Due to the significance of beliefs in giving direction to the activities of educators, the present study examined the beliefs of 12 Iranian pre-service teachers about democratic education. Overall, the findings of focus group discussion and semi-structured interviews pointed to a technicist and often an apolitical view of teaching held by most of the participants. While these findings can be ex...

The question of effective, high-quality education means many things to many people--some would like our young people to be better educated in the "basic skills"; others are concerned that schools prepare "technologically literate" youth; and still others want schools to be places where kids learn discipline, citizenship and positive democratic values. while all of these concerns are serious, an...

This article highlights the tenth conference of the Alliance of Universities for Democracy (AUDEM) held in Budapest, Hungary. Over the past ten years, AUDEM members have been instrumental in the reform of higher education in Central and Eastern Europe based on democratic principles. This year, government officials, college administrators, faculty members, and academic librarians from around the...

This paper draws on examples of successful stakeholder collaboration in existing projects to reason the importance of collaboration in education quality improvement. Stakeholder collaboration in the definition, implementation, measurement, and evaluation of education quality improvement projects arguably increases the likelihood that the resulting policy will more effectively meet the needs of ...

How might European higher education contribute to the promotion and development of European citizenship? In this article, the author addresses this question through a critical discussion of the notions of ‘active citizenship’ and ‘civic competence’, which play a central role in current policy and research on the role of education in the development of European citizenship. The author argues tha...

Open and Distance Learning (ODL) is an emerging area to address the fundamental issues of access, retention and quality of higher education to improve human capabilities and achieving the vision of knowledge economy. In India, a higher proportion of younger population is found due to unique demographic transition. Providing quality higher education to such a large proportion of population, in a...

We study how well states translate public opinion into policy. Using national surveys and advances in subnational opinion estimation, we estimate state-level support for 39 policies across eight issue areas, including abortion, law enforcement, health care, and education. We show that policy is highly responsive to policy-specific opinion, even controlling for other influences. But we also unco...

In the development of public systems of education, the intention was that everyone should have access to schooling; however, the democratic idea did not extend to giving everyone the opportunity of becoming familiar with the main forms of understanding that make up the critical, reflective level of culture and illuminate the key social institutions. Schooling in this sense which belongs to the ...

This brief article posits that the drive to privatize public services in the US (United States) coupled with growing economic inequality are now so extreme that they threaten a cornerstone of American liberal democracyquality public education. The argument rests on the assumption that there is such a concept as “the public good”. This idea of civic-mindedness is used to contrast examples from ...