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Over the past two decades, historians have dedicated a growing amount of research to the history of globalization. This introduction shows how the articles in this issue contribute to this dynamic, aiming to illustrate its heuristic potential in historicizing educational phenomena. The field of education is presented as a relevant platform for an analysis of transnational dynamics, a fact which is demonstrated in the various articles in this issue: they offer a diversity of original case studies that shed new light on the complexity of transfer mechanisms related to education policies, models, and knowledge over the last two centuries. The introduction underlines how this issue renews knowledge on the international production of education policies and practices, focusing on four key methodological issues that run through the various articles: periodization, the myth of progressivism, the multilaterality of circulatory phenomena, and gender relations.

The founders of the International Bureau of Education (IBE) in Geneva were convinced the best way to develop understanding between peoples was by disseminating knowledge: collecting pedagogical materials from around the world, making them accessible to all, and enriching them through collective studies and conferences where attendees could engage in reflection to "resolve global problems in education". This article goes behind the scene to study how the IBE "armed itself" to overcome rivalries, reach across borders, and promote international understanding. It focuses on its first two stages--as a private institution and an intergovernmental organization--before it became linked to UNESCO in 1946. It describes how the IBE positioned itself during the interwar period in relation to its first sponsors, continually adapting itself so it could safeguard the viability, durability, and legitimacy of its concept. Resolutely scientific, its mission was to make comparative education--joining the local and the global, the particular and the universal--the basis for circulating knowledge free from centrifugal and hegemonic forces, so it could develop a "charter of aspirations for global education".

Inaugurated in 2013, this collective research programme aims to construct an international mapping of the history of education that accounts for recent developments in the field. Our goal is to create a current and retrospective assessment of the discipline's institutional grounding and of the knowledge produced by its practitioners, stretching across national and cultural borders. Ultimately, the programme will help to increase interactions among scholars and facilitate the creation of collaborative research agendas, thereby augmenting the standing and visibility of the discipline. This text will briefly introduce the programme's conceptual basis, explaining the methodological steps taken to ensure the comparability of data gathered and the transnational and transcontinental character of the study's design. In the second section, we will zoom in on doctoral students' dissertations, which are the optimal way to study a discipline's development and potential. Doctoral students and recent graduates are part of a tradition, a school of thought, and yet they constitute that tradition's replacement and renewal. Therefore, as graduate students carry forth the disciplinary torch, they hold the future of the field in their hands.

The international conferences and the official publications of the International Bureau of Education (IBE) comprise a platform where a growing number of governments exposed their considerations and concerns with the purpose of building up a better world through education. The resulting recommendations foster the basis of an "international code for public education". The voluminous archives of the IBE comprise a particularly fertile source for understanding "the variant and invariants", and of course also the purposes of school organisations and curricula as promoted by these organisations. The paradoxes of this effort carried out during the first forty years represent both the challenges for its survival and the outline of this article: (a) giving up on all obligations and political statements so as to ensure effective actions at governmental level; (b) documenting local needs so as to establish a world chart; (c) supporting mass schooling through state involvement for promoting individual emancipation; (d) promoting curricula designed on separate subjects so as to guarantee harmonious complete personal growth; (e) advocating scientific objectivity for spreading the method and principles of New Education; (f) acting upon public schooling, the reserved hunting grounds of nations, for building up international education.

During the nineteenth century many European countries proclaimed sovereignty of the people and simultaneously founded their national educational systems. In order to provide public schooling, free and compulsory education was established. Political and sociocultural revolutions led to the rise of nation states, based on democratic or democratic-inspired aspirations, that then turned into "teacher states". Mass schooling and the worldwide - and furthermore enforced - dissemination of this schooling model characterise the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How can one best describe the concrete process of mass schooling? How should it be analysed, and what are the appropriate concepts to do so? How did nations contribute to its dissemination? By tackling these issues from a historical perspective and discussing, in particular, two concepts often addressed for understanding certain aspects of mass schooling - "school form" and "grammar of schooling" - the contributions of this volume shed a new light on the matter.

Educational phenomena and child development fascinate many disciplines for which they offer a tremendous field of experimentation and application. More than a hundred years ago, when educational sciences adopted the main institutional emblems of an academic discipline (chairs, diploma, laboratories, scientific network etc.), they obviously vacillated between the dream of becoming a unified science (as pedology testifies), and the claim of a rewarding pluridisciplinarity that could synergise all disciplines concerned with the child and with education. This paper asserts that the issue of pluridisciplinarity is constitutive for the development of sciences of education whose object is ever coveted by other disciplines. The first section adopts the point of view of a social history and, on the basis of voluminous archives, it describes the main lines of the shaping of this pluridisciplinary field in Geneva, representative of that which also occurs elsewhere. In the second part, it presents a more theoretical reflection on the tensions and pitfalls of what we call the "process of disciplinarisation" of educational sciences, outlining the characteristics of this constitutively pluridisciplinary field. (Contains 5 notes.)

In the first decades of the twentieth century, it was the turn of the reformist movements themselves to become institutionalised to make their voices better heard, to test their theories, to promote their pedagogic doctrines: through editorial vehicles, social and scientific events, associative networks and movements. Beyond this diversity there was an analogous denunciation of the inadequacy of established educational practices and systems for the specific needs of childhood and a demand for a radical change in educational ideas, in furtherance of an "Education" that was resolutely "new"; a "New Education," a "Progressive Education," "Reformpadagogik," "escola nova," "escuela nueva," a functional education, or an active school to use the terms by which these movements themselves recognised each other. The New Education, diversified though it was, emanated above all from cultured, pedagogic, humanist, intellectual, scientific urban environments, with the conviction that it was through education that humanity could, indeed must, be transformed. This article presents contributions that provide subtly different and contrasting views of New Education on knowledge and its transformation. The analyses proposed in this paper help to enrich, if not transform, what one knows about the relationship between New Education and knowledge. They also enable educators to question the way in which this knowledge is constructed, to study the theoretical and methodological reference points professed by the theorists and historians of the movement, then and now. The analysis of the transformations of knowledge promoted, expected, or constructed by New Education is fertile ground for examining how much the school systems are impregnated by the concepts in vogue a century ago. New Education profoundly transformed all educational knowledge by contributing new knowledge, and above all by reorganising it and by ushering in a change in its mode of production. It foreshadows the new knowledge regime that essentially still dominates in education today. (Contains 15 footnotes.

The debate on knowledge in New Education is generally dominated by two opposed Anglo-Saxon positions held by Dewey and Thorndike. This paper presents another line of division. Claparede and Vygotsky, two representative European figures of New Education are both scientists constructing a theory of psychological functioning, and heavily engaged in school reforms. Their conceptions of knowledge in education are nonetheless contrasted. We demonstrate it in analyzing their work from three points of view: the relationship between education and development; the nature of knowledge to teach; and the kind of knowledge necessary for teacher education. For Claparede, education follows natural development; knowledge to teach has to be useful and linked to everyday life; knowledge for the teacher is essentially knowledge on the child. For Vygotsky, education precedes development; knowledge to teach is systematic, different from everyday knowledge, transforming the relationship to its own psychic processes; knowledge for teachers is knowledge to teach and about teaching. Claparede's approach can be described as abstract negation of the traditional school; he wants a Copernican revolution, a completely different school linked to everyday life. Vygotsky's approach can be characterized as determined negation; he wants to build on the traditional school, maintaining and transforming knowledge organized systematically in formal disciplines. (Contains 101 footnotes.)

This article is aimed at understanding some mechanisms implied in the construction of educational sciences as a disciplinary field in interaction with other social fields. Its object is the Genevan "Institut des sciences de l'education" from 1912 to 1948. This institution is analyzed from two main points of view: the foundation and development of the Institute; the publication activity of its members. In order to understand the reasons that led to the foundation of the Institute, the programmatic text of Claparede (1912) is submitted to a thorough analysis that allows also an understanding of the choices made concerning institutional forms. The history of the Institute is then briefly presented showing that one can distinguish two phases with a transition period from 1929 to 1932. At this moment an important shift takes place from an institution heavily engaged in promoting New Education towards a university institute in which, through specialization and differentiation, one discipline--psychology--progressively emerges. The publication activity of the Institute members is first analyzed through the communication media they create or they are responsible for. The media create a local--and internationally linked--communication space. This space exhibits as much continuity with regard to certain media as an important change: the bulletin designed for linking disciplinary and social fields disappears in favor of media publishing research contributions for researchers. In what concerns the domains and themes treated in the publications one observes an important continuity of the proportion in the different fields, but a certain shift in the themes: New Education is much less prominent in the second phase in which at the same time one finds more strictly scientific and more practical contributions. The intermediate field weakens. The construction of educational sciences appears as a complex, not linear process whereby even a discipline emerges, psychology, in which education seems to be more and more excluded. The analyses show that the Institute of educational sciences in Geneva, like many others, is an essential institution in the construction process of a disciplinary field in the domain of education.