Search

This article focuses on the dispersed development of social sciences in Latin America, Asia and Africa. The regionalization take a critical stance towards their ethnocentrism, emphasizing their cultural biases and criticizing their universalistic aspirations. Latin America has played a pioneering role in this movement by organizing collaboration between national scientific communities on a continental scale and creating the necessary structures for scientific progress. UNESCO played an important role in these efforts and is now preparing to play a similar part in Asia and Africa. It is in good measure due to the regional efforts that Latin American social science has reached a degree of sophistication which permits it to confront European and North American communities on an equal footing. The Asian social scientists, supported by the growing recognition of the importance of the social sciences for national development policies, has led in a number of countries to the establishment of organizations of the type of national research councils with important social science sections. In Africa, efforts to organize regional co-operation in social science are very recent. They started shortly after the accession to independence of the African States south of the Sahara.

The article discusses various issues related to international education programs. The author first presents information related to curriculum development in international education and then set forth various reports on this topic. The author refers to major curriculum development projects from around the world which are presented by the International Clearinghouse on Science and Mathematics Curricular Developments. The author presents several reports including one on the UNESCO pilot project on new approaches in biology teaching in Africa and another on the development of new methods, techniques, and materials for teaching physics of light in Latin America.

This article revolves around the issue of training for comparative research in sociology. Though sociologist have concentrated upon the study of Western, industrial society, particularly that of the U.S. and anthropologists upon the study of primitive societies, an important third group of societies pertaining to the large agrarian societies of Asia, Africa and Latin America has been neglected. Although many sociological propositions are stated as universals, in the sense that the relationships between the variables presumably hold in any society, such relationships have usually been observed or tested only in the U.S. society. Because the primitive societies do not have complex systems of stratification, large-scale formal organizations etc., anthropological studies often fail to provide the comparative evidence necessary to test presumably universal sociological propositions. It follows that a major task ahead is the systematic comparative testing of these propositions with data from major societies, especially the national societies of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.