Education in Europe

This book is a comprehensive collection of chapters focusing on current techniques and strategies in education policy planning and application, summarizing the debate for the future and prospects of education, within the current socio-economic development and growth spectrum. This book considers a broad perspective to increase the information base and derive broader conclusions about education policies and activities. More specifically, this book presents a discussion of the environment, institutions and education policy issues, focusing on the institutional setting, as well as literature relating to education policy and practice. Moreover, this book identifies and examines relevant key research issues, building a conceptual framework drawing on the application of education and socio-economic development and growth process, enabling a comparative analysis in European level, explaining also any related socio-economic consequences. This book also presents a survey of the choices concerning education policy regarding development and efficiency enhancement, describing the instruments, the actors involved, the actions undertaken, and those which, although promoted in the context of other policies, affect the same channels or pursue similar aims. Moreover, this book explores and studies core dimensions of the interaction between education, research and development, efficiency, new paradigms, methods and techniques along with socio-economic links. Overall, this book describes the main kinds of policy interventions that are implemented, providing at the same time some useful elements, in order to understand the assumptions and theories which underpin them. This book fills a gap in education literature by exploring and studying various dimensions of the interaction between one of the most important socio-economic aspects, namely education, and interactions between related factors (both theoretically and empirically). Special focus is put on the appreciation of the ways in which education activities and policies change and adapt in the presence of new constraints of changing configurations of the knowledge-based economy combined with the emergence and adaptation of institutional or economic structures. Within this framework, this book acts as a platform for theoretical and empirical research, rendering a creative source for motivation, scientific dialogue, collaborative approaches, as well as knowledge creation and dissemination.