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This study examines how origami has been implemented, practised, and developed in the early childhood education of Japan over the past 140 years. Historically speaking, paper-folding has been part of Japanese symbolic art, craft culture, and religious ceremonial artefacts since paper and paper-folding techniques were first imported from China during the seventh century. By the eighteenth century, paper-folding provided a form of mass entertainment in Japanese society. During the 1870s, paper-folding was dramatically transformed into a pedagogical tool within Japanese kindergartens after Friedrich Froebel's (1782–1852) kindergarten system and its curriculum was transferred to Japan from the West. "Papier-Falten" (paper-folding) comprised an element of Froebel's Occupations – which was a series of handiwork activities – in his kindergarten curriculum, whereby various folding techniques and models were derived from European traditional paper-folding and introduced into a Japanese kindergarten curriculum that was associated with the concept of Froebel's kindergarten. Particularly seen in early childhood education in Japan, what we now call origami developed as a new form of paper-folding. This gradually emerged through the marriage of Western (German) and Eastern (Japanese) paper-folding cultures. The study highlights the benefits and uniqueness of cultural transmission and transformation when developing origami in early childhood education in Japan. [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]

In appreciating and responding to the three symposium papers on “Anarchism, Texts and Children”, a case is made for what John Berger has called “the honour of an alternative”, for affirmation as well as for refusal. Not only should we respond positively and imaginatively to Colin Ward’s call for “counter-history” of our own making, we should also extend our advocacy of alternatives through the adventure of more creative historical methodologies. Lastly, in the spirit of Berger’s writing, this Afterword celebrates the capacity of all three papers not just to speak to issues of enduring human importance, but to do so imaginatively and eloquently, thereby refusing and subverting the increasingly dreary hegemony of academic writing disgracefully in thrall to the diminishing calculus of neo-liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

R.H. Tawney (1880–1962), a leading English economic historian and prominent socialist, was vigorously involved in educational reconstruction during the Second World War. For Tawney, the war was a war for social democracy. His ideals of social democracy formed a basis for his case for Public (independent) School reform and free secondary education for all. Despite this, the connection between Tawney’s ideals and his perspectives on educational issues has not been addressed fully by historians and thus there has been a lack of a proper explanation for his often criticised sympathy for the public schools and his indifference towards the multilateral school. Hence, this paper aims to re-examine the link between them in greater depth. It concludes that, according to Tawney’s ideals of social democracy, the abolition of the public schools was not necessary for the establishment of a democratic educational system. Moreover, Tawney did not launch an attack on the tripartite system proposed by the Norwood Report of 1943 since it was not against his ideal of equality as long as different secondary schools were equal in quality and status. Equality, he believed, must be advanced through the raising of the school leaving age to 16 and the abolition of fees in all secondary schools. Thus, he laid more emphasis on the school leaving age and tuition fees than on the multilateral school. In brief, on various issues pertaining to secondary education, Tawney’s opinions and actions were deeply grounded in his distinctive ideals of social democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of the paper is to point out a specific segment of education of children in Slovakia in the period of Socialism (1948–1989) through the example of confessional education of children in the environment of the secret Church. After the Second World War, a significant turnover in education occurred in Czechoslovakia under the impact of Soviet politics. Schools were nationalised, which in fact meant the disappearance of church schools and plurality in education. After the Communist coup in 1948, education was immediately reformed by the Education Act of 21 April 1948, which unified the system of education and made it a state monopoly with a pro-Soviet orientation. The socialist school was indoctrinated by the ideology of Marxism-Leninism; the content of education at all levels, as well as leisure time activities of children. Work with children and youth in a religious spirit was harshly punished and considered an anti-state activity. Therefore, in the period of political liberation in the 1960s (Prague Spring), the so-called secret Church started its activity. The paper is focused on an analysis of the model of working with children in the secret Church in Slovakia between 1973 and 1989 through the method of oral history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the “Junkyard” (chatzar grutaot) - a unique educational environment and practice developed in kindergartens on the Israeli kibbutz in the 1940s and 1950s, and still in wide use today in kibbutz kindergartens. The Junkyard, consisting of artefacts of the adult world that are no longer in use, is an ever-changing set-up in which children’s free play is encouraged, with minimal rules for use of time, space, objects, and social relations. Anchored in the writings of its two founding educators, as well as in writings of and interviews with its advocates and instructors over the years, this paper shows how the Junkyard drew on widespread ideas about early childhood development and education, at the same time as it responded to local conditions and concerns. The paper argues that a unique conjunction of factors - material and structural, educational and pedagogical, ideological and cultural - facilitated the process by which the Junkyard was inserted relatively smoothly into the kibbutz educational landscape, in lasting ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Uruguayan state approach to the teaching of writing in public elementary education during the 1830s, and is an attempt to explain why state officials advanced new pedagogical methods aimed at increasing rationalisation and standardisation. While many different handwriting styles existed in the past, the school system simplified and standardised public education under a single cursive style, the English round-hand. Notwithstanding the state’s standardising directives, Uruguayan teachers combined the pedagogical innovations of Lancaster’s monitorial system with the calligraphic traditions of the old writing masters. According to personal preference and necessity, teachers devised a hybrid system, which implemented new dictation exercises and the use of the writing slate, but preserved the writing masters’ imitation ofmuestras, and the use of quill, ink, and paper. The government arranged an inventive procedure to accurately measure students’ handwriting performance. Theplanas, or samples of students’ handwriting, were useful tools in the standardisation and evaluation of public education. Elementary schools from all over the country forwarded handwriting samples to the central state, or exhibited them in public examination ceremonies, as teachers publicised pedagogical success, and state officials confirmed the general advancement of public education. This study is also an attempt to show that the teaching of writing was part of a greater pedagogical mission and nation-building project: the intentional departure from colonial corporate identities, and the construction of a national community conceived as the sum of its individual citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines prime minister Robert Menzies decision to support science education in Australian schools in 1963. This was a landmark shift in policy for the federal government, but in many ways mirrors the decision of Eisenhower who brought down the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958. The paper uses a transnational approach to offer a new way of looking at the 1963 decision by focusing on the need for science education and the environment which supported science advocacy rather than the traditional interpretation of political expediency to court the Catholic vote. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An analysis of the history of primary education in Belgium by Depaepe et al. in 2000 has demonstrated how the idea of “order” structured classroom reality in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This “order” is not only visible in the internal organisation of schooling (e.g. division into year classes, a structured timetable, the use of the didactics of teacher-centred instruction), but also in the design of the curriculum. Good behaviour and moral decency were consistently prioritised over “intellectual knowledge”. Very similar paternalising practices – including the cult of order – were transported to the Belgian colony. The implementation of these practices, however, did not go smoothly, because the African context of missionary education was totally different from the Belgian educational context. Precisely as a result of these difficulties, the core characteristics and likewise mistakes of the transported “grammar of educationalisation” become even more apparent. On the basis of a variety of sources, this paper demonstrates that secondary education for boys in the Belgian colony of Congo was founded on the same educational norms and values that characterised nineteenth-century Belgian education. In this respect, order was considered theconditio sine qua nonfor discipline and self-discipline. But, in contrast to what Nikolas Rose has argued, the Foucaultian paradigm – although attractive and interesting – is not imperative in explaining the educational strategy of order. On the contrary, the development of the history of education as a science could benefit from a theoretical framework coming “from within” the discipline. Until today, the history of educational practice has been explained from a history of education perspective only to a limited extent. By exploring the duality of a didactic grammar of schooling, on the one hand, and an educational semantics of moralisation, on the other hand, this paper contributes to the development of a theoretical framework from within the history of education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the late 1930s the Spanish Civil War captured the international imagination to an extraordinary degree. As in other countries British men and women were moved to intervene directly and the memory of the war, and of British participation in it, has held an enduring appeal in the UK. The Civil War was also notable for its use of the visual as a weapon of propaganda, and the Spanish Republican Government deployed visual imagery to great effect as an instrument through which it exhibited its progressive educational and welfare reforms to an international audience. This article focuses on the visual and textual representations of displaced children in Republican educational colonies in Spain that are preserved in British archive collections. Taking as its starting point a series of photographs of children in colonies gathered together as part of the International Brigade Memorial Archive in London, the paper will consider the construction, use, and circulation of these images and associated texts by British and American political and humanitarian networks and their subsequent collection and preservation in British archival institutions. The paper will assess the effectiveness of the images and texts as pedagogical and political agents and explore how their meaning shifted as they travelled through a range of performative spaces on a journey from their construction as artefacts designed initially to record and communicate the Spanish Republic’s progressive educational project, to commemorative objects in the archive. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]