In this special edited volume, scholars with diverse backgrounds and conceptual frameworks explore how economic, political, social and ideological forces impact on school curricula over time and place. In providing regional and global perspectives on curricular policies, practices and reforms, the authors move beyond the conventional notion that school contents reflect principally national priorities and subject-based interests.

This book highlights some of Kenneth King’s diverse contributions to international and comparative education, African studies and development studies over more than four decades. From his pioneering work on the first educational commissions to Africa, through his research on skills training in the informal sector, and on to his critical analysis of education analysis in development agencies, this book makes influential materials available in one place. Appropriately, it illustrates his career-long connections with Kenya, but also his more recent engagement with Japan, China and India. It is the first CERC volume to pay significant attention to the policies and politics of skills development. Kenneth King is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Edinburgh. He was based in and directed its Centre of African Studies for many years, and lectured on international perspectives in education and training in its School of Education. His research interests have addressed the politics and planning of skills development, including in the informal sector of the economy, aid policies towards education of both Western and Asian donors, and higher education cooperation. He founded NORRAG, the network for international policies and cooperation in education and training, in 1986, and edited NORRAG News until 2016. He was President of the British Association for International and Comparative Education (BAICE) from 2014-2016, and was one of the founding members of the UK Forum on International Education and Training (UKFIET).

This edited volume reflects on how the “transnational” features in education as well as policies and practices are conceived of as mobile and connected beyond the local. Like “globalization,” the “transnational” is much more than a static reality of the modern world; it has become a mode of observation and self-reflection that informs education research, history, and policy in many world regions. This book examines the sociocultural project that the “transnational turn” evident in historical scholarship of the last few decades represents, and how a “transnational history” shapes how historians construct their objects of study. It does so from a multinational perspective, yet with a view of the different layers of historical meanings associated with the concept of the transnational.

This book contributes to critical thinking about globalization and educational knowledge and, at the same time, opens our spirits to the theoretical opportunities and educational enrichment that the globalization era offers.

Over the past fifty years, new theoretical approaches to comparative and international education have transformed it as an academic field. We know that fields of research are often shaped by "collectives" of researchers and students converging at auspicious times throughout history. Part institutional memoir and part intellectual history, Transforming Comparative Education takes the Stanford "collective" as a framework for discussing major trends and contributions to the field from the early 1960s to the present day, and beyond. Carnoy draws on interviews with researchers at Stanford to present the genesis of their key theoretical findings in their own words. Moving through them chronologically, Carnoy situates each work within its historical context, and argues that comparative education is strongly influenced by its economic and political environment. Ultimately, he discusses the potential influence of feminist theory, organizational theory, impact evaluation, world society theory, and state theory on comparative work in the future, and the political and economic changes that might inspire new directions in the field.

Originally published in 1989. What should be taught in schools? This book explores the differing curriculum traditions in Britain, Europe, the USA, Latin America, India and the Far East and the possibilities for change. For the practising teacher and the educationalist it opens up the debates about ‘quality’ in education which have been intense in many countries throughout the 1980s and focuses on how different countries are trying to change the curriculum to achieve higher standards and greater relevance. Considering the age-old questions "Who shall be educated?" and "What knowledge is of most worth?", four major curriculum traditions are examined in an historical context. The authors show how some European and American practices were freely incorporated into emerging systems in other parts of the world while elsewhere curricula were transferred by imperialists to their colonies and then modified. In the first part of the book the difficulties of curriculum change are explored within the contexts of countries where the curricula are rooted in indigenous models. The second part examines countries where curricula have been transferred from other parts of the world and how this affects curriculum change. In each case the politics of educational change since 1945, when compulsory education was introduced in many countries, has been analysed. The book will help students of education to understand the issues of curriculum reform and the transfer of curriculum models and places the problems in an international perspective with case studies.

This book brings together contributions from around the world that analyse and reflect on the way curriculum is configuring and reconfiguring that world.