Education Subsystem Research Articles

The Community Deals with the Child Who Has a Handicap

Exclusion messages, however subtle, are interwoven into the community of the child who is handicapped. The subsystems of family, religion, neighborhood, education, health care, and financial assistance agencies have good intentions but frequently communicate poorly with the child and the parents. What is meant as a help becomes a hindrance for the child who must adapt to a limitation while continuing to move toward self-esteem, self-sufficiency, and skills that will enhance productivity and employability. No one negative message will destroy a handicapped child: it is the "history of learned inferiority" that cripples the child who is handicapped. Only when able-bodied individuals within the subsystems recognize the cumulative effect of these messages will the community be responsive to the real needs of the child who has a handicap. Nurses, schooled in sensitivity for the person, should resolve to be in the vanguard in this movement, becoming ever more sensitive to the needs of the handicapped. Such a giant step will begin a fresh and long-needed approach toward understanding those needs central to the well-being of the child who resides in the community and is also handicapped.

Reflections on Anthropology and the Black Experience1

The author discusses the forces that operated before World War II in the United States to limit the number of black anthropologists and the factors that ultimately led to increased participation of black students and professors in the discipline. As one of the less than a dozen “pioneers,” the author uses his own career as an atypical case study to illuminate certain significant facets of the history of anthropology. He discusses the image that anthropology had among Afro‐Americans as well as its role in the early development of race relations theory and multicultural practice. Mainstream anthropology is viewed as an institutional subsystem of an educational subsystem within a political‐economic system that conditions its approach to race and ethnicity.

Manpower targets and educational investments

Quadratic programming can be useful to compute the optimal investment trajectory for an education system which is planned on the base of manpower targets. The computation of optimal investments required to approach manpower targets more closely becomes non trivial if the budget available is insufficient to meet manpower targets exactly, or if the manpower target trajectory is erratic. The quadratic programming problem consists of three components: (1) an optimization criterion which reflects the objective to minimize the squared deviation of actual manpower available from the manpower target; (2) a set of time difference equations which reflect the flow of students, the manpower stock flow and the flow of investments in the education subsystem; (3) a constraint on the budget, available for this branch of education over a planning period. This education investment problem is worked out for middle level technical manpower training in Bangladesh.

ON SOCIAL SYSTEMS THEORY AS A PREDICTOR OF EDUCATIONAL CHANGE: THE ADOPTION OF CLASSROOM INNOVATIONS

All too often in education the “band wagon” has played an important role in the adoption of innovations. An innovation is often dropped into the schools' environment by enthusiastic leaders who have the expectation that anyone can recognize its obvious merits and will adapt his behavior accordingly. Subordinates, however, make their own judgements on how to respond to the innovation and, in varying degrees, elect to accept or subvert its conditions. Within a framework of organizational theory, this study attempts to explain the differing positive/negative responses of distinct groupings of educators toward the adoption of various classifications of innovations. The findings in this study suggest that the educational subsystem or subsystems which, in order to adopt the innovation, are required to make the greatest modifications in their normal procedures of operation will raise the highest level of resistance.

Strategies of Educational Innovation

This chapter discusses the strategies of educational innovation. The study of the innovative process and factors conducive to innovation is a fairly new undertaking. The term innovation had been taken over by the educators from industrial technology as has the entire conception of research and development as a part of the implementation of innovative change. Sometimes innovation is preached with a fervor as if it represented a value per se. People are oblivious of the self-evident fact that significant innovations and persisting changes in education ought to represent adequate responses to fundamental transformations in culture and society. Therefore, not all innovations in education could be regarded as fitting responses to these transformations. One might ask to what extent a certain lag between the development of society at large and the educational sub-system is unavoidable. Is there any reason to believe as did the Swedish School Commission in an optimistic report that the educational system can act as a propelling and progressive force in our society, a kind of optimism that was aired by many people who represented the “new education” after the Second World War. There are ample reasons to believe that the schools are lagging behind because of the social mechanisms involved and that the problem faced by educational planners is to reduce the lag to a necessary minimum.

Análisis socioespacial de los Institutos Tecnológicos federales de la Ciudad de México

Entre 2008 y 2012 se establecieron doce Institutos Tecnológicos Federales en la Ciudad de México para ampliar las oportunidades educativas en las alcaldías con mayor rezago en educación superior. En el presente artículo exploramos la pertinencia socioespacial de este subsistema educativo y buscamos arrojar luz sobre dos problemáticas actuales del mismo. Nuestro análisis se basa en el uso de un sistema de información geográfico (Q-GIS) que incorpora las siguientes variables a nivel de alcaldías y municipios: número de instituciones de educación superior, Índice de Desarrollo Humano, y número de jóvenes de entre 15 y 24 años por municipio o alcaldía. El análisis descriptivo muestra que los IT en la Ciudad de México tienden a ubicarse en las alcaldías con menores niveles de desarrollo regional y mayor número de jóvenes.

Logro y tasas de riesgo en alumnos de alto y bajo desempeño escolar en el nivel medio superior en Sonora

En este artículo se ofrece una especificación de modelos multinomiales que permiten determinar los perfiles probabilísticos de estudiantes denominados “de alto y bajo desempeño” escolar considerando la base de datos de alumnos de la evaluación realizada por el Instituto de Evaluación Educativa del Estado de Sonora (IEEES), 2006-2007, a los diferentes subsistemas de educación media superior en Sonora, México. Los resultados indican que el turno vespertino y el consumo de bebidas alcohólicas se relacionan con la pertenencia al grupo de bajo desempeño escolar. Los de alto desempeño presentan relación directa con el patrimonio cultural, su promedio actual y la discusión de lectura previa; sin embargo, las técnicas pedagógicas implementadas por parte del docente, así como las utilizadas por parte de los alumnos no garantizan la adhesión al grupo de alto desempeño.

Systems analysis approach to research on German education

The paper shows some of the experience of the empirical research on demographic accounting which is being carried out at Heidelberg University, F.R. of Germany. The first part of the paper presents the system including the subsystems (population system, educational system, manpower system). It contains some suggestions how to measure the connections between the subsystems. The first measure is a measure of substitution, the second deals with the degree of general use of a certain educational level in terms of occupation. In the second part of the paper special reference is given to the empirical Heidelberg studies of the educational subsystem. At present the main purpose of the project is to try out the functional relations between the various transition rates involved in the system. There-upon a sensibility analysis will be developed which provides empirical data as to which transition rates are of strategic relevance for educational planning. Here the transition rates are defined as dependent variables, certain influencing factors or determinants as independent variables. Empirical results of the structural analysis will be published at the end of 1968, those of the sensibility analysis at the end of 1969.