Singapore has a multiethnic and multilingual society. Presently, the population of this country is composed of 75.9 per cent Chinese, 15.2 per cent Malays, 6.5 per cent Indians. Each of the three major racial communities has been constructed by many subethnic groups definded on the basis of their ethnicity in parallel with their literary traditions.
In this situation of severe ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity, a large part of language education policy-making has been concerned with its political and social relevance, not with its pedagogic consequences. Indeed, there has been no precise formulation of the objectives of the bilingual policy beyond stating that it would help national integration by facilitating interethnic communication and provide cultural stability by enabling people to keep an intra-ethnic mother tongue. The policy makers in education seemed to think that students educated in English and their racial mother tongue would not only break racial barriers, but also identify themselves as being “Singaporean” with both Western and Asian values, thus contributing to a more harmonious and better disciplined society.

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In recent years, Japanese children have come to have rooms available for their exclusive use at home almost to the extent that their counterparts in other advanced countries have. Traditionally, Japanese did not give private rooms to their children, and it was in the Taisho era that the idea of nurseries first entered Japanese experience. What mainly interests me is the question as to how housing which gave pride of place to children came into being in Japan.
This paper is designed to shed light on how this came about by examining W. M. Vories' theory of housing.

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By analyzing the enculturation and acculturation process at village level, this paper attempts to examine the process by which the Thai government has introduced school education among the hill tribes in Northern Thailand, and the effects of schooling.
In Thailand, the government has enforced national education among the hill tribes since the 1950s. Aiming at national integration and development, the focus of the education for the hill tribes is on the teaching of the Thai language and Thai national values as well as modern knowledge. Since the hill tribes have their own culture and enculturation system, the introduction of formal schooling adds a new dimension to their enculturation process and caused severe acculturation problems.
In the concluding section, the educational policy toward the hill tribes and its implementation are considered in light of the cultural changes currently taking place among the Akha in Thailand. The author then proposes the need for improvement of the government educational policy.

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Although the first federal legislation for bilingual education in the United States was the Bilingual Education Act of 1968, federal involvement 201 found that Chinese-American, non-English-speaking students were denied equal educational opportunity under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act when instructed in English, a language they did not understand. The Court ordered that schools must rectify the language deficiency, but did not specify how that should be accomplished. Regardless of the remedy chosen, however, the Court made it clear that the federal government had a responsibility to ensure that school districts receiving federal funds provided appropriate services to minority-language children.

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In Malaysia, the University enrollment rate is so small (2.5%) that universities are seen as elitist educational institutions. In the early 1980s, however, the number of unemployed graduates was increasing.
The purpose of this paper is to consider the Malaysian students' aspirations for social mobility within the context of the ‘affirmative action’ for Malays at that time. When examining social mobility, we ordinarily distinguish between two types of aspiration, firstly, the aspiration to enter higher education and secondly, the aspiration to get a good job. But if we aim to grasp the causes of graduate unemployment totally, we must recongnize that both aspirations are connected through the educational system and should take more notice of their common features.

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Multiculturalism has emerged as an issue in Australian education only over the past twenty years. In order to find out the contents of multicultural education, the paper examines 9 materials including policy guidelines, textbooks, resource books and teachers guidebooks developed by the Multicultural Education Centre, Directorate of Special Programs, New South Wales Department of Education. The paperidentifies two major themes commonly prepared for classroom activities. One ismulticulturalism in Australia and the other is the special features of “New Australian”society.

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In modern times, a feature common to the school systems of a number of Western European countries was their contribution to the formation of nation states with a homogenized citizenry. However, when immigrant laborers who brought their own religion and value systems were accepted into these countries, the idea of a uniform “nation state” gradually become fictitious. To integrate heterogeneous people of this kind, the social policy of such multiethnic societies has shifted from a segregationist approach to an assimilationist and then to a cultural pluralist approach. Today, most of these countries try to guarantee equal opportunities for minorities and to promote social-wide tolerance with regard to cultural diversity.

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This paper examines the longitudinal trend of the unit cost (defined as the current expenditure divided by the number of students) in higher education in Japan and the U. S. The unit cost of American higher education has been relatively constant in both public and private institutions over the past two decades. In Japan, the unit cost of private universities has steadily risen since 1960, while that of national universities has been constant since the middle of the 1970s.

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In this paper, the author considers the Labour Party's educational policy for the 1990s which is regarded as an important item in the study of contemporary educational reforms in England and Wales, if the important role that was played and will be played by the Labour Party in educational reforms is taken into account.
In the 1980s, the onservative Party implemented educational policies based on Thatcherism, which stressed the free market principle in education. Although the Labour. Party had the initiative in educational reforms and pursued comprehensive reorganisation actively in the 1960s and 1970s, it is argued that it was rather slow in responding to a large scale Conservative reforms in the 1980s. However, toward the end of the 1980s the Labour Party made great efforts to develop the educational policy which it intends to implement, if and when it regains the power. The fundamental principle of the Labour Party's educational policy for the 1990s is still that of equality as before. Therefore it attacks the Conservative Party's “double standards”, in which first-class education is provided for the privileged few but second-class education for the rest. In contrast to this, the Labour Party aims to give the best possible education to every child.

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In Japan, “TOKUBETSU KATSUDO” forms one of the main areas of the elementary school curriculum. It consists of class activities, club activities, pupils' council activities and school events. We used a questionnaire to conduct an international survey about this area.
This paper aims to show how such activities are programmed or performed in other countries, and to examine Japanese “TOKUBETSU KATSUDO” in the context of an international perspective.

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