Education: Learning and Schooling Worldwide

Colloquially, “education” usually means “schooling,” and thus this bibliography focuses on schooling, but it also considers education more broadly defined. Sections on schooling are limited to pre-primary, primary, and secondary education, excluding postsecondary even though some university students arguably fall on the border between childhood and adulthood. The interdisciplinary field of educational studies is largely an applied field and much of its literature is devoted to efforts to improve schooling; however, this bibliography identifies descriptive studies of actual practices and beliefs rather than prescriptions for reform. An important theme of literature identified here is that schooling has recently become among the most important settings in which children live and develop, meaning that the current global form of schooling as well as variations in schooling “on the ground” have huge consequences for children’s lives and powerful meanings for all of us.