Books in the Routledge Library Editions: Education series

The authors provide a meeting-point for developmental psychology, sociology and education, to the illumination of all three. There is a concern with the daily life of 'ordinary'children in 'ordinary' families. School reluctance - rather than the more clinical school phobia or truancy - is delicately probed. The back-up that parents provide at home, directly or indirectly, is objectively evaluated, yet with empathy for parents' and teachers' anxieties about their roles.

The editors have compiled this critical and comparative study of changes which took place in the New Zealand education system in the second half of the twentieth century. For other Western societies who have felt the impact of New Right policies the New Zealand case is interesting because it provides some indication of how policies of decentralization in education might be used to develop egalitarian and democratic educational policies.