Trousson, Raymond / Vercruysse, Jeroom (dir.), Dictionnaire general de Voltaire. (Champion classiques, references et dictionnaires 18) 1272 p. 2020:10 (Champion, FR) <670-9>
ISBN 978-2-38096-016-7 paper ¥7,064.- (税込) EUR 38.00

Ying, Zhou, Education and Democracy in China: To Confine the Surging Tide from the Outside World, 1901-1937. (Ideas, History, and Modern China 31) 292 pp. 2023:12 (Brill, NE) <711-962>
ISBN 978-90-04-68787-5 hard ¥25,894.- (税込) EUR 110.00

In this book, Ying Zhou argues that educational reform filled a critical role in bridging the precarious gap between democratic ideals and political realities in late Qing and Republican China, where institutional change in education and the cultivation of a qualified citizenry were two sides of the same coin in the development of democratic education. Through a multi-level analysis of the (re)arrangements of national education and teachings of citizenship, Zhou unravels the complex political and educational nexus in China between 1901-1937, where the hope of education was to bring both political modernity and social progress.

Munoz, Laura K., Desert Dreams: Mexican Arizona and the Politics of Educational Equality. (Politics and Culture in Modern America) 288 pp. 2023:12 (U. Pennsylvania Pr., US) <711-1272>
ISBN 978-1-5128-2511-4 hard ¥9,702.- (税込) US$ 45.00 *

Desert Dreams chronicles seventy-five years of Mexican American efforts to attain educational equality in Arizona, from its territorial period in the nineteenth century to the post-World War II era. Laura K. Munoz reveals how Arizona Mexicans, or Arizonenses, embraced the United States expecting that they would be treated as American citizens. Instead, Anglo Arizonans wrote laws and designed schools to transform Mexicans from "unassimilable immigrants" into "American workers" by restricting their education to the acquisition of fluency in English and mastery of basic domestic and industrial skills. Arizonenses confronted these anti-Mexican attitudes by developing their own politics of educational equality. They founded public schools, served as school leaders, promoted Spanish and English bilingualism, and encouraged their children to pursue high school and college. From these efforts, a small cadre of Arizonenses obtained enough education to sustain a successful middle class, comprised of students, teachers, lawyers, and politicians who fought for Arizonense civil rights, especially the right to a good education. These efforts culminated in Romo v. Laird (1925), the earliest known school desegregation case filed in the state. Arizonenses also developed regional networks that brought them into conversation with Mexican Americans and allies in Southern California and across the borderlands. As the first comprehensive social history of Mexican Americans in Arizona before 1960, Desert Dreams demonstrates that Arizonenses across generations engaged in vital political, legal, and educational debates about civil rights and subsequently gave rise to a national Mexican American political consciousness.

Kelly, Matthew Gardner, Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequity. (Histories of American Education) 270 pp. 2024:1 (Cornell U. Pr., US) <711-1345>
ISBN 978-1-5017-7325-9 hard ¥28,028.- (税込) US$ 130.00 *
ISBN 978-1-5017-7326-6 paper ¥5,810.- (税込) US$ 26.95 *

In Dividing the Public, Matthew Gardner Kelly takes aim at the racial and economic disparities that characterize public education funding in the United States. With California as his focus, Kelly illustrates that the use of local taxes to fund public education was never an inadvertent or de facto product of past practices, but an intentional decision adopted in place of well-known alternatives during the Progressive Era, against past precedent and principle in several states. From efforts to convert expropriated Indigenous and Mexican land into common school funding in the 1850s, to reforms that directed state aid to expanding white suburbs during the years surrounding World War II, Dividing the Public traces, in intricate detail, how a host of policies connected to school funding have divided California by race and class over time. In bringing into view the neglected and poorly understood history of policymaking connected to school finance, Kelly offers a new story about the role public education played in shaping the racially segregated, economically divided, and politically fragmented world of the post-1945 metropolis.

Schapira, Michael, University in Crisis: From the Middle Ages to the University of Excellence. (Off the Fence: Morality, Politics and Society) 200 pp. 2023:12 (Rowman & Littlefield, US) <711-1347>
ISBN 978-1-5381-7499-9 hard ¥20,482.- (税込) US$ 95.00 *

As is obvious to the casual newspaper reader, the debt-saddled student, the increasingly precarious university teaching force, the reactionary politician, and the budget-constrained administrator, the entire system of higher education is in crisis. This book brings necessary clarity to contentious debates about the state and future of the university by reconstructing the institution's history around the theme of crisis. Since its origins in medieval Bologna, the university has been a site where humanity has worked out many of the thorniest questions of individual and collective purpose, often in what were described as crisis conditions. This book is not just a history of the university or a survey of contemporary debates, though. It is also an impassioned defence of the university as a privileged institution through which threats to collective self-governance are most acutely felt and from which strategies for its rehabilitation can be most fruitfully developed.

Zysiak, Agata, Limiting Privilege: Upward Mobility Within Higher Education in Socialist Poland. (Central European Studies) 284 pp. 2023:12 (Purdue U. Pr., US) <711-1349>
ISBN 978-1-61249-881-2 hard ¥21,557.- (税込) US$ 99.99 *
ISBN 978-1-61249-882-9 paper ¥11,855.- (税込) US$ 54.99 *

State socialism tried to industrialize, urbanize, encourage the more frequent washing of hands, urge people to leave the church, emancipate women, and electrify cities-all within a single lifetime. Central to these initiatives was extending educational opportunities to the working class and creating a vision of an egalitarian socialist university that offered advancement for all. Limiting Privilege: Upward Mobility Within Higher Education in Socialist Poland traces the possibilities and limits of this goal by looking at a model socialist university established in 1945 in the working-class city of Lodz, Poland. Initially a flagship project of socialist modernization, the university tried to offer social advancement by privileging admission for peasant and working-class children, but these efforts were often fought by the elite who sought to preserve their privilege. By looking at first-generation students, intelligentsia faculty, and an industrial city, Limiting Privilege explores a complex story about utopian visions, failed aspirations, and reluctant academia.