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This paper will investigate the state's utilisation of higher education policy as 'compensatory legitimation' within the Cypriot context in the late 1980s. It argues that not only the establishment of the University of Cyprus in 1989 - after thirty years of strong nationalist opposition during the British colonial administration and another thirty years of state hesitation and postponement during political independence - but also the character of the established University (state-based and linked to the international community of scholarship) can be explained mainly as the result of the state's decision to utilise higher education in order to make up for its serious deficit in legitimacy. It also maintains that the state used the policy strategy of expertise and to a lesser extent the policy strategy of participation in order to legitimate the process that determined the character of both the University and the knowledge that it was expected to produce. ; peer-reviewed

Abstract After WWII, Singapore launched decolonization and the state elites were under strong compulsion to blend the Chinese and other racial communities into a national whole. Chinese schools, equipping students with worldview and cultural‐linguistic abilities very different from those at other schools, hindered the completion of this task. The state elites sought to resolve this problem by replacing Chinese schools, but this policy antagonized the Chinese and undermined the legitimacy of the ruling regime. To pacify the Chinese, they switched to uphold Chinese schools as an integral and distinct category in the education system. This strategy, nevertheless, kept Chinese schools culturally compartmentalized and sacrificed the objective of promoting interracial integration. To rectify this situation, the ruling authorities sought to blunt the cultural distinctiveness of Chinese schools by strengthening Chinese teaching in English schools. However, this policy was not very successful, because the Malays – the adversary of the Chinese – resented it. This study demonstrates that state formation is a complicated project containing conflicting tasks, it reminds us state hegemonic strategies always bring about contradictory results and the connection between education and state formation is always dialectical.

Political methodology -- The critical citizen -- The individual, society and the problem of authority -- The institutional structure of education -- The interactional structure of education -- Federated disestablishment of education and state -- Internally democratic schooling.

This qualitative study examined the effects of a high-stakes, standardized test on teachers' instructional planning at a rural school. The research addressed this question: How do mandated curricular standards affect teachers' instructional planning and content selection? Ethnographic interviews (Creswell, 1998) examined four secondary teachers' perceptions of the effects of high-stakes standardized tests on their work. Case study methodology (Yin, 1994) guided the analysis of the data. Each participant had several years' experience teaching at Mollusk Island School, and each teacher had previously included place-based lessons (e.g. environmental studies, cultural history) in his/her repertoire. Ultimately, the study explored how a community maintenance function of small rural schools might be affected by state legislation for standardized accountability.