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This article provides a critical reading of current efforts in India to enroll in school all children between six and fourteen years of age. These efforts usually gain moral certitude through their being constructed within a binary frame of reference i.e. formal schooling as the space that "saves" child laborers. Neither exhaustive in its review of existing literature nor in its attempt to address the working of this binary worldwide, this article largely draws on different narratives to reveal the ways in which international policy discourse relies on a particular construction of children, childhood, and family in the non-Western world. The framing of the issue that the binary sets in place and its subsequent impact on policies is discussed through an interrogation of its underlying assumptions as well as its influence on the local. To transcend a culturally relativistic reading of these narratives as local examples, incapable of exercising larger analytic weight, the article utilizes these to discuss three dominant constructions that underlie this binary, namely constructions of the child, of school, and of labor.

Based on ethnographic research with over four hundred Congolese refugees in Kampala and Kyaka II refugee settlement, Uganda, this article interrogates the politics of education—both historically in the Democratic Republic of Congo and currently in migration contexts in Uganda. Formal education was an aspiration for all young people in the study, irrespective of current educational level. Moreover, it is a priority for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and many other organizations working with refugees. Drawing on the experiences and views of Congolese young people, this article analyzes the socio-political importance they accord to formal schooling. It then analyzes the degree to which these political aspects of education are manifested in daily decision-making processes in families, households, communities, and high-level politics. The author concludes with some reflections on how researchers and practitioners working in migration contexts can recognize and take into account the politicized nature of education. ; Se basant sur des recherches ethnographiques réalisées auprès de plus de quatre cents réfugiés congolais dans les camps de Kampala et de Kyaka II, en Ouganda, cet article s'interroge sur la politique de l' éducation, à la fois d'un point de vue historique, dans la République populaire du Congo, et d'un point de vue contemporain, dans le contexte de la migration en Ouganda. Tous les jeunes gens interrogés dans le cadre de la recherche aspiraient à faire des études scolaires, peu importe leur niveau de scolarisation actuel. En outre, l'enseignement est une priorité du Haut Commissariat des Nations Unies pour les réfugiés (UNHCR) et de nombreuses autres organisations travaillant avec des réfugiés. S'appuyant sur les expériences et les opinions des jeunes du Congo, cet article analyse l'importance sociopolitique que ces derniers accordent aux études scolaires. Il cherche ensuite à définir dans quelle mesure les aspects politiques de l' éducation se manifestent dans les procédures de ...

The importance of self-action and its considerable links with cognitive activity in childhood are known. For instance, in arithmetical cognition, 2-year-olds detected an impossible arithmetical outcome more accurately when they performed the operation themselves (actor mode) than when the experimenter presented it (onlooker mode). A key component in this domain concerns the understanding of the inversion principle between addition and subtraction. Complex operations can be solved without calculation by using an inversion-based shortcut (3-term problems of the form a+b-b must equal a). Some studies have shown that, around the age of 4, children implicitly use the inversion principle. However, little is known before the age of 4. Here, we examined the role of self-action in the development of this principle by preschool children. In the first experiment, 2-year-olds were confronted with inversion (1+1-1=1 or 2) and standard (3-1-1=1 or 2) arithmetical problems either in actor or onlooker mode. The results revealed that actor mode improved accuracy for the inversion problem, suggesting that self-action helps children use the inversion-based shortcut. These results were strengthened with another inversion problem (1-1+1=1 or 2) in a second experiment. Our data provide new support for the importance of considering self-action in early mathematics education.