Description:
Trajectories in the Development of Modern School Systems provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical critique global reform movements that seek to homogenize schooling around the world and how and why they inevitably confront significant tensions caused by differences in heritage, politics, and formal structures.
Review Quotes:
"This book really comes together.What it shows--time and time again, in a variety of national contexts and time periods--is that efforts to import school policies and curricula and practices from elsewhere always experience an intense interaction with national policies and curricula and practices. It's not that globalization efforts have no impact; it's that this impact is nonlinear and not at all necessarily in the intended direction. National systems of schooling use international initiatives for their own purposes, just as globalizers try to use national vulnerabilities to advance their own agendas."
--David F. Labaree, Stanford University, USA