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Thich Nhat Hanh, a 76-year-old Buddhist monk of the Vietnamese meditation school, exemplifies mindfulness in his daily life and teaches these principles around the world. Preferring to be called "Thay" which means teacher, he has written over 75 books on such subjects as mindfulness in daily living and its relation to social action. His teachings can be identified with "engaged Buddhism," which emphasizes the importance of community, yet points out that one need not look outside oneself for love because loving oneself with proper care and understanding is loving the world. Mindfulness is the energy of being aware and awake to the present moment throughout the day. It can be practiced in the kitchen, bathroom, one's room, and on the walking path. Thay believes America's disregard for daily living has contributed to violence in the world and explains that its foreign policy and Americans' personal relationships disallow the deep listening needed to understand the suffering and issues of people in other nations. Adult educators such as Freire and Boal wish to transform fear and oppression into empowerment and understanding. Adult educators also agree with Thay that learning is alive and well within each person, each community, each culture; equality is in one's mind; dialogue is necessary; adult educators must be aware of the culture, customs, and very being of their students; and balance is valued. (Contains 19 references.) (YLB)

Outlines national language policy for Australia, taking into account the culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse society, as well as role of English and uses of other languages in the community. Since English is the dominant language, all citizens and permanent residents have a right to learn it to level of proficiency that meets their personal, social and vocational needs. (SL)

The paper explores the effects of industrialization on objectives and content of education for women. Three groups of women serve as examples--Jewish women who immigrated from unindustrialized areas of Europe to the growing industrial economy of early 20th century United States; Ghanaian women who function in a dual economy historically and currently; and Vietnamese women who immigrated from a non-industrial society to the advanced industrial United States in the 1970s. The authors hypothesized that with increasing industrialization, schools would attempt to increase occupational options of women. Data upon which analysis of educational experiences was based included literature on immigrant education, primary sources, exercises from textbooks used in English language classes, historical accounts, curriculum, and classroom observation. For each of the groups, information is presented on the women's roles in their own society and on typical experiences of the women as they participated in American schooling. Findings indicate that, contrary to expectations, schooling tended in all three cases to constrict rather than expand women's economic and social roles and to portray the role of housewife as the most desirable occupation. (DB)

This document, written in Vietnamese and containing a bilingual (English/Vietnamese) forward, examines the differences between the American and Vietnamese educational systems with respect to basic educational philosophy, content, learning style and organization. Also discussed are specific learning problems which affect the education of Vietnamese students in American schools, and the difficulties faced by Vietnamese refugee parents due to adjustment processes. The paper includes ten steps that Vietnamese parents can take to ensure a successful education for their children in American society. (Author/JCD)

Vietnamese has a group of semantically amorphous indefinite words and phrases whose meanings appear to be refined according to the particular syntactic or pragmatic context in which they are embedded. In appropriate environments, they are the functional equivalents of the English "who, someone, anyone, whoever, everyone." Analysis of the occurrence of these words and phrases in Vietnamese suggests four basic contexts that welcome most or all of these indefinites and refine or elaborate their somewhat vague semantics. These include: (1) content questions; (2) situations in which the indefinite functions as an unidentified constant referent; (3) a broad category defined as "irrealis," which subsumes traditional polarity contexts and environments created by both desideratives and root and epistemic modals; and (4) the nomatterative, a semantic structure associated with a type of conditional construction. In each case, attention must be paid to whether the indefinite represents a constant or variable. The syntactic cues associated with each of these contexts are often not sufficiently reliable to prevent ambiguity about the indefinite's function, so both linguistic and extralinguistic information should be used to define these interpretive contexts. This account of indefinites highlights the range of indefinite functions made possible by their apparent lexical underspecification. (MSE)