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In the 1990s, efforts were launched in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the Russian Federation to support the revival of Sakha (Yakut) language education. This interdisciplinary study examines the evolution of school-based Sakha language education in the city of Yakutsk over a 25-year period beginning with the launching of the first reforms in the 1990s. Language education reform in the capital city has been shaped by a dynamic interplay between federal, regional, and local factors. Grassroots social and cultural activism continues to play a key role in school-based language revitalization in Yakutsk, influencing how policies have been received and implemented at the local level. Local community stakeholders are working together to counteract federal education policies, which direct school resources away from minority language education. This case study shows that the Sakha (Yakut) language revival has taken root in the capital city, and it provides important evidence that civic activism continues to develop in urban areas of the republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the morning of 24 June 1932 the ‘People's Party’, a small group of civil and military bureaucrats, toppled the Thai absolute monarchy and introduced constitutional democracy. This article discusses the establishment of democracy as an endeavour in ‘democratic paternalism,’ by which is meant the Party's attempt to establish a new moral and intellectual leadership that had as its main goal the creation of a depoliticized democratic citizenry. To implement their programme for democracy, the Party embarked on an ambitious plan to modernize education and explain popular sovereignty through countrywide lectures and radio programmes. The democratic paternalist effort had mixed results. State weakness limited the reach of the educational and propaganda campaigns, and further the ‘people’ in whose name the revolution was staged, constituted two different groups: a largely illiterate peasantry and a small, incipient new intelligentsia. Because of its limited capacity, the People's Party tasked the second group with assisting in democratic mentorship of the masses, but many in this second category of people had a broader conception of democracy than the Party's ‘top-down’ model and criticized the Party for its paternalist constraints on popular sovereignty. Democratic paternalism and frustration with the limits imposed on popular democracy are two central aspects of this period of history that have endured in Thai society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This contribution looks into nationalization and education in European borderlands in the early post-World War II period. Belonging to Belgium and Poland, respectively, in the interwar years, the Eupen–St. Vith–Malmedy and the East-Upper Silesia regions came under German rule during World War II. Returned to the Belgian and Polish nation-states once the war was over, the regions experienced a pronounced upheaval in the population profile as a result of population transfers and reorientations in education curricula. The aim of these measures was to guarantee the national reliability of borderland inhabitants, with a special role being designated for teachers, who were perceived as crucial in the raising of children as national citizens imbued with certain core values. This contribution compares the methods employed by the authorities in selecting educational personnel for their borderlands, the nationalizing role teachers were to play and the way teachers gave meaning to their professional practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]