This well researched volume tells the story of music education in Japan and of the wind band contest organized by the All-Japan Band Association. Identified here for the first time as the world s largest musical competition, it attracts 14,000 bands and well over 500,000 competitors. The book s insightful contribution to our understanding of both music and education chronicles music learning in Japanese schools and communities. It examines the contest from a range of perspectives, including those of policy makers, adjudicators, conductors and young musicians. The book is an illuminating window on the world of Japanese wind bands, a unique hybrid tradition that comingles contemporary western idioms with traditional Japanese influences. In addition to its social history of Japanese school music programs, it shows how participation in Japanese school bands contributes to students sense of identity, and sheds new light on the process of learning to play European orchestral instruments.

"Important and unique." - Professor Richard Colwell, "Ethnomusicology Review."
"A major contribution to studies of international music education and of music in Japan." - Professor Bonnie Wade (Foreword to the book).
"The definitive book on Japanese wind music . . . should be in every library" - Maestro Tim Reynish (timreynish.com/)
"A comprehensive, stunning account of wind bands in Japan . . . the most comprehensive information about concert (wind) band participation in any country" - Peter Gouzouasis and Alan Henderson, "Music Education Research."
"Hebert's study should be highly lauded. Seeing extracurricular club activities in the light of Japanese studies is a perspective that I intend to employ in my own research in the future . . . this publication can serve as an important reference and inform the decisions of those attempting to advance changes to the educational system."- Professor Hiroshi Nishijima of Tokyo Metropolitan University, "Social Science Japan Journal."
"It provides an interesting insight into the successful pedagogical techniques and methods required to cultivate collective notions of identity and ultimately musical achievement.This book is a valuable resource to those with interests in a number of musical and academic fields, in particular music education, ethnomusicology and band studies. Throughout the book the author successfully connects these different strands and produces an accurate and engaging picture . . ."- Richard Jones, PhD, "The World of Music."
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Drawing on a wide variety of traditions and methods in historical studies, from the humanities and social sciences both, this volume considers how historians from a wide variety of countries create the study of the history of education. It poses ways of thinking about the questions, methods, and knowledge of historical studies in the formation of schooling that go beyond those typically found in American studies of the history of education.

There's hope for childhood. Despite a perfect storm of hostile forces that are robbing children of a healthy childhood, courageous parents and teachers who know what's best for children are turning the tide. Johann Christoph Arnold, whose books on education, parenting, and relationships have helped more than a million readers through life's challenges, draws on the stories and voices of parents and educators on the ground, and a wealth of personal experience. He surveys the drastic changes in the lives of children, but also the groundswell of grassroots advocacy and action that he believes will lead to the triumph of common sense and time-tested wisdom. Arnold takes on technology, standardized testing, overstimulation, academic pressure, marketing to children, over-diagnosis and much more, calling on everyone who loves children to combat these threats to childhood and find creative ways to help children flourish. Every parent, teacher, and childcare provider has the power to make a difference, by giving children time to play, access to nature, and personal attention, and most of all, by defending their right to remain children.

This book presents the early existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger as a way to reformulate academic disability studies and activist disability politics. It redresses the almost categorical neglect of human difference in the philosophy of Heidegger. It proceeds by applying a revised version of his phenomenology to social policy aimed to get disabled persons to work and to methods in rehabilitation science intended to be more 'client friendly'. Phenomenological philosophy is extended to the topic of disability, while, at the same time, two key concerns facing disability studies are addressed: the roles of capitalism in disablement, and of medical practice in the lives of disabled persons. By reframing disability as a lived way of being in the world, rather than bodily malfunction, the book asks how we might rethink medicine and capitalism in democratic ways. It aims to transform Heidegger's work in light of his troubling politics to produce a democratic social theory of human difference.

This book portrays the experiences of self-described "outsider" or "other" teachers-teachers whose identities set them apart from their students based upon combinations of race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, nationality, ability status, religion, or other identity characteristics. The teachers profiled bring experiences of social isolation and difference into the classroom and demonstrate perspectives and habits of mind that inform a nuanced approach to interaction with students.

Development education is a radical form of learning that addresses the structural causes of poverty and injustice in the global North and South. This volume debates development education practice and the policy environment in which it is delivered. It affirmatively points to the transformative power of education as a means toward social change.

This book fills an existing gap within the practice of global citizenship education by offering Asian perspectives. In this book, Soka or value-creating education developed by the Japanese educators, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi (1871-1944) and Daisaku Ikeda (b. 1928) is compared to the ideas of the Indian political leader Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948). This study of their respective thoughts and movements has a significant bearing on the three domains of learning within the global citizenship education conceptual dimensions of UNESCO - the cognitive, socio-emotional, and behavioral. This book deftly combines theoretical discussions with themes and suggestions for practice and future research.

This book examines corporal punishment in United States public schools. The practice-which is still legal in nineteen states-affects approximately a quarter million children each year. Justification for the use of physical punishment is often based on religious texts. Rather than simply disregarding the importance of religious commitment, this volume presents an alternative faith-based response. The book suggests the "hermeneutical triad," of sacred text, tradition, and reason as an acceptable approach for those seeking to be faithful to religious text and tradition.

In light of the growing phenomenon of Islamic schools in the United States and Europe, this compelling study outlines whether these schools share similar traits with other religious schools, while posing new challenges to education policy. Merry elaborates an ideal type of Islamic philosophy of education in order to examine the specific challenges that Islamic schools face, comparing the different educational realities facing Muslim populations in the Netherlands, Belgium, and the United States.

Education as a major social movement is coming to an end. The End of School Reform derives its theoretical framework from the ideas of Hegel, who perceived an end to history, and Thomas Kuhn, who theorized that history does not follow a linear path but that the scientific landscape changes through large-scale movements called "paradigm shifts". This book examines the partial successes of history's three major educational reform movements (the Progressive Education movement at the beginning of the 20th century, the Equity Reform movement of the 1960's-1970's, and the Excellence Reform movement from 1983 to the present) and contends that such major movements in education will never be seen again. Blending Arthur Danto's "end of art", John Horgan's "end of science", and Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" theses-all of which argue that only minor reforms will occur in the future-and drawing on interviews of education historians and policy professors, the "end of school reform" thesis maintains that educational innovation may still continue, but only on a piecemeal basis.

Critique and utopia are two of the central concepts of the sociology of education, and they indeed exemplify the critical traditions in the sociology of education as a discipline. This book analyzes, using theoretical frameworks and empirical data, the state of the art of the sociology of education at the beginning of the century, offering a systematic criticism of the dominant theories, and findings in the sociology of education. Key chapters focus on theoreticians who have made an impact in the discipline, including Basil Bernstein, Pierre Bourdieu, Paulo Freire. Yet, there is much more than theoretical analysis in this book. It also offers insights for policy and practice in diverse areas of education, including the formal, nonformal, and informal modalities of educational praxis.

Schooling in the region known as Micronesia is today a normalized, ubiquitous, and largely unexamined habit. As a result, many of its effects have also gone unnoticed and unchallenged. By interrogating the processes of normalization and governmentality that circulate and operate through schooling in the region through the deployment of Foucaultian conceptions of power, knowledge, and subjectivity, this work destabilizes conventional notions of schooling's neutrality, self-evident benefit, and its role as the key to contemporary notions of so-called political, economic, and social development.

This work aims to disquiet the idea that school today is both rooted in some distant past and a force for decolonization and the postcolonial moment. Instead, through a genealogy of schooling, the author argues that school as it is currently practiced in the region is the product of the present, emerging from the mid-1960s shift in US policy in the islands, the very moment when the US was trying to simultaneously prepare the islands for putative self-determination while producing ever-increasing colonial relations through the practice of schooling.

The work goes on to conduct a genealogy of the various subjectivities produced through this present schooling practice, notably the student, the teacher, and the child/parent/family. It concludes by offering a counter-discourse to the normalized narrative of schooling, and suggests that what is displaced and foreclosed on by that narrative in fact holds a possible key to meaningful decolonization and self-determination."

This book evaluates contemporary approaches to education, with a particular focus on the ways in which assessment shapes the educational experience and influences pupils and students. It adopts a critical approach, arguing that there is a need for students to develop critical thinking skills, be flexible and have the capacity for originality. Education has increasingly come to be seen as a process with qualifications as the output; however, as economies change, attaining advantage increasingly relies on creativity and originality. Unfortunately, in the quest to remove uncertainty from education, creativity and originality are often overlooked; and the result is that education is impoverished. Creasy argues here that there is no single factor that has shaped education and led to this situation; rather, developments within education can be seen as having been shaped by a range of forces such as neoliberalism, New Public Management, standardization and internationalization. This is not to claim any deliberate undermining of education, but the cumulative effect is that education is less and less fit for purpose. Written for anyone involved in education, student, teacher or manager, this book draws upon Educations Studies, Sociology and Social Policy to offer a compelling critique of contemporary education.

Winner of the 2013 Eleanor Maccoby Award from APA Division 7
Women's schooling is strongly related to child survival and other outcomes beneficial to children throughout the developing world, but the reasons behind these statistical connections have been unclear. In Literacy and Mothering, the authors show, for the first time, how communicative change plays a key role: Girls acquire academic literacy skills, even in low-quality schools, which enable them, as mothers, to understand public health messages in the mass media and to navigate bureaucratic health services effectively, reducing risks to their children's health. With the acquisition of academic literacy, their health literacy and health navigation skills are enhanced, thereby reducing risks to children and altering interactions between mother and child. Assessments of these maternal skills in four diverse countries - Mexico, Nepal, Venezuela, and Zambia - support this model and are presented in the book.
Chapter 1 provides a brief history of mass schooling, including the development of a bureaucratic Western form of schooling. Along with the bureaucratic organization of healthcare services and other institutions, this form of mass schooling spread across the globe, setting new standards for effective communication - standards that are, in effect, taught in school. Chapter 2 reviews the demographic and epidemiological evidence concerning the effects of mothers' education on survival, health, and fertility. In this chapter, the authors propose a model that shows how women's schooling, together with urbanization and changes in income and social status, reduce child mortality and improve health. In Chapter 3, the authors examine the concept of literacy and discuss how its meanings and measurements have been changed by educational research of the last few decades. Chapter 4 introduces the four-country study of maternal literacy. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 present the findings, focusing on academic literacy and its retention (Chapter 5), its impact on maternal health literacy and navigation skills (Chapter 6), and changes in mother-child interaction and child literacy skills (Chapter 7). Chapter 8 presents a new analysis of school experience, explores policy implications, and recommends further research.

Based on firsthand reporting in Iran and the United States, "The Iran Agenda" explores the turbulent recent history between the two countries and shows how it has led to a showdown over nuclear technology.In addition to covering the political story, Erlich offers firsthand insights on Iran s domestic politics, popular culture, and diverse population He also interviews the former Shah s son, Reza Pahlavi, as well as the members of Southern California s large Iranian expatriate community and reports on their efforts to shape Iran s future."

The first fully comparative empirical analysis of the relationship between education and social cohesion, this book develops a new "distributional theory" of the effects of educational inequality on social solidarity. Based on a wide-ranging theoretical critique, and extensive analysis of data on inequality and social attitudes for over 25 developed countries, the study shows how educational inequality undermines social trust, civic co-operation and the rule of law. It is not how much education a country has that matters for social cohesion but how it is distributed and the co-operative values that people learn.

Improving Student Achievement: Reforms that Work expands on the first volume in the Milken Family Foundation series on education policy, ""Talented Teachers: The Essential Force for Improving Student Achievement."" The series explains to policymakers, parents, business leaders, and teachers the importance of teacher quality in increasing student achievement. This volume is based primarily on the proceedings from the 2004 Milken National Education Conference (NEC), which was held in Washington, D.C., in May 2004. Reform of any kind is an arduous process. It requires forward thinking, hard work, collaboration, and commitment on the part of teachers, administrators, policy leaders, and other supporters of the endeavor. Education reform in particular can be especially difficult due to the many ingrained features of our current K-12 system; however, it is vital to learn from our past mistakes and break the cycle of failed efforts in order to fix the system that is the lifeblood of our country's future success. These proceedings provide insights into some of those past efforts as well as some of the current initiatives that provide optimism and hope in schools across the country. From these examples, we recognize that it is imperative that we improve student achievement by embracing reforms that work.

As a diverse, interdisciplinary group of scholars, drawing from experience in 12 countries, contributors to this volume share an anti-oppressive stance and have utilized an array of theories and research strategies to counter the persistent and growing number of exclusions in education - based on race, class, gender, ethnicity, language, dis/ability, sexual orientation, and citizenship status. Authors include education researchers, teacher educators, and theorists who have worked for many years on issues of social and educational inclusion and empowerment of groups which have been marginalized and share a focus on pedagogy, policy, and professional development of teachers. Contributing authors share a deep commitment to naming ways in which social exclusion has diminished the educational and life chances of many students in our various sites of work and regions of the world - and to moving the discourse and action beyond pedagogies of exclusion to a more visionary and inclusive praxis.

With Warnock, the so-called 'architect' of inclusion now pronouncing this her 'big mistake' and calling for a return to special schooling, inclusion appears to be under threat as never before. This book takes key ideas of the philosophers of difference - Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida - and puts them to work on inclusion. The book offers new challenges for those involved with education to invent new ways of tackling the 'problem' of inclusion.

"Public Universities and the Public Sphere" argues that two crises facing America - a crisis of public discourse and a crisis of public higher education - are closely connected. The center of significant public discussion in the United States is located in a core public sphere consisting of publications, associations, and universities that was consciously constructed in the nineteenth century. The modern American university originated in the process that created the core public sphere. Public universities essentially democratized the core public sphere in the twentieth century. Part of the solution, Smith argues in this timely work, to both crises lies in understanding and building on the connection.

Informed by the most up-to-date research from around the world, as well as examples of good practice, this handbook analyzes values education in the context of a range of school-based measures associated with student wellbeing. These include social, emotional, moral and spiritual growth - elements that seem to be present where intellectual advancement and academic achievement are being maximized. This text comes as 'values education' widens in scope from being concerned with morality, ethics, civics and citizenship to a broader definition synonymous with a holistic approach to education in general. This expanded purview is frequently described as pedagogy relating to 'values' and 'wellbeing'.

This contemporary understanding of values education, or values and wellbeing pedagogy, fits well with recent neuroscience research. This has shown that notions of cognition, or intellect, are far more intertwined with social and emotional growth than earlier educational paradigms have allowed for. In other words, the best laid plans about the technical aspects of pedagogy are bound to fail unless the growth of the whole person - social, emotional, moral, spiritual and intellectual, is the pedagogical target. Teachers and educationalists will find that this handbook provides evidence, culled from both research and practice, of the beneficial effects of such a 'values and wellbeing' pedagogy.

International education in the United States is at a significant crossroads. The magnanimity of the 102nd Congress has raised the possibility of federal financial support of international studies to a new level. The newly established governing board of the National Security Education Act can provide unprecedented coordination of federally supported international education programs. If federal financial support can be maintained and coordination achieved, the objectives of the IEA of 1966 can be realized in the 1990s. The academic community and public policy makers need to be made aware of the opportunities at hand in order for this to be possible. U.S. education generally and higher education specifically have a responsibility to improve our international capabilities in order to meet the post-Cold War challenges of a complex world.