ABSTRACT
This book has been infused with a considerable measure of idealism and hope, inspired both by the visionary programmatic of world order models thinking and by the author's personal appreciation for Chinese culture and its traditional and modern achievements. However, the decision to create a model that highlights the most positive and hopeful tendencies in recent educational development has been offset by the introduction of a second model that uses both the development experience of other third world nations and China's own historical experience to crystallize some of the negative possibilities in the present transition from isolation to integration within a world community dominated by the capitalist nations of the OECD. The intention in the formulation of these models was to devise instruments of measurement that go deeper than technical issues of efficiency and effectiveness in evaluating the general cultural, political, and economic outcomes of this historic process. It is still far too early to reach any definitive conclusions, yet I hope the framework these models provide will be useful both to policy makers and to scholars who are involved in shaping or evaluating cultural and educational relations between OECD nations and China.
