In Seoul, hundreds of young boys compete to be the best at one single video game: Star-craft. As top players earn hundreds of thousands of euros, being a professional gamer isn't only a wise career move, it is also the path to respect and credibility in the highly competitive society of South Korea. The stars of the Star-craft league are national celebrities, participating on all levels of popular culture.But what happens when play becomes work? For some it will be a struggle to stay on top of their game, for others it might be the turning point of their lives

Set in New York City, NURSERY UNIVERSITY is a feature documentary that reveals the oddly competitive, yet often humorous, world of nursery school admissions. The film tells the story of five families – each with different backgrounds and economic circumstances – attempting to place their toddlers in prestigious Manhattan preschools that have limited spaces and high price tags. NURSERY UNIVERSITY follows the families’ journeys while also going behind the scenes with the experts that advise them and the school directors who must determine which “applicants” to allow through their doors. Enjoy the insanity in this sweeter look at the social issues, and the little darlings at the center of all the fuss.

In Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world, more than four million students attend more than 29,000 Islamic boarding schools. This film offers a rare insight into daily life at one such traditional school. From the students’ sporadic contacts with home, we gather that considerable sacrifices are sometimes made to finance their education. The camera discreetly documents the lives of the young people both inside and outside the classroom. The editing also does little to color our opinion. This open style leaves room for us to get to know the personalities of the young people—and it also matches the approach to teaching at the school. The students aren’t told what to think, but how to think, and are encouraged to show tolerance towards other religions and non-believers. The mixed school also endorses equality between men and women, drawing its justification from the Koran. As the opening titles explain, the type of Islam taught here has been practiced in Indonesia for centuries, but is under threat from rising conservatism.

《教育诗》是马卡连柯的代表作，五十年代在我国曾风行一时。作者认为：教育是像诗一样美好的科学，尤其是教育新人的过程更如同诗歌创作一样，其间充满着艰难困苦的探索，同时也极富浪漫传奇的色彩。作者在书中描述了将一群犯罪少年改造成为社会新人的故事，由于其文笔娴熟而幽默，叙述充满激情，更由于在创作中表达出的深刻的人道主义精神，使《教育诗》影响深远。

Book Description In this book, Martin Carnoy explores the surprising success of the Cuban educational system, where the average elementary school student learns much more than her Latin American peers. In developing the case for Cuba's supportive social context and centralized management of education, Carnoy asks important questions about educational systems in general. How responsible should government be for creating environments that encourage academic achievement? How much autonomy should teachers and schools have over their classrooms? Is there an inherent tradeoff between promoting individual choice and a better system of schooling? Cuba's Academic Advantage challenges many prevailing views about the effectiveness of educational markets, school and teacher autonomy, decentralized decision-making, and government responsibility for children's social and economic welfare. Drawing on interviews with teachers, principals, and policymakers, as well as hours of videotaped material taken in more than 30 classrooms, this book brings new evidence to bear on controversial educational issues currently under debate in many countries.

Upon its initial publication, many reviewers dubbed Dan C. Lortie's Schoolteacher the best social portrait of the profession since Willard Waller's The Sociology of Teaching. This new printing of Lortie's classic - including a new preface bringing the author's observations up to date - is an essential view into the world and culture of a vitally important profession.

National Book Award-winning author Jonathan Kozol presents his shocking account of the American educational system in this stunning New York Times bestseller, which has sold more than 250,000 hardcover copies.

Sponsored by the Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP), this groundbreaking new handbook assembles in one place the existing research-based knowledge in education finance and policy, thereby helping to define this evolving field of research and practice. It provides a readily available resource for anyone seriously involved in education finance and policy in the United States and around the world. The Handbook traces the evolution of the field from its initial focus on school inputs and the revenue sources used to finance these inputs to a focus on educational outcomes and the larger policies used to achieve them. It shows how the current decision-making context in school finance inevitably interacts with those of governance, accountability, equity, privatization, and other areas of education policy. Because a full understanding of the important contemporary issues requires input from a variety of perspectives, the Handbook draws on contributors from a variety of disciplines. While many of the chapters cover complex state-of-the-art empirical research, the authors explain key concepts in language that non-specialists can understand.

With growing numbers of mothers in the work force, industrialized societies are turning increasingly to preschools to educate, nurture, and socialize young children. This book presents a unique comparison of Japanese, Chinese, and American preschools and discusses how these schools both reflect and affect philosophies of child-rearing and early-childhood education and larger social patterns and beliefs in each society. “This book should be required reading for professionals in early education and makes thought-provoking reading for anyone aware of his or her own cultural blinkers.”—Penelope Leach, New York Times Book Review “As in the best ethnographic research—and surely this qualifies for that accolade—the study raises a number of hypotheses about the impact of educational experiences on children… This is a rich book, filled with data, insights, and speculation. The authors are careful to buttress their speculations with extensive references to the scholarly work of others as well as to their own. This reviewer was impressed by their success at bringing this scholarship to bear on their own findings and by their ability to clarify the interplay of culture and schooling in so interesting a fashion.”—Nicholas Anastasiow, Educational Researcher “[An] important study. …Tobin et al have some strong and thought-provoking evidence that demonstrates that preschools may be at the front line of conserving social structures and values… A must read for those who take social issues seriously.”—Carole C. Kemmerer, Los Angeles Times A 55-minute companion videotape is also available that shows a typical day in a preschool in each country and presents evaluations by Japanese, Chinese, and American teachers of their own and each other’s schools.

Getting ahead and getting an education are inseparable in the minds of most Americans. David Labaree argues, however, that the connection between schooling and social mobility may be doing more harm than good, for the pursuit of educational credentials has come to take precedence over the acquisition of knowledge. Labaree examines the competing intellectual and ideological traditions that have fought for dominance in our public schools from the nineteenth century to the present. He claims that by thinking of education primarily as the route to individual advancement, we are defining it as a private good -- a means of gaining a competitive advantage over other people. He endorses an alternative vision, one that sees education as a public good, providing society with benefits that can be collectively shared -- for example, by producing citizens who are politically responsible and workers who are economically productive. He points out that when education is seen primarily as a private consumer good, a number of consequences follow. Formal characteristics of schooling -- grades, credits, and degrees -- come to assume greater weight than substantive characteristics, such as actually learning something. Grading becomes more important for its social consequences than for its pedagogical uses. For these and other reasons, the pursuit of certification and degrees takes precedence over the goals of learning, and the private benefits of schooling take precedence over its democratic and civic functions. "A wonderful book that draws on the history and sociology of education to show why schools have been increasingly oriented around the awarding of credentials rather than the pursuit oflearning". -- William Reese, author of The Origins of the American High School