Michael Apple offers a powerful analysis of current debates and a compelling indictment of rightist proposals for change. Apple presents the causes and effects of further integrating schools into the corporate agenda, as well as current calls for a national curriculum and national testing, privatization and voucher plans, and fundamentalist religious pressures to censor textbooks. He demonstrates who will be the winners and losers culturally and economically as the conservative restoration gains in strength, bringing with it an even greater restratification of knowledge and students in terms of race, class, and gender.

Ruling by Schooling Quebec provides a rich and detailed account of colonial politics from 1760 to 1841 by following repeated attempts to school the people. This first book since the 1950s to investigate an unusually complex period in Quebec’s educational history extends the sophisticated method used in author Bruce Curtis’s double-award-winning Politics of Population. Drawing on a mass of archival material, the study shows that although attempts to govern Quebec by educating its population consumed huge amounts of public money, they had little impact on rural ignorance: while near-universal literacy reigned in New England by the 1820s, at best one in three French-speaking peasant men in Quebec could sign his name in the insurrectionary decade of the 1830s. Curtis documents educational conditions on the ground, but also shows how imperial attempts to govern a tumultuous colony propelled the early development of Canadian social science. He provides a revisionist account of the pioneering investigations of Lord Gosford and Lord Durham.

The notion of improvement permeated social and political discourse in colonial Canadian society. From agriculture to building roads and mills to defining correct habits and behaviour, Nova Scotia's improvers embraced the ideals of innovation and progress and promoted modern programs of government. Daniel Samson moves Nova Scotia and rural Canada from the colonial margins to the heart of a modernizing society, showing how the countryside functioned as a centre of change and innovation. He connects a fascinating spectrum of sites, actors, and strategies and links settlement, farm-building, rural market formation, and early industrialization to the heterogeneous strategies of families and state actors, the rural poor, and rural elites. The Spirit of Industry and Improvement presents the first-ever overview of rural colonial Nova Scotia and provides compelling insights into the formation of modern liberal practices of government and self-government in British North America.

In 1846, a group of women came together to form what would become one of nineteenth-century Hamilton’s most important social welfare institutions. Through the Ladies Benevolent Society and Hamilton Orphan Asylum, they managed and administered a charitable visiting society, orphan asylum, and aged women’s home. At this time, in other parts of the Western world, the public sphere and women’s exclusion from it were reshaping political and gender relations. Although charitable women in Hamilton managed essential social services in the community, and although these efforts were publicly financed, their work was still defined as “private.” In Private Women and the Public Good, Carmen J. Nielson explores the history of this pioneering charity and demonstrates that despite its notable political significance, women’s charitable work failed to challenge the staunch division of private and public spheres.

By the end of the Twentieth century, formal schooling - once the privilege of male elites - had become accessible to women, the working class and some ethnic minorities. The essays in this volume explore the historical origins of this transformation, analyzing struggles Australia, Canada, China, Columbia, India, the United States, and South Africa.

Disrupts popular myths about education in Asia and the Pacific.

This is a book at the cutting edge of research on multiculturalism. With contributions from top American authors currently working in this area, the result is a text that not only dissects the multicultural issues facing education in the USA today, but also reveals the methods and procedures of research into this contentious area.