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Nationalism is a product of the modern era and is closely linked to the development of capitalism. In a highly mobile industrial society that emerged in modern Europe, people needed to communicate via a common vernacular language, and the speakers of said language gradually formed a sense of unity. The vernacular was then adopted by the government as a common written national language, in its attempt to establish official nationalism, and propagated through a newly established education system (Anderson, 2006). In Asian societies, which skipped this process, the creation of nation was not a result of modernization, but was instead a part of modernization from the very beginning. Asian nations had to face a gap between modernization, which required them to imitate Western values and systems, and the formation of a nation, which in the West was based on existing linguistic peculiarities that distinguished certain members of society from others. The primary aim of this paper is to explore how Asian governments from different backgrounds dealt with this gap. In particular, this paper focuses on music education in schools across Japan, Thailand, Singapore and Taiwan, and argues that the availability of a common language, the change in power holders, the populace’s identification with the government and the historical timing influenced Asian governments’ decisions regarding official nationalism.

The paper deals with John Dewey’s democratic concept of school and its international significance. The man of the XX century, John Dewey (1859-1952) has made great impact on the development of world pedagogy. The masterwork «Democracy and Education» published in 1916 by American scholar and educational reformer is in the focus of attention too. The main elements of John Dewey’s concept of child-oriented school are given along with the following three conditions: «democracy», «growth» and «experience». The author explains the reasons of Dewey’s influence on educational thought and practice in the XXth century. The experience of old European countries such as Great Britain, France, Turkey, as well as Japan, Russia and Latin America is touched upon in the paper. It is stressed that cultural interpretations of Dewey’s ideas and practices in different countries served as the instrument of modernization of the state and school reform stimulator. John Dewey’s democratic ideas brought him international reputation of an outstanding philosopher and the best educator of the XXth century alongside with the other three: George Kershensteiner, Maria Montessori and Anton Makarenko.

After Ottoman colonial rule, education in Greece became an important institution for the ideological construction of a Greek national identity. This paper looks at schooling in Greece just prior to the Greek Revolution and immediately after Greek Independence, and how the Greek national school system assisted in the construction of a Greek national identity. This paper is divided into several sections. The introductory section discusses how a newly independent Greek nation-state struggled to unite the Greek people under a collective national identity. While most people at the time identified with their families, communities, and Greek Orthodox Christian religion, after Greek independence people began to see themselves as members of a broader Greek nation. The section that follows provides a discussion of Greek education during Ottoman colonial rule, and how a type of Greek identity (centered around the Greek Orthodox Christian faith) was maintained through the Greek Orthodox mileu. The Greek Church ran schools, and taught Greek children how to read and write, as well as the virtues of the Orthodox Christian faith. Section three of the article looks at Greek education during the early years of the Greek nation-state. In this section the general contours of the Greek educational system are delineated. The section also discusses how the organization of the Greek national school system was borrowed from extant school models found in Western Europe. Section four describes the Greek national curriculum and how the national curriculum would help to teach future generations of Greek citizens what it meant to be Greek. This is further reinforced in the Greek school textbook, which is part of the discussion in section five. Section five concludes with the role of education and its implications in uniting nations from around the world.

The aim of the present paper is to highlight the process of educational and cultural cooperative between China and African countries, particularly Burundi, the gap it came to fill and the positive outcomes it has generated. It is essentially based on a review of existing relevant documentation. African Universities were born during a period marked by rapid change as most of the countries of the continent were achieving independent nationhood. In this context, those young institutions were assigned the daunting task of contributing to national development through research activities and by producing competent manpower to help in solving the complex problems facing those societies. To this end, African states have sought to enhance the performance of their higher education systems through cooperation with China an emerging but experienced country. Hence, since the 1960s, China has been granting scholarships and other facilities to prospective African leaders and technocrats to study in different regions of the host country. Within this framework, Burundi has enjoyed cooperation assistance from the P.R. China, in economic, medical, cultural and educational matters since independence. This has helped the country to build the capacity of its education system, particularly higher education. We may conclude by saying that the offering of scholarships, the exchange of scholars, artistic performances on both sides as well as the widening Chinese language teachin programme in schools and universities through the Confucius Institute have gone a long way in promoting intercultural appreciation and understanding between the two countries. In this perspective, there is a need for highlighting the extent to which China-Burundi educational and cultural cooperation has contributed the building of mutual understanding between, the two countries.

During the 18th century, the Bourbon dynasty promoted and created an array of educational institutions that would serve its own reformist project by training its military and political agents. This paper approaches this educational system through four of its most important centres: the Naval Officer’s Royal Academy, the Noble’s Royal Seminary, the Royal Academy of Artillery and the Royal Patriotic Seminary of Vergara. The prosopographical analysis of the pupils is the empirical foundation and the core of our work. For the sake of detail, we focus on the Basque and Navarrese students that attended these institutions, who were part of a broader elite closely linked to the Spanish state-building process. Many of the region’s most important families, the ones controlling the regional political space, sent their children to these academies while they took important careers in the imperial political structures. Moreover, our work shows these families’ role in transmitting reformist ideas in their local communities. Therefore, our approach stresses the need to analyse education not in an isolated way, but in close relation with the other elements of the system.

At the outset, «myth», which is a widely held false belief, and «history» as a scientific discipline based on actual fact might appear to be incompatible. However, the history of Indian education abounds with several myths that are far removed from reality. Such myths were developed for political and ideological reasons. As Eric Hobsbawm argues, «myth and inventions are essential to the politics of identity»; to claim that «we are different from, and better than the other is part and parcel of this process» (Hobsbawm, 1997, p. 7). In the history of Indian education, myths were invented and perpetuated to prove that Indians were essentially different to Europeans. In certain myths, Indians are superior to the Europeans and do not require the knowledge created in Europe, and in other myths it was the might of the colonial state that imposed modern education upon the passive recipients. All these myths begin with basic assumption that the world consists of neatly divided categories of East-West; coloniser-colonised, and European-non-European. These categories are often considered to be mutually exclusive, incompatible and impermeable. This paper addresses two primary myths in the history of Indian education – that «pre colonial indigenous education was oral» (Kumar, 1991) and «modern education was European cultural imposition» (Carnoy, 1972) – as well as a cluster of secondary myths created to reinforce them.

Sports activity has entered the age of science. It is no longer limited to applying and passing on the knowledge and methods that prove to be effective but seeks within itself the rules and tools for its own evolution. The purpose of sport are all crossed by the ethical problem. Therefore, sport helps the child to enter an environment different from the family and school environment, but equally important as it is relevant for his education as an individual and as a social subject. The sporting environment, therefore, represents a particular social system, where the child is part of the group through an experience that turns out to take on an educational value at any age. Today, one of the most significant pressure to sport is the use of performance enhancing drugs and methods. In Paralympics games doping methods is commonly called “boosting”. Doping, always, erodes sport’s core values, including fair play and sportspersonship. In order to avert doping, education on ethical decision, multi-tiered educational programs can to protect sport for future generations. The ethical foundation for anti-doping is the protection of the athlete’s health. It is reasoned that anti-doping control is necessary to prevent damage from doping. The essence of sports includes ethics, fair play and honesty. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the main elements of ethical arguments on Anti-Doping practices and policies as help to protecting the education and athlete’s health.

The aim of the paper is to analyse the case of the Italian writer Liala in the light of one specific aspect: the symbolic and crucial role of her work in the changes in Italian women’s fiction from the 1950s. Liala’s work represents a shift from the traditional narrative, where the role of the author is still crucial, to a writing process directly linked to the social, technological and distribution changes resulting from standardization and serialization in literature.

This paper examines the theme of online reading and the role of text and images in this context. The first part contains a bibliographic analysis of the cognitive studies dealing with the reading process. The second part is focused on the new abilities required by humans in the ongoing passage from a reading brain to a digital brain. Considerations and theoretical insights are applied to the study of two categories of digital project: digital archives and virtual museums.