Over the last three decades, a significant amount of research has sought to relate educational institutions, policies, practices and reforms to social structures and agencies. A number of models have been developed that have become the basis for attempting to understand the complex relation between education and society. At the same time, national and international bodies tasked with improving educational performances seem to be writing in a void, in that there is no rigorous theory guiding their work, and their documents exhibit few references to groups, institutions and forces that can impede or promote their programmes and projects. As a result, the recommendations these bodies provide to their clients display little to no comprehension of how and under what conditions the recommendations can be put into effect. The Education System in Mexico directly addresses this problem. By combining abstract insights with the practicalities of educational reforms, policies, practices and their social antecedents, it offers a long overdue reflection of the history, effects and significance of the Mexican educational system, as well as presenting a more cogent understanding of the relationship between educational institutions and social forces in Mexico and around the world.
In Education, Learning, Training: Critical Issues for Development, renowned scholars and practitioners examine shifts in global education policy and practice over the last 50 years.
kills are the key to shaping a better future, and central to the capacity of countries and people to thrive in an increasingly interconnected and rapidly changing world. This report identifies opportunities and makes recommendations to strengthen the skills of youth, foster greater participation in adult learning, use people’s skills more effectively to raise productivity, and strengthen the governance of the skills system in the state of Tlaxcala, Mexico.
This book examines the scope of urban planning in Mexico through case studies of four municipalities - Campeche, Hermosillo, Leon and Morelia - that have recently updated their plans using new federal guidelines. We seek to advance a research agenda on the impacts of planning and its effectiveness by proposing some foundations for how to assess planning processes, as well as to provide guidance for the federal government of Mexico in its oversight of municipal planning practice and recommendations for the four cities we study. We begin with the concern that the debate over whether urban planning in Mexico “works” suffers from a lack of shared definitions about what is and is not within the scope of urban planning, and a shared conceptual framework for assessing the planning process. The case studies were conducted as part of a graduate studio in the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA. They rely on multiple interviews with planners and professionals in each city as well as documentary and data analysis, and literature reviews. We use a framework of five processes: creating a plan, implementing the plan, raising revenue to fund urban infrastructure, upgrading existing neighborhoods to ensure equal access across neighborhoods, and investing in new infrastructure to support growth. Each case presents a brief urban history and contextual data; a description of local government planning activities, the current plan, the city’s political history, and transparency in local planning; an assessment of planning processes, the mechanisms for changing land uses, and examples one infrastructure project and enforcement of land use rules; and an evaluation of the plan itself, including some GIS analysis local zoning and federal policy. The book’s recommendations fall into three areas: making plans into part of an ongoing and iterative process, increasing coordination between municipal budgeting and planning, and creating transparency and public input to the planning process. More specifically, we find that new plans often ignore successes and failures of prior plans, they do not periodically assess indicators to gauge impact, and discretionary changes in between plan updates diminishes the importance of the plan itself. In the second area, we argue that the scope of planning must be expanded. The plan should be integrated with the municipal budgeting process and municipalities in Mexico should work to generate more local revenues to adequately fund plans. Finally, in the third area, we recommend making planning documents, zoning maps, and basic data on urban conditions accessible to the public. A lack of transparency and the often opaque decision making processes harm the legitimacy of governance. We also outline how the federal government can play a role in advancing these recommendations for local planning processes.
This monograph lays down the foundations of the theory of complex Kleinian groups, a newly born area of mathematics whose origin traces back to the work of Riemann, Poincaré, Picard and many others. Kleinian groups are, classically, discrete groups of conformal automorphisms of the Riemann sphere, and these can be regarded too as being groups of holomorphic automorphisms of the complex projective line CP1. When going into higher dimensions, there is a dichotomy: Should we look at conformal automorphisms of the n-sphere?, or should we look at holomorphic automorphisms of higher dimensional complex projective spaces? These two theories are different in higher dimensions. In the first case we are talking about groups of isometries of real hyperbolic spaces, an area of mathematics with a long-standing tradition. In the second case we are talking about an area of mathematics that still is in its childhood, and this is the focus of study in this monograph. This brings together several important areas of mathematics, as for instance classical Kleinian group actions, complex hyperbolic geometry, chrystallographic groups and the uniformization problem for complex manifolds.
