Free Schooling Research Articles

Preventing HIV Transmission Among Injecting Drug Users (IDUs) and From IDUs to Noninjecting Sexual Partners in Sichuan, China

May you live in interesting times is actually not a Chinese curse. However HIV/AIDS is clearly creating interesting times in China. The initial outbreak of HIV occurred among injecting drug users (IDUs) in Yunan province in 1989. HIV spread along the drug trafficking routes from the Golden Triangle through southern China and northern Vietnam toward export cities on the Pacific. HIV also spread throughout the country and by 2002 there were HIV seropositive IDUs in all 31 provinces and autonomous regions. There was also substantial transmission among plasma donors in Henan province. Initial attempts at controlling HIV in China were hampered by many factors including a weak public health infrastructure differences in development between the eastern and western regions the difficulties in working with the large floating of internal migrants as well as relatively severe stigmatization of the disease. The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic however taught a severe and important lesson. Even if only a small percentage of the population is infected infectious diseases can be a threat to economic growth and national security. A new national policy of Four Frees and One Care (free treatment free voluntary counseling and testing free prevention of mother to child transmission and free schooling for AIDS orphans and provision of social relief for HIV patients) was announced on World AIDS Day 2003. In the most recent estimates there are 650000 people with HIV in China though the actual numbers may be considerably greater than the estimates. There are also high rates of syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases that facilitate HIV transmission. (excerpt)

King's Dialogues: Literature and Medicine

King's Dialogues:Literature and Medicine Introduction Neil Vickers (bio) and Brian Hurwitz (bio) The King's Dialogues in the Humanities is a series of lectures held from time to time at King's College in the University of London. The lectures are generally given by internationally celebrated figures. Typically, a scholar who has crossed a disciplinary boundary—often against prevailing orthodoxies—explains why he or she did so, reflecting, perhaps, on issues of interdisciplinary permeability and miscibility; but the formula is flexible enough to allow for individual variation. In 2005 the theme chosen was Literature and Medicine to mark the launch at King's of what is believed to be the world's first master's program in the field.1 Eight lectures were given by leaders in our field: George Rousseau gave his personal view of the history of literature and medicine as seen from a literature department. Oliver Sacks discussed narrative genre and the case history. Rita Charon elucidated the poetics of house calls. Ron Britton asked what psychiatry and psychoanalysis can learn from literature. Richard Horton used what he called Elizabeth Gaskell's "literature of public health" to make an impassioned plea for a contemporary counterpart, a literature of global health centered on the plight of Africa. Sally Shuttleworth compared the portrayal of childhood in nineteenth-century psychiatry with literary depictions of the child. Brian Hurwitz considered the representational forms of clinical case histories. And Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan discussed what literary theory might learn from illness narratives. The excitement that ran through the room on lecture nights was felt beyond these occasions. Although they attracted a fair share of London's specialists in our field, lectures were open to the public and not just to members of the university; they were dialogues not only between scholars but also between scholars and the wider world. The setting was historic. All the lectures except one took place in a [End Page 189] room that from the fourteenth through nineteenth centuries was the Rolls Chapel in Chancery Lane, where for the last hundred years the Magna Carta has been displayed—a fitting symbol of the intellectual enfranchisement at which the series aims. Reassuringly, perhaps, the funerary monuments of former Masters of the Rolls—senior judges who held custodianship of the parchment records of the Court of Chancery—could be glimpsed behind the podium. We are fortunate to publish three of the lectures here for the first time. The dialogical character of Richard Horton's lecture was perhaps most complex. Though they lived in what was undoubtedly a progressive social era, Victorians liked to take a "long" view of social advancement. The age teemed with ingenious reformers, many of whom achieved the difficult feat of pleasing the privileged and extolling the plight of the needy at the same time. The compromises on which these achievements were based sometimes strike us as unbalanced and even shoddy. Edwin Chadwick (1800–90) proposed to "solve" the problem of child labor by recommending an eight-hour day for children under thirteen, complemented by three hours of education. Employers desperate to avoid restrictions on adult labor applauded him, and Chadwick's proposal was rushed into law. The consequence—not quite unforeseen—was the beginnings of free schooling for children. The same Chadwick who would go on to become a hero of public health as the author of the Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842) played no negligible part in framing one of the most detested pieces of "reforming" legislation of the whole nineteenth century: the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Charles Dickens's outrage against the countless humiliations this piece of legislation visited on the poor can be seen in the opening chapters of Oliver Twist (1837–38), in which destitute and helpless young boys are herded into workhouses and sold off to funeral undertakers when they complain. (He was still railing against the Poor Law in 1865 in Our Mutual Friend.) But Chadwick, once secretary to the legal reformer and philosopher Jeremy Bentham, was proud of the Poor Law Amendment Act, going so far as to claim credit for its most infamous provision: the requirement that...

The legacy of unhygienic plasma collection in China

The legacy of unhygienic plasma collection in China

Keeping Children in School: The Response of the Montreal Catholic School Commission to the Depression of the 1930s

In Quebec, as elsewhere in Canada, the depression of the 1930s highlighted the inadequacies of existing welfare arrangements and ultimately compelled a shift towards greater state intervention and rationalization of philanthropy. Historians have so far devoted little attention to the situation of children and the evolution of child welfare services during this crucial period. This paper seeks to examine the effects of the depression on the origins, the nature and the impact of aid policies in a particular urban school system. The analysis centres on the Montreal Catholic School Commis- sion (MCSC), the largest of Quebec's local public school boards, during the period 1929 to 1940. In 1930, the Commission s primary and secondary schools boasted an enrolment of nearly one hundred thousand students. These mainly French-speaking children of working-class origin were particularly hard hit by the economic crisis. The author argues that the severe physical want experienced by schoolchildren in the depression years constituted a formidable obstacle to regular school attendance and to learning. Faced with this situation, MCSC officials were obliged to abandon a conception enshrining education, health and welfare as separate categories. The economic crisis thus compelled the commission to assume an enlarged, systematized and diversified role in student welfare. School authorities rationalized and expanded the long-standing policy of free schooling for indigents and, in 1934, created a social service agency to provide free milk and clothing to needy children. To this end, they allied a continuing reliance on private charity with the adoption of modern social work practices. However, lacking sufficient funding, MCSC assistance programmes proved hopelessly unequal to the enormous student need. The MCSC s depression-era ini- tiatives were, despite their inadequacies, developments of long-term significance, providing the springboard for social work's entry into the school system.

Barriers and incentives to orphan care in a time of AIDS and economic crisis: a cross-sectional survey of caregivers in rural Zimbabwe

BackgroundAfrica is in an orphan-care crisis. In Zimbabwe, where one-fourth of adults are HIV-positive and one-fifth of children are orphans, AIDS and economic decline are straining society's ability to care for orphans within their extended families. Lack of stable care is putting thousands of children at heightened risk of malnourishment, emotional underdevelopment, illiteracy, poverty, sexual exploitation, and HIV infection, endangering the future health of the society they are expected to sustain.MethodsTo explore barriers and possible incentives to orphan care, a quantitative cross-sectional survey in rural eastern Zimbabwe asked 371 adults caring for children, including 212 caring for double orphans, about their well-being, needs, resources, and perceptions and experiences of orphan care.ResultsSurvey responses indicate that: 1) foster caregivers are disproportionately female, older, poor, and without a spouse; 2) 98% of non-foster caregivers are willing to foster orphans, many from outside their kinship network; 3) poverty is the primary barrier to fostering; 4) financial, physical, and emotional stress levels are high among current and potential fosterers; 5) financial need may be greatest in single-orphan AIDS-impoverished households; and 6) struggling families lack external support.ConclusionIncentives for sustainable orphan care should focus on financial assistance, starting with free schooling, and development of community mechanisms to identify and support children in need, to evaluate and strengthen families' capacity to provide orphan care, and to initiate and support placement outside the family when necessary.

Nutrition in War and Peace

Nutrition in War and Peace

Sidney Webb on the Penalization of Parenthood

Population and Development ReviewVolume 31, Issue 1 p. 145-155 Sidney Webb on the Penalization of Parenthood First published: 30 March 2005 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2005.00056.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract The costs of educating and socializing children to take on adult roles in the economy and society are borne in part by their parents and in part, recognizing the substantial public-good element involved, by the community or the state. The size of that public subsidy and how it is allocated across families of different incomes potentially affect decisions on childbearing—that, at least, is the assumption behind one category of measures seeking to raise fertility where it is very low. That the arguments underlying this area of social policy are of long standing is shown by the statement reproduced below by the prominent British socialist Sidney Webb. It is his evidence before the National Birth-rate Commission, delivered on July 8, 1918. The Commission was set up in 1913 by the National Council of Public Morals, a self-appointed group of prominent citizens. It issued a widely read report, The Declining Birth-Rate: Its Causes and Effects, in 1916. However, the continuing drop in the birth rate (from 24 per 1000 in 1913 to 18 in 1918) led to calls for further investigation and to a reconstituted Commission. One of the terms of reference for this second deliberation was to consider “the economic problems of parenthood in view of the rise of prices and taxation and their possible solutions.” Sidney Webb's statement takes up this matter with characteristic clarity and conviction. Webb is exercised both by the overall deficit of births and, more particularly, by its disproportionate weighting among “the prudent and responsible, and those capable of foresight.” (This eugenic concern is spelled out more strongly in his 1907 Fabian Tract, The Decline of the Birth-rate.) Various ways in which “the economic penalisation of parenthood might be mitigated” are considered, including free schooling, public housing, and abolition of the “marriage penalty” in income tax. But he puts most store in “some system of universal endowment of children during their period of complete dependence.” (In its subsequent report, the Commission declined to recommend any such scheme.) Webb's proposals prefigure many of the social policies later adopted in European welfare states—with at best seemingly modest influence on fertility. Sidney Webb (1859–1947) was a significant figure in the history of social democratic thought in Britain. He was an early member of the Fabian Society and one of the group that in 1895 established the London School of Economics. As a member of Parliament in the 1920s, he held ministerial posts in the first two Labour governments. In collaboration with his wife Beatrice, Webb was a prolific writer on social problems and policies—notably trade unionism, local government, and Fabian socialism. The text below is taken from Problems of Population and Parenthood [Being the Second Report of and the chief evidence taken by the National Birthrate Commission, 1918–1920.], London: Chapman and Hall, 1920. Volume31, Issue1March 2005Pages 145-155 RelatedInformation

Navy Gives Psychiatrist Unique Assignments

Navy Gives Psychiatrist Unique Assignments

Gifted Education in New Zealand

New Zealand has enjoyed a system of free and compulsory schooling for 126 years. During this period many aspects of the New Zealand education system have been recognised internationally as innovative and forward-thinking. Unfortunately, support for gifted and talented learners has not been one of these, and as a nation we have a somewhat unenviable record in this area. However, almost overnight this situation changed, and a series of new initiatives over the past six years have transformed the educational environment for the gifted and talented. The nature of these developments is interesting, as they reflect some of the unique features of the country and its education system; but what is also fascinating, is to reflect on why, after 120 years of ‘official’ neglect, it has been acceptable to target this area for special development.

Fat free schooling: The discursive production of ill-health

This article centres attention on the rising tide of eating disorders, essentially anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, afflicting young people, particularly young women globally, it seems. It explores the relationships between discourses of food refusal/slenderness and those of 'obesity'/'overweight' and examines their effect on curricular concerned with the education of the 'body' in schools First, the analysis points to the limits of reducing eating disorders to a problem of 'body image' or to what some have called the 'cult of slenderness' affecting, and exported from, 'Western cultures'. Secondly, it interrogates the ways in which 'obesity' and 'overweight' are socially constructed and suggests that these discursive corollaries to the cult of slenderness, when expressed in the curricular of schools, may be seriously implicated in the production of disordered eating and ill health. Finally, it is suggested that a shift in the focus of analysis from gender to issues of power and control may be a necessary precursor to more complete understandings of the challenges facing young people in a fast changing global age, as well as to achieving forms of education that can deliver empowerment and health.

State, Education, and the Market

The tail of the tail-end of the 2nd millennium has taught the humankind two valuable lessons: democracy and the market, although imperfect, have succeeded where other systems have failed. What is clear is that the most successful systems are aligned to humankind’s predispositions rather than being inimical to them. Insofar as it aligns itself with the predisposition to greed, consistently regulated capitalism terms out to be the most efficient economic system hitherto observed in human society. Likewise, democracy works by aligning many people’s desire for power with a governance system which on balance is helpful to the general population, unlike various forms of totalitarianism. But recent movements for both capitalism and democracy in many developing countries largely do not subscribe to humankind’s predispositions, rather they appear to be a part of the headlong global trend towards these paradigms. The reason being that the most important ingredient, common to both recipes, is lacking in many developing countries: that is the popular pressure and mobilisation which is sufficiently informed of its duties and rights. This ingredient is most important as it forces out the authoritarian rule whether, totalitarian or ‘democratic’, and makes democratic governance drive the market to the maximum benefit of society. The central thesis of this work is that this most important ingredient is the result of an effective and efficient system of public institutions for free and compulsory universal primary schooling which, if the resource constraint could be overcome, ought to be supplemented by free and compulsory secondary schooling.

The economic return to schooling in Ireland

Recent developments in the schooling returns literature have focused on exploiting alternative instruments. A number of instruments are available in an Irish dataset, including parental background variables (social class and educational attainment), and variables measuring changes in the schooling system (the introduction of free secondary schooling in the mid-1960s, accompanied by a rapid rise in educational participation rates, and the raising of the school-leaving age in 1972). The results suggest, however, that OLS estimates of rates of return are not significantly downward biased as would be suggested by recent arguments in the literature.

The Massification of Education in Hong Kong: Effects on the Equality of Opportunity, 1981–1991

Hong Kong's commitment to free schooling in the 1970s led to a massification of its formerly elite education system. Analysis of census data reveals that, consequently, family background and gender have played smaller roles in determining which children go to secondary school. There was no concomitant increase in social selection at the postsecondary level Ironically, the colonial government owed little of its legitimacy to the provision of equal opportunities for individuals. In years past, social mobility was not central to the rationale for public education. However, with the pending transfer of sovereignty to China, the weakened authority of the government has generated a need for new bases of legitimacy. It may be that guarantees of equal opportunity will emerge in attempts to bolster state authority.

Egalitarian Ideals and Exclusionary Practices: U.S. Pedagogy in the Colonial Philippines

Abstract This essay examines U.S. colonial education in the early 20th‐century Philippines, focusing on the ways in which the teachers recruited from the U.S. derailed the colonial administrators’ earnest if ingenuous attempt to dismantle the indigenous structure of privilege in the new possession vie a system of free primary schooling. The approach breaks with the notion of the state as the ultimate locus of force and attends instead to the study of local sites and ordinary, everyday practices of social regulation. In so doing, it argues that the U.S. teachers in the field transformed the directives handed down to them into a pedagogy that came to have its own subverting tactics, mechanisms and trajectory within the wider colonial polity.

Changing Demographics: Past and Future Demands for Early Childhood Programs

This article provides a historical analysis of how demographic changes in the organization of American family life from the mid-1800s to the present have shaped the demand for programs to complement the efforts of families to educate and care for their children. The author asserts that the United States is in the midst of a second child care revolution. The first occurred in the late 1800s, when families left farming to enable fathers to take jobs in urban areas and when compulsory free public schooling was established for children age six and above. The second has developed over the past 55 years as the proportion of children under six living in families with two wage earners or a single working parent has escalated and propelled more and more young children into the early childhood care and education programs discussed throughout this journal issue. Looking to the future, the author sees indications that the demand for early childhood care and education programs will continue to grow while the needs of the children to be served will become increasingly diverse. To meet these dual pressures, the author argues that public funding for early childhood programs--like funding for public schools--is justified by the value such programs have for the broader society.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF EDUCATION IN SOUTH AFRICA

Such 'rearrangements' are reminiscent of those that resulted from Dr H. F. Verwoerd's 'Bantu Education' programmes, which succeeded in bringing about a similar reallocation of resources from African post-primary to primary education from 1953 to 1970. That an ANC government's budget would be non-racial does not detract from its surprising intention to stress primary education at the expense of secondary and tertiary. For South Africa has already achieved universal primary education for blacks (see Table 2), and it is the whites who not only enjoy free universal secondary schooling to year 10 but can afford to pay the existing fees for a wide range of tertiary education and training. Thus the ANC's astonishing proposal to introduce 'user charges' (a euphemism for school fees) could only further restrict the availability of schooling for blacks who are least able to afford such charges. Obviously the ANC's proposals could not derive from Verwoerd, but they do seem to be based on its advisers' adherence to what has since 1965

Public school expenditures in the plantation states, 1910

Although white children in the postbellum South benefited from the diversion of black school funds, both races had measures of schooling below the national norm. In particular, plantation states had the least commitment to public school systems. This paper theorizes that the tendency for education to create geographical and occupational mobility ran counter to the interests of southern landlords. It shows that agricultural production based on unskilled and highly supervised tenant farming was a major reason for the slow acceptance of universal free schooling in the plantation region of the United States.

Reply to Paul Grendler

With regard to Paul Grendler's points about the curriculum, it may be replied that the impact of Ciceronianism in fifteenth-century Italian education was mainly felt at the post-grammatical level of Latin teaching, i.e., in the study of rhetoric and moral philosophy. There was of course a great difference between medieval dictamen and Ciceronian rhetoric, based on classical rhetorical treatises and modelled on Cicero's speeches and letters, but this new material was usually encountered after the completion of normal secondary education which ended with grammar. In the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, rhetoric and moral philosophy were normally tertiary, i.e., post-school, subjects, and as such the usual place for their study was in universities, equivalent centers of higher education, or the advanced, post-grammatical classes of humanist teachers. Grendler's discussion of the broadening of the Renaissance Latin curriculum after the study of grammar (Schooling, 235-71) corresponds to the further teaching of Latin prose authors in the Middle Ages. A number of classical Latin prose authors had a powerful commentary tradition in the Middle Ages, and this can be related to post-grammatical teaching just as much then as in the Renaissance. With regard to Grendler's point about the predominance of free education in the Italian communes, it is true that Grendler's actual formulation of this trend is cautiously worded; but the evidence that he cites, together with the material in Manacorda, vol. I, 174-75, with the material in Peter Denley's Governments and Schools in Late Medieval (in City and Countryside in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy. Essays Presented to Philip Jones, ed. T. Dean and C. Wickham, London, 1990, 104-5), and with my own still unpublished archival research on Tuscan schools in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, suggests that free grammar education was becoming the norm in Italy by the end of the fifteenth century. In fact free education was established regularly in San Gimignano after 1435, in Colle di Val d'Elsa after 1445, in Arezzo after 1456, in Prato after 1464 and in Pistoia after 1466. The interesting point in all thisunderemphasized by Grendler-is that the free schooling introduced by the Counter Reformation had been largely anticipated by the communal schools of Italy by the turn of the sixteenth century. In reply to Grendler's doubts about the Italian diffusion of Doctrinale and Catholicon in the fifteenth century, manuscript survival and contemporary book inventories suggest a widespread use of these texts, especially Doctrinale. For Catholicon, see Manacorda, II, 237, 253; Bursill-Hall, Census, 55, 78, 136, 140 (3 copies), 142, 166, 208, 252 (2 copies), 255 (2 copies), 257 (3 copies), 264; A. Marigo, I codici manoscritti delle Derivationes di Uguccione Pisano: saggio

Trends in Gender and Family Background Effects on School Attainment: The Case of Hong Kong

Using household census data from Hong Kong in 1971 1976 1981 and 1986 the authors constructed new individual data sets for 4 separate cohorts of youth. The new data include family background variables and allow the authors to examine the selectivity in education over time. The question of how background and gender affect educational attainment is addressed in 2 complementary ways. They first used linear regressions on the number of school years completed and then logistic regressions to calculate the likelihood of making particular school transitions. Consistent with prior research in the US Hungary and the Philippines the 2 methods yield results which are apparently contradictory. The linear effect of family background and gender on attainment diminished over time suggesting a more open educational system. However the effect of these same variables on the odds of making transitions actually increased at the higher levels. During the 15 year period examined Hong Kong attempted to expand the educational opportunities for its youth. Few nations have provided free and compulsory secondary schooling so shortly after having instituted universal primary education. One might expect rapid educational expansion to lead to a more open educational system as well. In fact while the system did become much more open at both the primary and secondary levels it also became more selective at the higher educational levels. (authors)

Les Types de Scolarité : Plaidoyer Pour la Synthèse en Histoire de L'Éducation

Rien ne vaut une lecture assidue des rapports individuels fournis sur les instituteurs par les inspecteurs primaires pour formuler de fructueuses hypothèses de travail, non seulement sur le personnel enseignant, mais sur l'école, les élèves et le milieu. Les tournées d'inspection n'ont pas pour unique objectif d'inciter au travail les instituteurs, de les conseiller et d'apprécier la qualité de leurs relations avec la population locale ; elles sont aussi destinées à fournir des matériaux pour un tableau de la situation scolaire dans chaque circonscription utilisé lui-même par l'inspecteur d'Académie pour rédiger un rapport de synthèse sur son département.Si l'on n'y prend garde, ces sources, trop négligées cependant par l'histoire locale et régionale, risquent de fournir la matière de tableaux pointillistes aux teintes folkloriques. Mais l'histoire générale aurait tort de les mépriser. Les données communales elles-mêmes ne sont pas indignes d'intérêt.