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La transición hacia el uso del papel para la enseñanza de la escritura en las escuelas elementales públicas en México no fue sencilla. Al finalizar el siglo XIX, se había cuestionado el uso de las pizarras por el riesgo que representaban para la salud, pues muchas veces los estudiantes borraban sus escritos con saliva y el material con el que estaban fabricadas no siempre guardaba las especificaciones necesarias, además el ruido al escribir era insoportable. En cambio, el papel, desde el punto de vista higiénico, pedagógico y estético, fue considerado un material superior frente a la dureza de la pizarra, el brillo de la superficie y la poca precisión que se obtenía en el trazo de las letras. Derivado de este planteamiento, se vislumbró seriamente la posibilidad de la adopción de papel en las escuelas oficiales. Sin embargo, este material era escaso y muy caro. Hacia el cambio de siglo, sólo dos fábricas de papel podían surtir a las escuelas y era necesario que abarataran el precio, que el sistema de distribución garantizara el abastecimiento y que el suministro fuera continuo. Este artículo analiza el inicio del proceso de reconversión de una tecnología para la enseñanza como era la pizarra por el papel. Analizo el gasto que significó y cómo esta modificación fue resultado de una multiplicidad de relaciones sociales, culturales, económicas y políticas que se entrecruzaron para dar una nueva configuración del tiempo, el ruido y los valores establecidos en el salón de clases. The transition to the use of paper in public elementary schools in Mexico was not easy. At the end of the nineteenth century, the use of slates had been questioned due to the health risk they represented since students often erased their writing with saliva and the material with which the slates were made did not always meet the necessary specifications. On the other hand, paper, from a hygienic, pedagogical and aesthetic point of view, was considered a superior material compared to the hardness of the slate, the shine of the surface and the lack of precision obtained in the tracing of the letters. Derived from this approach, the possibility of changing materials in official schools was seriously envisioned. However, the paper represented a very high cost. Only two paper mills could supply the schools and it was necessary to lower the price, and guarantee the supply by enhancing the distribution system. This article analyses the beginning of the conversion process of a technology for learning to write such as the slate for paper. I analyse the expense that it meant for the authorities and families, how the change was the result of a multiplicity of social, cultural, economic and political relations that intersected to give a new configuration of time, noise and established values in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the Berlin Abitur examination in the twentieth century and its written documentation in files. By the late nineteenth century, the Abitur examination was fully established in Prussia and with it a graduation certificate that was obligatory for university entrance. Thus, the Abitur examination was part of the modern state entitlement system and an instrument to establish the state education monopoly. Thereafter, in every secondary school a new file was compiled for each class that took the exam every year. The resulting records provide a unique insight into the history of examination procedures. This article seeks to discuss the question of the Abitur files being simply products of bureaucratisation and rationalisation of examination practices at secondary schools, and the extent to which there was a ritualisation of the examination on paper. The building processes of the Abitur examination files in the twentieth century are reconstructed on the basis of a representative school archive located in Berlin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper firstly presents Statement Archaeology, an innovative and rigorous method devised to systematically operationalise the approach to historical exploration used by Michel Foucault in pursuit of the question "how do certain practices become possible at particular moments in history?" Drawing on an analysis of the theoretical basis of Foucault's broad – and arguably equivocal – approach, a series of methodological procedures by which it can be systematically operationalised are set out. These focus on the interrogation of "statements", through a series of questions, against three criteria: Formation, Transformation, and Correlation. Secondly, through the use of a specific policy development in English Religious Education as an exemplar, the paper establishes the potential of the approach. Deploying Statement Archaeology in relation to this example reveals that the change under investigation became possible at a nexus of changes in the rules of what is thinkable and unthinkable within different domains of discourse, and complex and messy processes of changing legitimacies and normalisations, with previously unacknowledged policy-influencers playing an important role. Many existing accounts of this change have overlooked these matters. The paper concludes by arguing that Statement Archaeology has potential significance in any domain of enquiry that seeks answers to the question "how did this particular practice become possible at that particular moment?" [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following a period of close to a century when the Irish language was placed at the margins of the education system under British rule, there was a radical change in curriculum provision following political independence in Ireland in the 1920s. The importance of the Irish language in defining sovereignty, national identity, and nationhood in the Irish Free State was central to these curricular changes. Within months of the achievement of political independence, curriculum policy was revised to include provision for the teaching of the Irish language to all pupils in primary schools as well as the use of Irish as the medium of instruction in infant classes (the first two years of primary school). The education system became the linchpin in the political and cultural campaign to restore the Irish language as the vernacular. This paper critically examines how nationalist thinking in Ireland, which had its origins in nineteenth-century European discourses, impacted on curriculum decisions pertaining to the Irish language in the early 1900s. Focusing on the interrelationship between nationalism, language, and education, it traces the process and provisions of curriculum development in Ireland in the 1920s. Overall the paper argues that the influence of nationalism as understood in the wider European context of the time shifted emphasis in Ireland away from bilingualism (Irish and English languages) to the revival of the Irish language in the 1920s, primarily through the education system, to add political legitimacy to the new Irish Free State. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La leçon de choses est une modalité didactique particulière répandue en Europe et dans le monde occidentalisé au cours du XIXe siècle, diversement déclinée selon les contextes nationaux sous le nom d'Anschauungsunterricht, object lesson, lezione di cose, lección de cosas. Basée sur la méthode intuitive (parfois appelée naturelle), elle s'impose comme un rejeton direct de la pédagogie de Pestalozzi, bien que sa généalogie ait été reconstruite différemment de pays à pays. Cela en fait un cas intéressant de translation and transformation dans le domaine éducatif ou, peut-être, seulement un exemple de "maquillage" motivé par des raisons revanchardes. Le but est, en général, de faire acquérir des idées abstraites aux élèves de l'école maternelle et primaire à partir de l'observation des objets concrets. Grâce aux principaux théoriciens (les premiers disciples de Pestalozzi en Allemagne et en Angleterre, la pédagogue Marie Pape-Carpentier en France, les positivistes italiens et espagnols ...), elle avait dans la plupart des cas la forme de la conversation maternelle, où adultes et enfants se provoquent mutuellement par des questions et des réponses. De nombreux programmes scolaires lui ont donné une place dans l'articulation du curriculum, d'autres l'ont maintenue sous des formes plus libres et spontanées. L'article se propose d'offrir, sur la base de la littérature la plus récente, une analyse des différentes traditions nationales, même en utilisant les principaux dictionnaires pédagogiques publiées en Europe dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle. The object lesson is a particular teaching method that was widespread in Europe and the westernised world during the nineteenth century, which was variously adapted according to national contexts under the name of Anschauungsunterricht, leçon de choses, lezione di cose, and lección de cosas. Based on the intuitive (sometimes known as natural) method, it established itself as a direct product of Pestalozzi's pedagogy, although its genealogy has been reconstructed differently from country to country. This makes it an interesting case of translation and transformation in education or, perhaps, simply an example of maquillage motivated by revanchism. The aim, in general, is to introduce abstract ideas to infant and primary school pupils through the observation of concrete objects. The leading theorists (the early followers of Pestalozzi in Germany and England, the educationalist Marie Pape-Carpentier in France, the Italian and Spanish positivists, etc.), gave it, in most cases, the form of a maternal conversation, where adults and children prompt each other with questions and answers. Many school programmes have given it a place in the curriculum, others have maintained it in freer and more spontaneous forms. This paper offers, on the basis of the most recent literature, an analysis of the different national traditions, using the main pedagogical dictionaries published in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper draws upon photography as an active intervention into compromised environments and uses it to discover and develop new perspectives on past and future histories of education after COVID-19. These perspectives become particularly clear when seen against the backdrop of recent discussions on planetary responsibility and shared ecologies. The paper suggests that we shift our research agendas away from anthropocentric world views that have placed great emphasis on human sovereignty, modernisation, progress and/or decline, nation states and global governance, and the stratifying effects of education systems, without reflecting their ecological consequences. It argues that anthropocentric approaches to history of education have neglected the openness and vulnerability of the human body and its ethical, cultural and social proximity to other living creatures and the material world. The paper therefore focuses on what it means for historians of education to respond to the COVID-19 crisis, what it means to change research perspectives, and what it means to look at photographs that were produced in a state of exception. The paper sets out to propose a manifesto for a post-anthropocentric research agenda that anchors history of education and the history of pandemics in intertwined ecologies of the living and material worlds. The paper suggests that future histories of education cannot be written without considering the COVID-19 crisis as both a challenge and an encouragement to further develop our understanding of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the emergence of sex education in the early 20th century is well studied, religious reactions to it remained under-studied. The paper addresses this gap by analysing the emergence of Roman Catholic sex education in the German-speaking area from the turn of the century to the 1930s. It explores official doctrinal guidelines, inner-Catholic debates, and the growing body of Catholic sex education publications. The paper argues that for the Roman Catholic Church, sex education was not a mere pedagogical problem but a topic that raised overarching questions such as how to deal with modern natural sciences, female emancipation, or the secular school system. The findings suggest that lay people and clergy working in pastoral care were the driving force for the modernisation of the discourse vis-à-vis a more conservative church authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of the Hilfsschule (special school) is contested and multifaceted. For the German context, most research to date has focused on institutions or professional pioneers in special education. This paper, through a "New Historicism" perspective, asks how a group of pupils, described as "retarded", could become a new pedagogical object within a discourse among teachers, psychiatrists, school doctors and local administrations at the end of the nineteenth century. Linking national and local discourses, this paper analyses the emergence of the special school pupil (Hilfsschulkind) in Germany within a broader discourse of educability as well as through knowledge practices, namely record-keeping systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how female subjectivities were constructed in the educational discourse in women’s magazines published in the Ottoman language from the first magazine that was published in 1869 until the promulgation of the Second Constitution Period in 1908 in the Ottoman Empire. The study draws on the concept of Occidentalism defined by Meltem Ahıska, as well as on Deniz Kandiyoti’s concept of patriarchal bargain. These concepts are used to identify and explain central tensions emerging in the Occidentalist fantasy in the educational discourse. I argue that, in the writings on women in women’s magazines of the late Ottoman period, we can see, first, the early traces of the Occidentalist fantasy and, second, how it is channelised to shape Ottoman women’s subjectivities within at least three tensions. I also argue that the ambivalent attitudes of the authors in these Occidentalist tensions operated as strategies for patriarchal bargaining for Ottoman women. Thus, this paper contributes to the understanding of the construction of womanhood in the late Ottoman period by showing the complexity embedded in the transnational spread and transformation of educational ideas related to women’s education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the changes in infant homes for children under the age of three in West Germany after the Second World War by combining two research perspectives. First, it will show that the increase in institutional care in the decade after 1945 was not simply dictated by a growing number of orphans. Instead, it primarily resulted from the way how authorities dealt with single mothers and their children. In a second step, the adverse influence of Maternal Care and Mental Health, the WHO report by British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby, will be analysed. It will become clear that this monograph from 1951 was enormously influential within West German infant home education, such that institutional care for children under the age of three was almost completely abolished only a few years later. Thus, the paper contributes to the historization of residential childcare and of attachment theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Calcutta madrasa was one of the many institutions which witnessed recurrent attempts at reform in Muslim societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Since the eleventh century, when madrasas first emerged as the principal institution of higher Islamic learning, it has undergone many changes, adapting in varying degrees to local cultures and changing times. Given the centrality of the Calcutta madrasa in the preservation and production of knowledge as well as in the formation of the religious elite, the madrasa was crucial to the construction of religious authority. This paper attempts to arrive at a deeper understanding of the origin and nature of the Calcutta madrasa. The first half explores the impact of British educational policies and conceptions of knowledge on the very "traditionalists" attempt to protect Islamic knowledge and learning from its feared extinction under colonial rule. The madrasa institution established by and during colonial rule emerges as a more complex entity that absorbed both colonialist and traditionalist conceptions, which continued to be renegotiated even after the madrasas, had been firmly established. This aspect will be discussed in the second part of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the technologisation of the pedagogical space "classroom". We will discuss the development and establishment of the subject-specific classroom system in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany, 1949–1989) by taking a closer look at organisational-structural conditions and responsibilities, as well as at the functioning and challenges that emerged during the implementation of subject classrooms. The furnishing of the subject classroom with seating, desks, teaching and learning objects including technical equipment, and storage furniture was planned down to the last detail and aligned to the requirements of the curriculum. We will concentrate on the classrooms for Physics and Music to highlight the peculiarities of this principle of school spatial organisation and its impact on social school practice. Our paper will focus on the political agenda and regulations, by drawing on sources from state-led research programmes. The article uses the concept of the classroom dispositif as a description of the programmatic claims. Thus, the subject-specific classroom could be considered as a technically shaped apparatus whose architectural structure determines pedagogical practices in their spatial, temporal, social, institutional, and technical dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Spanish scholars started to pay particular attention to the history of schools' material culture, defining this as "etnohistoria de la escuela". Reflections on the "materiality of schooling" and "school heritage" continued in the years that followed. Teaching tools or, more widely, "school objects" challenge the concepts of space, time and sociality. They speak of school practices, cultural history, and ideology. School artefacts are either handmade products created by pupils and teachers, or the school equipment that is made up of commercial products, which also respond to an industrial and economic logic, linked to the achievement of mass schooling. The aims and means of education are intermingled, but if educational theories have long attracted scholars' attention, the history of educational objects can be further explored from different angles. This paper shows the connection between educational models and pedagogical tools, but also between ideology and the cultural dimension of pedagogical objects, and between economy and pedagogical artefacts. ISCHE 43 was dedicated to the histories of educational technologies and the articles in this special issue of Paedagogica Historica represent some of the leading papers presented at the conference, which was held for the first time as a hybrid event at the Catholic University of Milan from 31 August to 6 September 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study deals with the outdoor learning approach developed by Sreten Adžić (1856–1933), who is considered the founder of the outdoor learning movement in Serbia. He greatly influenced pedagogical practice as a primary-school teacher, professor, and teacher-training school manager. According to this approach, the term outdoor learning had two meanings: learning through exploring the local environment and staying outside the school building in green spaces during regular classes. This paper deals with the questions related to the theoretical and political foundations of that approach, its didactic characteristics, possible pedagogical, social, political and economic scope, and its position and role in the circulation of knowledge about the international context. The first part of the paper deals with the Pestalozzianism and socialism foundations of Adžić's practice at the beginning of his professional career. The second and third parts thematise outdoor learning as student-centred learning in an authentic context based on sense perception and students' self-activity. The local environment is interpreted as an educational object. This approach aimed to develop students' critical thinking and civic education. The fourth part presents the realisation of Adžić's project of outdoor classrooms as green spaces for learning and explains their pedagogical meaning. Key findings presented in the final part are those encouraging teachers to come outdoors contributed to rethinking the traditional teaching model and school education in giving a background for the new school movement, which was widely accepted in Yugoslavia between the two world wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827–1891) was an English educationist, artist, philanthropist, and feminist. Her personal correspondence is quite extensive, containing letters exchanged with her family, friends, and acquaintances. The bulk of her epistolary archive though consists of letters sent to her. Instead of viewing this fragmentation and imbalance as a handicap, this paper argues that the silences her epistolary archive contains can be turned into a meaningful source of information and thus are methodologically relevant. To do so, it examines the extent to which Bodichon herself might have introduced silences ([un]consciously) as a strategy to exercise power over her own narrative. In order to tease out these epistolary silences and make them speak, this paper reads them through the lens of Lisa Mazzei's poetics of silence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines debates over the nature, purpose, and reform of geographical education in schools in the eighteenth-century German-speaking territories. Attention is paid to contemporaries' concerns over the cognitive content of geography – what geography was – and, in greater detail, to their views concerning how the subject might be taught, its teaching improved, and the end in view of teaching it, namely to produce informed citizens. The paper shows that while there was widespread agreement over the utility of geography, opinions differed over how best to teach it, and to whom. These differences centred less on religion, between the largely Catholic southern German territories and the chiefly Protestant northern German territories, and more upon the age, social status, gender, and intended future of the pupil. Proposals for the reform of geographical education argued that geography be taught first with reference to the pupil's locality and to notions of "homeland" from which local setting attention would be paid to other states, countries, and continents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Friedrich Fröbel is known as the founder of the modern kindergarten and for his development of novel learning materials called Gifts and Occupations. One of the foci of Fröbel's programme was mathematical education, which he addressed and taught through various activities that encouraged the largely implicit transmission of mathematical principles. Based on a historical analysis of Fröbel's background in mathematics and crystallography and drawing on Fröbel's notes, the first part of this paper proposes that the mathematics and the various Gifts taught and used in Fröbelian kindergartens have their roots in two traditions, both of which intersected in Fröbel's thought: first, a visual tradition, influenced by drawings of crystals; second, a tradition influenced implicitly by German Idealism consisting of geometric methods and conceptions as well as notions derived from crystallography used to analyse the structure of crystals and mainly developed by Christian Samuel Weiß. The second part of this paper will inspect these influences drawing on Fröbel's previously unpublished notes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper continues the previous part, and examines the influence of crystallography on Fröbel's conception of mathematics. In this part we focus on yet unpublished material. These unpublished notes of Fröbel underline the visual transfer of drawing and images of crystals, mainly developed by Haüy, which were widespread at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, into the Fröbelian activities. Hence, the paper shows that a transfer of knowledge occurred from crystallography to mathematical education as well as the interweaving of philosophical and scientific reflections in Fröbel's thought as early as the late 1810s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper aims to examine how students in Greek supplementary schools in England develop their identities within a period of structural and inter-generational change in the Greek community due to the recent migration waves from Greece and Cyprus to the UK. This is undertaken with a review of sociological theories and studies around identity construction, complemented by data drawn from the quantitative and qualitative phases of the research, under the prism of critical realism philosophy. The paper examines and discusses how archetypal notions of culture and ethnicity influence pedagogic practices and students' identity development. The findings call for a revisiting of policies, curricula and pedagogical practices in Greek supplementary education, in order to allow students to negotiate their identities within a period of extensive migration waves and a constantly changing context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects an effort to consider the history of Albanian education within the context of the country's history. In it, the origin and evolution of Albanian education are described in connection with the country's social and political standing. It is divided into sections, each corresponding to a major historical period in the formation of the Albanian state and intertwined with major reforms in education: education during the Albanian National Renaissance (1830s–1912); education after the Declaration of Independence (1912–1928); education under King Zog (1930s); the 1946 education reform; the 1960s reform, which involved reorganising the system of education for long-term success; and education after the decline of communism in the 1990s and beyond. The paper chronicles how the dawn of the educational system, its organisation and its curriculum were designed to prepare "period-specific" citizens. It is concluded that the roots of the Albanian national education system took hold during the Albanian Renaissance as a necessity of national survival and that the system's development through time is intertwined with the country's constitutional standing, echoing the secret workings of national life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the duality between global perspectives and local realities that have influenced the design of the school architecture by examining and comparing state school projects in two geographically distant countries: Chile and Portugal. The proposals and experiences of the "Society for the Construction of Educational Facilities" (1937–1987) in Chile and the "Board of Constructions for Technical and Secondary Education" (1934–1969) in Portugal are analysed. Established in the 1930s, these centralised bodies managed, organised, and controlled state school building projects in such a way as to achieve uniformity in design, creating architectural identities that embodied both the educational values and the representative character of the State. These bodies were influenced by similar global circumstances, and their activities were guided by the recommendations issued by intergovernmental organisations of the time. Such a situation brought their projects closer together in terms of their functional, aesthetic, technical-constructive characteristics. After examining and identifying the international influences which brought them closer in terms of the educational meanings and values associated with school architecture, the paper identifies the local circumstances that guided the design and construction processes of schools in both countries, bringing fresh geographical insights to school architecture discussion. At the same time, possible global readings of strategies, influences and results are explored, enabling us to understand school architecture as part of a nation's cultural values and as a material expression of the social model of modernity, which will continue to meet the challenges that schools face in twenty-first-century society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the analysis of discursive shifts in the constructions of teachers' roles during the twentieth century in the Russian Federation, this paper argues that pedagogy becomes redefined based on the political elites' vision for the society's future. During the Soviet era, teachers were expected to play a key role in social transformation. In order to transform the world, they were expected to deploy humanistic pedagogy to help all students realise their potential. During the post-Soviet era, this vision was abandoned. As teachers were expected to fulfil the function of social control, they were called to adopt technocratic pedagogy that comprised principles of psychologisation, individualisation, pathologisation, and depoliticisation. Psychologisation of teachers' roles and pathologisation of diversity became deployed to "adapt students to the world" by addressing problems within students rather than in the society. The significance of this paper lies in demonstrating connections between shifting discourses of teachers' roles, pedagogy, and pursuit of social transformation or conservative social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is focused on the theoretical basis of the study of the history of education in Serbia in the period from the foundation of the first Teacher College (1871) to the end of the socialist establishment in the country (1989). By theoretical bases, we mean theoretical and methodological assumptions, including ideological patterns, which influenced the constitution of the history of education as a scientific discipline. The aim of the paper is to analyse and clarify scientific and non-scientific assumptions in the conception of the history of education in Serbia. As a teaching discipline, the history of education has always been placed within the framework of professional education of primary school teachers and education scientists. As a scientific discipline it has gone through different phases, which are presented in this paper: from Christian-oriented support for teacher training, through fitting into current developments in cultural history, to particular propaedeutics of the method of dialectical materialism for all disciplines of the educational science. The history of education in Serbia in the 20th century reached its full development through cooperation with general historians on projects from the national history of education and schooling, as part of the shift of interests from political to social historiography. This orientation of scientific discipline was not accompanied by an increase, but rather a decrease in the role of the history of education in the professional education of teachers in Serbia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the beginnings, development, transformations, challenges and perspectives of History of Education (in orig. Istorija pedagogije) as a scientific discipline and a teaching subject in Montenegro. For this purpose, the paper analyses the appearance, status and representation of History of Education as a teaching subject over a 130-year period, as well as the significant role it has had in the development of educational workers in Montenegro. Although generally considered a fundamental educational discipline, the History of Education has lost its importance as a teaching subject, especially when it comes to its low representation in the education of future primary-school teachers and subject teachers in primary and secondary schools or its reduction to a semester course in the Study Programme for Science of Education (in orig. Studijski program za pedagogiju). On the other hand, the History of Education has never lost significance as a scientific educational discipline in Montenegro, i.e. its content has always aroused interest. Beside the numerous dilemmas and challenges the History of Education faces, this work considers a number of recent studies which can significantly influence its status and development perspectives as well as the status of Science of Education (in orig. Pedagogija) in Montenegro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scout Rally at Birmingham and Imperial Scout Exhibition organised in July of 1913 by the Boy Scouts Association constituted educational propaganda of the British Empire. The term "imperial", which was used in the British press, reflects the ideological meaning of this outsized event which gathered scouts from the United Kingdom and its dominions, and much smaller groups of scouts from Europe, including quite numerous groups from Poland. In the eyes of Poles, British "imperialism" or "patriotism" confronted as an ideal compared to Russian and German rule, and their attitudes were enthusiastically Anglomaniacal. This is the psychological key to understand the attractiveness of performing on the British arena for the representation of the young generation of Poles who were invited. For Polish scouts, the Scout Rally in Birmingham was an opportunity to demonstrate not only their skills but also patriotism as a function of political presence. This is how the Polish press understood these things, and which after the British – what needs to be emphasised – paid the most attention to the events in Birmingham. The most important Polish dailies publishing in Cracow, Warsaw, Poznań, and Lvov (now Lviv) closely followed the course of the rally, which was given the rank of success by a two-sentence depeche from London and a lengthy letter published in the Czas daily paper. The object of interest for the author of the article is the book written by the founder of Polish scouting, Andrzej Małkowski, which constitutes a noteworthy record of observations made by him during the Scout Rally as well as those made by other organisers of the Polish delegation's trip and of letters from journalists who accompanied this delegation and sent their correspondence to the Polish press from Birmingham, London, and Paris. Only one journalist broke out from apologetic opinions about the excellent performance of Polish scouts, who noticed shortcomings in performance and wrote about them. The article introduces the content of these letters and interprets and compares them. The opinion about the triumphant rally in Birmingham rooted firmly in Polish public opinion, constituting an important element of the founding myth of Polish scouting, which in the history of this movement is worth noting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The General Education Law was approved half a century ago. It was designed by Francoism to reform the educational system, adjusting itself to the liberal-developmental approach that Franco's regime followed in its last few decades. The oppression that the so-called "vernacular languages" were subject to during the former years of Francoism made their learning recognition stand out amidst the rest of the changes and developments that this law provided. The aim of this paper is to review the concepts and measures that structured Francoist educational politics in regard to languages. Special attention will be paid to the causes, foreseen in the Libro Blanco (Spanish for "White Book"), that fostered the change established in the 1970 Law. The idea will be presented that the incorporation of regional languages in the new policies happened to fulfil the idiomatic regulations requested by UNESCO and the Catholic Church, and to meet the need to cope with the popular currents of linguistic demand emerging in the scenario of socio-labour conflict that characterised the final years of the dictatorship. This moment was determined by the tensions generated within a system reluctant to change its traditional values, although it was forced to resolve the external and internal pressures that urged it to recognise the multilingual reality of the Spanish State in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual evidence offered by a set of previously unexamined photographic images taken at Stanmore Public School in Sydney, Australia in 1919 informs this paper which considers the images' purpose, construction, content, use, and reception. It endorses arguments that visual evidence combines with other sources to tell a richer history, and that images have potential to reveal history that otherwise might remain hidden. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Australian educators participated enthusiastically in the worldwide movement for educational reform known as New Education. The state of New South Wales introduced new curricula and fresh methods of teaching. The Department of Education was proud of its achievements, and the photographs taken at Stanmore reflect, affirm, and promote the changes which had taken place during a period when educators were enthusiastic about making New Education available to all children in the state schools and not just to those in small private progressive schools. This situation would shift in the 1920s and 1930s. The photographs, in conjunction with other sources including archival school files, allow an approach to the school experience of small children in the Infants Department at Stanmore. The School, with the support of influential educators, consciously introduced Kindergarten and Montessori methods into newly refurbished classrooms and an expanded playground. The photographs represent both educational achievement and optimism for the future and fit well into a recently argued genre called "the progressive image". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the memories of Japanese teachers who worked in Korea during the colonial period. By focusing on the autobiographical narratives of three Japanese primary school teachers who worked in rural Korea between 1931 and 1945, this study aims to unpack the relatively under-studied aspects of colonialism. Their narratives carried personal histories regarding their choice to study and work in Korea, the nature of their relationship with Korean children, and the memories of the political and cultural atmosphere at schools in pre-war Korea. These memoirs were accounts of Japanese colonialism through the "Japanese eyes". As they intimately interacted with the local community and students, their memories were multifaceted and complicated; these were not simply apologetic or nostalgic but involved particular social relations that they had experienced in Korea. In this paper, I attempted to shed light on the reconstruction of the grander narrative of pre- and post-war educational history in the region by looking at the complexity of their "reflected" memories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine memory as it relates to politics and early childhood education in the context of the internationally known preschools of Reggio Emilia in Italy. I draw a connection between foundational stories, ideologies connected to Italian politics in the 1970s, and the construction of the educational visions in these preschools. To do so, I examine school diaries from the 1970s that I encountered in the Reggio Emilia schools' official archives – the Centre for Documentation and Educational Research. These diaries, which are mostly unpublished, have a great value: they show us how stories about the past and visions of the future can merge to constitute the social and political imaginary of a school community, with the power of shaping the decisions, actions, and beliefs of its members. Though much of the literature around the so-called Reggio Emilia Approach used in the Reggio Emilia schools talks about the "democratic" character of its educational practices, it often does not touch on the specific political character historically associated with such an approach. In this article, I begin to address this lacuna. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peronism deployed, especially since the 1950s, a set of devices for the attention and care of children in Argentina, not only through schools but also through other institutions, such as development societies, cooperatives, the Eva Perón Foundation, sports clubs, among others. The new social order was central to the rhetoric of the government, and it gave children a preeminent role, as is visible in the phrase "in the New Argentina the only privileged are the children". This paper focuses on Vacaciones útiles, a film made in 1948 that shows how educational cinema reflects a view of childhood and also how public policies aimed at it. This short film was part of a larger project called Cine Escuela Argentino, a Commission of the National Council of Education for the production of film material to be shown in schools and other public institutions. What particular view did Peronism have on childhood in it? To what extent can this film be thought of as an educational cinema or as a school cinema? In which ways do films like Vacaciones útiles or public policies like Cine Escuela Argentino show the figure of the State as author? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are histories describing in detail the development of early childhood education (ECE) around the world, yet not enough is known about this in the Middle East and the information on the origins of ECE in Iran is scarce and fragmentary. This article is the first of its kind to present an overview of the main developments rendering possible the establishment of the first kindergartens in Iran. In our account, we connect this genealogy of early childhood education in Iran to various trajectories: 1) the work of intellectual reformers; 2) the Iranian feminist movement; 3) the Constitutional Revolution in Iran (1906–1911); 4) religious reformist beliefs in Shia; 5) the missionaries' schools; 6) the Armenians' schools and 7) the age of girls' marriage. As we demonstrate, early childhood education in Iran emerged before the industrial revolution. It was mainly provided for intellectual and influential families, focused on physical education accompanied by music, while religious education was marginal. Our genealogical explorations indicate that compared to kindergartens in Britain and Europe, Iranian early childhood education has been an instrument for intellectual societal reform. It was the fruits of a transplanted tree nourished by various local cultural-socio-political trends and religious beliefs. The paper concludes with an assessment of the importance of local and international influences on the emergence of early childhood education and the need to explore this history with an intersectional approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how girls' education developed in Norway and Prussia (and later North Rhine-Westphalia, NRW) during the first and second wave of women's political mobilisation. It analyses how organisations and activists of the women's movement were included in different cross-interest coalitions in education politics. The cases are interpreted in light of Rokkanian cleavage theory. In Germany, the women's movement was split along class lines but also along denominational lines. The Catholic women's movement became a part of the Catholic and later the Christian democratic political alliance. In Norway, influential sections of the women's movement were linked first to the liberal movement and later to the social democratic movement. In both cases, women's rights activists left a mark on education policy, but Norwegian women's rights activists enjoyed successes earlier and more consistently. This is a result of the Norwegian women's movement's comparatively greater unity and related to the different cleavage structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 20 years, “transnational knowledge circulation” has become a powerful theoretical construct for use by historians of education seeking to identify, characterise, and account for the nature of ideas and practices operating in one constituency that had their origins elsewhere. Research of this nature is very limited in relation to Ireland, both prior to and following political independence in the 1920s. This paper reports on an effort to commence addressing this deficit in the pre-independence era. The main focus is the work of “The Commission on Manual and Practical Instruction” (CMPI) conducted between 1896 and 1898, with the intention of proposing reforming practices for Irish national (primary) schools. A particular emphasis is placed on the efforts of the CPMI to explore and synthesise transnational education policies and practices, and to reflect these in its final report. The impact and legacy of this work in terms of the development and enactment of the subsequent curriculum for schools (1900–1922) are also analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how a gender-historical perspective may still be productive in today’s historiography of education. In doing so, it relies on theoretical approaches developed in feminist and gender-historical debates and in debates about the ontological turn in historiography. Categories are thus understood as “world-giving” and changing entities which cannot just be analysed in their varying historical contexts but must be examined and historicised themselves in order to capture their fuzziness and fluidity. Against this theoretical background and on the basis of professional journals of kindergarten teachers and published speeches of seminar teachers, this article analyses debates about kindergarten in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, focusing on the years 1950–1980. In these debates, it examines what “productive work” (Scott) the categories “child” and “mother” did with regard to social and gender order and how they emerged from various knowledges becoming entangled in specific places and times. The allegedly clear “inside-outside boundaries” and “dichotomies” (Haraway) between the categories are questioned by turning to conflicts, to the unresolved, to the paradoxical. Furthermore, the paper reflects on the tasks assigned to kindergarten and the arguments which were put forward to legitimise it within the category-related “meshwork” (Ingold) of knowledges and power. Finally, it is shown how powerfully the categories “child” and “mother” acted in the debates about kindergarten in German-speaking Switzerland when stabilising and perpetuating a strongly gendered social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brian Simon (1915–2002), an influential Marxist historian and educationist in Britain, had been campaigning for comprehensive education from the late 1940s to the 1960s. In the early 1970s, followed by a rapid expansion of comprehensive schools since the issue of Circular 10/65, comprehensive education was under attack by the Conservative government and other conservatives. In the mid-late 70s, along with the conservatives and the New Right, left-wing intellectuals also undermined the public's confidence in comprehensive education. Faced with the crisis in comprehensive education, Simon continued to battle for it by shifting between different roles. Simon was not only involved in politics of education, but also dealt with ideological issues implicit in contemporary educational theories nationally and internationally which caused harm to comprehensive education. Despite this, very little research has focused on Simon's ideas and practice in relation to comprehensive education in the 1970s. Therefore, this paper aims to fill the lacuna. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to recognise the transformations in the concept of quality as formulated by Chilean educational policies between 1985 and 1990, at the beginning of the educational privatisation process. Using a conceptual history approach allowed us to analyse the meanings attributed to the concept of quality in the design and implementation of two evaluation systems: The Educational Quality Assessment System (SECE, Spanish initials) and the Educational Quality Measurement System (SIMCE, Spanish initials). The findings show a transformation in meaning for the concept of quality. It moved from the operationalisation, management, and improvement of school systems to equating quality with the results of educational evaluations. This new definition of quality resulted from decisions by the Chilean State, which simplified its complexity and helped manage the new school system. An implication of this semantic transformation is the understanding of quality as a tool used to rank schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a sociologically informed analysis of the historically changing relation between education and society. Using a set of socio-geographical methods and longitudinal data from population censuses, we explore changes in the forms of educational inclusion and exclusion in the period 1961 to 2011. We analyse, more particularly, changes in the geographical segregation and clustering of both high- and low-schooled individuals, while geographical proximity determines the kind of social contacts people normally have. Our findings show, firstly, that the segregation of university-trained human capital within Belgium and its regions has remained high, in spite of the expansion of university education and the creation of "regional" universities. Highly educated individuals now increasingly attract one another; they increasingly search for an environment in which they are able to meet people with a similar educational background. Our findings show, secondly, different evolutions for early school leavers. While the overall decrease in the share of early school leavers has gone hand in hand with decreasing heterogeneity within Belgium, our analyses point to increasing divergences between Flanders, on the one hand, and Wallonia and Brussels, on the other. In large parts of Wallonia and Brussels, the labour markets suffer from comparatively high shares of early school leavers. We conclude that the coupling between education and society has changed in the period under consideration. We question, however, that education has become a dominant social system. We rather argue that historical analyses of geographical inequalities in educational participation shed light on the complexity and heterogeneity of society. Cet article présente une analyse sociologique de l'histoire de la relation entre l'éducation et la société. Par le biais d'un ensemble de méthodes sociogéographiques et de données longitudinales issues de recensements de la population, cette étude analyse les changements historiques dans les formes d'inclusion et d'exclusion scolaire dans la période 1961 à 2011 en Belgique. Nous analysons plus particulièrement les changements historiques de la ségrégation géographique et le clustering des individus hautement et peu scolarisées, sachant que la proximité géographique détermine le type de liens sociaux que tissent normalement les individus. Nos constats montrent, tout d'abord, que, en Belgique et dans ses régions, la ségrégation du capital humain formé à l'université est demeurée élevée malgré l'expansion de l'enseignement universitaire et la création des universités 'régionales'. Les individus hautement scolarisés de plus en plus s'attirent mutuellement les uns les autres; ils recherchent ainsi un environnement dans lequel ils peuvent rencontrer des personnes ayant un niveau de formation similaire. Nos résultats montrent, d'autre part, des évolutions différentes pour les abandons scolaires. Si en Belgique la diminution globale chez les 'abandons' va de pair avec une hétérogénéité scolaire décroissante, nos analyses indiquent des divergences croissantes entre la Flandre, d'une part, et la Wallonie et Bruxelles, d'autre part. Dans une grande partie de la Wallonie et de Bruxelles, le marché du travail souffre d'une proportion relativement élevée de jeunes qui quittent précocement l'école. Nous concluons que l'accouplement entre l'éducation et la société a changé au cours de la période analysée. Nous remettons cependant en question l'hypothése que l'éducation soit devenue un systéme social dominant. Nous soutenons plutôt que les analyses historiques des inégalités géographiques dans la participation à l'éducation mettent en lumiére la complexité et l'hétérogénéité de la société contemporaine. Dieser Aufsatz präsentiert eine soziologisch informierte Analyse des historisch veränderten Verhältnisses zwischen Erziehung und Gesellschaft. Anhand einer Reihe von sozio-geografischen Methoden und Längsschnittdaten aus Volkszählungen untersuchen wir Veränderungen in den Formen der Inklusion und Exklusion von Schulerziehung im Zeitraum 1961-2011. Wir analysieren insbesondere Veränderungen in der geografischen Segregation und Clustering von Personen mit hohem und niedrigem Schulabschluss, weil die geografische Nähe die Art der sozialen Kontakte bestimmt, die Individuen normalerweise haben. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen zum einen, dass die Trennung des von Universitäten ausgebildeten Humankapitals in Belgien und seinen Regionen trotz des Ausbaus der Hochschulen und der Schaffung "regionaler" Universitäten hoch geblieben ist. Hochgebildete Individuen ziehen sich zunehmend an; sie suchen vermehrt nach einem Umfeld, in dem sie Individuen mit einem ähnlichen Bildungshintergrund treffen können. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen zweitens unterschiedliche Entwicklungen für frühzeitige Schulabbrecher. Während der allgemeine Rückgang des Anteils der Schulabbrecher mit einer abnehmenden Heterogenität in Belgien einherging, deuten unsere Analysen auf wachsende Unterschiede zwischen Flandern einerseits und Wallonien und Brüssel andererseits hin. In weiten Teilen Walloniens und Brüssels leiden die Arbeitsmärkte unter einem vergleichsweise hohen Anteil von Schulabbrechern. Wir schließen daraus, dass sich die Kopplung zwischen Schulerziehung und Gesellschaft im betrachteten Zeitraum geändert hat. Wir stellen jedoch in Frage, dass Erziehung zu einem dominanten gesellschaftlichen Funktionssystem geworden ist. Wir argumentieren vielmehr, dass historische Analysen geografischer Ungleichheiten im Falle von Schulerziehung gerade die Komplexität und Heterogenität der heutigen Gesellschaft beleuchten. Este artículo presenta un análisis sociológico de la relación cambiante entre educación y sociedad a lo largo de la historia. Utilizando un conjunto de métodos socio-geográficos y datos longitudinales de los censos de población, analizamos los cambios en las formas de inclusión y exclusión educativa en el pertíodo de 1961 a 2011. Analizamos, más espectíficamente, los cambios en la segregación geográfica y la agregación tanto de individuos de alto nivel de escolaridad como de bajo nivel de escolar, considerando que la proximidad geográfica determina el tipo de vínculos sociales que normalmente desarrollan las personas. Nuestros hallazgos muestran, en primer lugar, que la segregación del capital humano con formación universitaria en Bélgica como al interior de sus regiones, se ha mantenido alta a pesar de la expansión de la educación universitaria y la creación de universidades 'regionales'. Las personas con un alto nivel educativo se atraen cada vez más entre sí y buscan cada vez más un entorno en el que puedan conocer a otras con una formación académica de simila [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on the approach that knowledge is socially constructed, this study aims to deepen the understanding of knowledge production processes by adapting the concept of a laboratory on an historical example of editorial collaboration. We use the editorial process of The International Encyclopediaof Education (IEE) (1985) as an example. Considering knowledge as situated in contrast to the illusion of objectivity, the paper pursues identifying a perspective on the editing process that is located in its periphery. Rooted in constructivist assumptions of Science and Technology Studies (STS) andFeminist Standpoint Theory (FST), the paper builds on the potential of understanding the social construction of knowledge by taking marginalised perspectives into account. Including the concept of gendered division of labour, the approach offers a deeper understanding of the editorial process, beyond the presented picture of relevant actors and actions. The source material consists of correspondence concerning the editorial process of the encyclopaedia, which is filed in the archive of Torsten Husén. There, we encountered the publisher's managing editor Barbara Barrett, the only woman in the editorial board of the IEE's first edition. By analysing almost 4000 pages of correspondence by coding according to qualitative content analysis it is possible to show that the kind of work that Barrett performed was much more central than presented. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of knowledge production processes and of related marginalisation of certain groups in the past. Hereby, it offers a departure point for reflecting upon present practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past two decades, the interdisciplinary push to denaturalise the concept of society has historicised the very object of social history. In this paper, I propose a way of studying the social history of education that eludes the presupposition of the social as a transcendental or pre-discursive object. My central claim is that it is possible to observe a process of socialisation regarding educational problems. This means that the social and society were not simply concepts that created a new object of knowledge, but rather that they became a visualisation principle that allowed for the abstraction of categories and made observable a set of relationships. These notions are contained and articulated in how social problems were produced, observed, performed, and acted upon by educational and political actors. I will do this by examining the production of illiteracy (analfabetismo in Spanish) as a social problem in Mexico in the first decades of the twentieth century. I argue that two fundamental processes rendered illiteracy a social problem. First, the development of statistical knowledge and methods made it possible to know the number of people who did not read and write, creating the illiterate as a statistical category. The second is the articulation of this statistical reality as a generalised problem by education experts and authorities. In this sense, literacy was abstracted and framed as an essential feature for the proper functioning of a modern society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The educational system in nineteenth-century Sweden was, as in many other industrialising states, segregated by social class. Children of the economically and politically marginalised classes were educated in basic primary subjects in the nationwide Folkskola (primary schools). From 1868 to the early 1940s, the government issued, subsidised, and distributed the Läsebok för folkskolan (Reader for Primary School; "the Reader"). Besides poems and songs, the Reader contained religious, fictitious, moral, and historical texts – all wrapped in an explicit nationalist discourse. However, it also contained images and ideologies about social class which have remained unexplored. The representations and social vernaculars in the Reader about how children of the working poor should identify and conduct themselves in order to grow up as functional members of a bourgeois society have been more or less overlooked. This paper deals with the images of the poor and marginalised in the Reader. We suggest not only that the Swedish state reproduced a class-based society through a segmented school system, but that the social descriptions in the book were aimed to produce diligent and docile workers to serve the political and economic interests of the dominant classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is focused on development of history of education as a study subject and an academic discipline in Slovakia (from 1918 to 1992, Slovakia was part of Czechoslovakia with an interruption between 1939 and 1945). Until the establishment of Czechoslovakia, the study subject history of education was part of the curriculum of teacher training schools which were established by the school act of 1868. However, it consisted only of an overview of pedagogical past and the knowledge had an informative character. After the establishment of Czechoslovakia (1918), history of education developed in two directions: firstly, at teacher training schools (orig. učiteľské ústavy), where together with theory of education (orig. pedagogika) and didactics (orig. didaktika) it formed basic educational disciplines and secondly, as an academic discipline at the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava. The incorporation of history of education into academic education, either at the Faculty of Arts (since 1922/23) or later at faculties of education (from 1946) stimulated development of this academic discipline and historical-educational research as well. The aim of the paper is to reconstruct individual phases and turning points in the development of history of education in Slovakia, accentuating the period from the establishment of Czechoslovakia to the fall of socialism (1918 – 1989). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In our paper, we aim to give an overview about the emergence and evolvement of the history of education in Hungary. Nevertheless, we intend to surpass the traditional approach of giving a schematic description of these processes as we would like to depict the interconnectedness of the Hungarian history of education with the European research tendencies and the thematic variety of the Hungarian research activities. We used literature analysis, historical source analysis and descriptive statistical analysis as primary methods. Within Hungary, we pay special attention to the University of Budapest but we also reflect special peculiarities regarding the other full universities in the country. The Hungarian history of education followed the pathway of the German-speaking countries regarding the approach and the function until 1948. History of education had a self-legitimising role in the emerging national education system and modernised university environment; however, this characteristic feature did not exclude the incorporation of international research approaches. This function was slightly altered in the interwar period since leading researchers of the subfield contributed to maintaining the ideological coherence of the political structure. During the socialist period, researchers were expected to follow the directives of their Soviet colleagues; however, in the 1970s the homogeneity in themes and research approaches began loosening. As the result of the political regime change in 1989/1990, Hungarian research was given an opportunity to be integrated into the European exchange of ideas and implement research approaches prevalent in Western countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first national teacher training school in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), founded by the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, pedagogy was a compulsory teaching subject. The official school report from 1888 stated that there were three books in use for teaching and learning pedagogical subjects, all by the same author from Croatia. Pedagogy was being developed as a practical teaching discipline in the teacher training schools and schools of theology, in accordance with the school system in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. During that period, teachers were the main representatives of the intelligentsia in BiH. Therefore, professional magazines published in BiH at the time were mostly from the field of pedagogy, as well as history of education. Historiographical planting of the history of education's manuals used in schools for teaching this subject were also researched. After the Second World War, the teaching subject History of Education found its place in the senior years of the teacher training schools. In 1963, the Chair for Pedagogy was established at the Faculty of Philosophy Sarajevo. The lectures in the history of education were, however, given only in the period 1967–1969. The lack of teachers for this course was evident and it was only in the 1990s that it became regular part of the curriculum. The goal of this paper is to emphasise the importance of the history of education as a teaching subject, but also as a field that contributes to the general cultural traditions of the different ethnic groups living in BiH. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early nineteenth century, the ideas of reform pedagogues gave rise to a didactic turn towards the visual that criticised an exclusive textual mediation of knowledge through books and lectures. To raise educational effectualness, teachers came under increasing pressure to incorporate high-profile media technologies into their lessons. Yet, top-down initiatives to implement new instructional technology often fell short of expectations when logistical and financial challenges and teachers' practices and preferences were not taken into account. However, most of the existing studies on the introduction and proliferation of high-profile educational technology in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western education have focused on industry-led promotional efforts or governmental initiatives to introduce commercially produced media into the classroom. As such, they lend insight into the normative discourse surrounding the construction of the ideal of the tech-savvy teacher, but have mostly overlooked teachers' agency, as well as the difficulties teachers met in the implementation. This paper investigates how, between 1900 and 1940, Belgian secondary school teachers dealt with the tension between professional pressures and expectations on the one hand, and their individual preferences and possibilities on the other hand. It does so by comparing the discourse of educational media advocates and governmental actors with teachers' accounts of their visual media practices as documented in teachers' pre-class preparations and notes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mediocrity as a concept in education has frequently been used by modern-day and historical actors to express discontent with the status quo of pedagogy and schooling. Despite its pervasiveness in discourse, however, the concept has largely evaded academic scrutiny, particularly in terms of its historical development in the years leading up to its appearance in the famous United States Government report, A Nation at Risk. This paper aims to construct a conceptual history of mediocrity in American education through the analysis of newspaper articles from The New York Times, to explore how the concept developed amidst the rise of neoliberalism and meritocratic discourse in education. This study finds that the concept of mediocrity between 1971 and 1983 had a number of nuanced conceptualisations and played a pivotal role in developing meritocratic discourse on natural talent and ability, as well as neoliberal and marketised narratives in public debates over educational equality, business approaches to education, and performance pay for teachers. These findings allow educational researchers to reflect meaningfully on the ways that language shapes, and is shaped by, historical developments in education, and provides layers of meaning and context to oft-used educational concepts that are crucial for the authentic evaluation of our modern education systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the potential of educational materials to forge and shape the collective memory, this article analyses the representations of the Francoist Hunger Years (1939–1952) in recent history textbooks for secondary schools by a wide range of publishers. The main thesis of the paper is that while there are textbooks that provide a complex narrative of the hunger experiences, others – even some of the most recent ones – depict the period in an oversimplified and historiographically outdated way and fail to address various social perspectives. This article also argues that it is possible to detect the persistence of the official Francoist discourse on the years of hunger in some textbooks that continue to implicitly perpetuate the distortion and oblivion the Franco dictatorship tried to impose on the famine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas Munro, a Scottish highlander, came to the Madras Presidency in South India as a soldier in the army of the East India Company in 1780. He rose to the position of its governor 40 years later in 1820 and died in India in 1827. His rise was not through military campaigns but peaceful administrative policies. During his stay in India, he defended Indian interests and took on powerful governors-general and other higher officials. He resisted their elitist policies, talked of lack of political freedom in India and wanted to give representation to Indians in administration. He conducted the first educational survey and established 101 schools. In the history of modern India, particularly in the history of education, there is a tendency to view British colonialism as a monolithic category. This paper looks at this extraordinary journey of a Scottish soldier, his impoverished status, family constraints, struggle with British elitism, and above all, his contributions to education in South India. No theory of imperialism and colonialism is available to analyse the Scottish interventions in the field of education. Such existing theories rely on the European and non-European dichotomies. They cannot be used to explain why the Scots chose to support Indians instead of their own fellow British officers in the colonial administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper delineates the intellectual history of endeavours to generate a unified science of child welfare in Finland in the early twentieth century by elucidating the efforts of leading Finnish protagonists to depict the concept of child welfare science. The idea of such a new science was not unique to Finland; similar trends emerged extensively throughout the industrialising world, in which child welfare was being increasingly championed. The fundamental reasons given for developing a child welfare science in Finland were linked with ambitions to develop child welfare as a consistent system in modern society. The aspiration to develop a scientific basis for child welfare was not only about adapting relevant research-based knowledge to practice, but also about creating historical and theoretical self-understanding in the field. The intention was to construct a comprehensive conceptual framework for the child welfare needed in policymaking, legislation, and systems building, as well as in the development of professional practices. Although focusing on Finland, the review is of more general significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American College of St Maurice at Münster in Westphalia was founded in 1867 to train priests for the Catholic missions in the United States. This paper outlines the history of this short-lived educational institutions (1867–1879), with particular focus on the 68 seminarians, who attended this theological seminary for their pastoral formation, accompanied by scholarly studies in theology and philosophy at the Academy of Münster. This educational concept and history of the American College is considered against the background of the scholarly dispute about the dogma of papal infallibility and the Prussian Kulturkampf, that eventually led to the closure of the American College in 1879. Finally, attention is paid to the pastoral ministry of the alumni and the situation of the German Catholics in the United States. The alumni of the American College became a particularly sought-after group of priests, not only due to their religio-cultural background, but also with regards to their broader pastoral and academic formation that helped to meet the challenges ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]