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The paper compares the American and Soviet transformations at Kabul University, Afghanistan, during the 1960s to the 1980s explained in terms of Americanisation and Sovietisation. Using new declassified documents from both American and former Soviet archives, the author reveals that both powers attempted to impose their rival models of university education in Afghanistan. However, resistance on the part of the Afghan university undermined both of their cultural influences, thus causing their policies of reform to eventually fail. The case of Kabul University demonstrates the inability of the superpowers to encourage the formation of pliable students and professors. Despite crucial transformations in the structure, administration apparatus, and content of disciplines, both superpowers were not able to change the traditions and values of professors and students. The university community has been proven to be the main cause for the success or failure of any reforms brought to a university by external powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses Cleveland, Ohio, to examine educational reform by focusing on place, institutional change, motives, and results between 1900 and 1930. The study as well as the practice of public education in urban America has been a battleground for “the great school wars.” Despite the endless conflicts and debate, public education remains a popular panacea for the ills of urban America. Public schools expanded their programs to meet the needs of urban students, particularly immigrants from southern, eastern, and central Europe and black migrants from the American South during the era of this study. Progressive reformers also campaigned for reforms that would adapt the public schools to an environment that was changing from a commercial to an industrial city. Above all, they championed the next, all-powerful superintendent, enlightened by the “cult of efficiency,” to achieve progress and stability in the school system. Urban historians can analyze educational change and the validity of conflicting interpretations by studying local schools within their historical context. The results of progressive school reforms did not often match their promises, but failure and disappointment did not lead to introspection and analysis of their remedies. The majority of students still failed to graduate in the 1920s. Centralized management, social efficiency, vocational and technical education, recreation, Americanization, specialization, intelligence testing, tracking, and quantification became the popular national model for public education between 1900 and 1930. They still constitute the paradigm for public schooling in America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]