to become literate and demonstrates how the visions of enslaved African Americans emerged into plans and action once slavery ended. Enslaved people, Williams contends, placed great value in the practical power of literacy, whether it was to enable them to read the Bible for themselves or to keep informed of the abolition movement and later the progress of the Civil War. Some slaves devised creative and subversive means to acquire literacy, and when slavery ended, they became the first teachers of other freedpeople. Soon overwhelmed by the demands for education, they called on northern missionaries to come to their aid. Williams argues that by teaching, building schools, supporting teachers, resisting violence, and claiming education as a civil right, African Americans transformed the face of education in the South to the great benefit of both black and white southerners.

In the half century after 1945, South Korea went from an impoverished, largely rural nation ruled by a succession of authoritarian regimes to a prosperous, democratic industrial society. No less impressive was the country's transformation from a nation where a majority of the population had no formal education to one with some of the world's highest rates of literacy, high school graduates, and university students. Drawing on their premodern and colonial heritages as well as American education concepts, South Koreans have been largely successful in creating a schooling system that is comprehensive, uniform in standard, and universal. The key to understanding this educational transformation is South Korean society's striking, nearly universal preoccupation with schooling-what Korean's themselves call their "education fever." This volume explains how Koreans' concern for achieving as much formal education as possible appeared immediately before 1945 and quickly embraced every sector of society. Through interviews with teachers, officials, parents, and students and an examination of a wide range of written materials in both Korean and English, Michael Seth explores the reasons for this social demand for education and how it has shaped nearly every aspect of South Korean society. He also looks at the many problems of the Korean educational system: the focus on entrance examinations, which has tended to reduce education to test preparation; the overheated competition to enter prestige schools; the enormous financial burden placed on families for costly private tutoring; the inflexibility created by an emphasis on uniformity of standards; and the misuse of education by successive governments for political purposes.

"Many countries all over the world are struggling to achieve for all. As part of such effort, they have strategized to provide universal primary education which normally refers to the enrollment of all school age children in primary schools, namely achieving one hundred percent of the net enrollment. While such efforts have been realized in many developing countries, it is a major challenge in most developing countries, especially in Africa following the attainment of independence. This book focuses on the influence of donor agencies in setting for the development of education in Africa leading to the preliminary interventions by different African English countries through the provision of free primary education. It is noted that most of the countries which introduced fee remission through free primary education experienced massive enrollments as many children from disadvantaged groups took advantage of the policy intervention to send their children to school. However, the push for it came to be identified with increasing deterioration in the quality of primary education right from the provision of physical facilities, teaching and learning materials, deployment of teachers, performance and transition from primary to secondary education. The quality of infrastructure and teaching and learning materials were in a deplorable state, especially in the rural areas, where such enrollments were well above the official recommended number of pupils per classroom. It proceeds to provide an interesting and easy to read accounts of the development of universal primary education in selected countries analyzing successes and challenges. Among the key challenges identified in the implementation of the UPE policy include; the lack of adequate planning, financing, inadequate infrastructure, and the HIV/AIDS scourge. On the basis of the above challenges, it is important that policy measures are put in place to improve the quality of primary education in many countries"--

Established in 1895 as the first U.S. scholarly journal in its field, AJS remains a leading voice for analysis and research in the social sciences, presenting work on the theory, methods, practice, and history of sociology. AJS also seeks the application of perspectives from other social sciences and publishes papers by psychologists, anthropologists, statisticians, economists, educators, historians, and political scientists.