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This article reexamines the intellectual history of the first public kindergartens, established in St Louis, Missouri, by William Torrey Harris and Elizabeth Blow in 1873. This piece argues that historians have overlooked a critical influence on the establishment of the first public kindergartens; namely, Harris and Blow's conviction that children's intellectual, psychological, and moral development recapitulated historical stages of human cultural and sociological evolution. This belief in cultural recapitulation deeply informed how they viewed the kindergarten curriculum and the role of public education—including the public kindergarten—in a liberal democratic society. Consequently, the first public kindergartens stand as a patent example, not of romantic reform, but of a late nineteenth-century state-centered liberalism grounded in Harris and Blow's ethnocentric views of cultural and child development, as well as their Hegelian institutional idealism. Finally, this article illustrates how Harris and Blow transposed widely circulating theories of biological and cultural evolution, a belief in Western cultural superiority, and their vision of a civilised social order onto the biology and psychology of the child. As such, this paper illustrates how the metaphors and categories used to describe the stages of child development have made ethical claims with far-reaching implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the development of history teaching in West Germany from the 1970s onwards. When in the early 1970s the relevance of history - both as an academic discipline and as a school subject - was challenged, this led to fierce debates as a multitude of new concepts were being developed. One of these was Annette Kuhn’s revolutionary concept of teaching history which immediately came under attack. This debate - and others - had far reaching consequences. At first glance it was a debate about how to model objects like the English Revolution in a way to make them suitable for the history classroom. At second glance, however, this debate revolved around fundamental issues like the role of history in school, the relation between social sciences and didactics, and history’s relevance for today in general. The debate and its eventual outcome are explained within the framework of Bourdieu’s field theory. The study re-examines the consequences of this debate. In discussing alternatives to Kuhn’s approach, it shows how debates forced upon traditional history led historians to readdress the essentials of historical thinking and thus to gain new theoretical strength which resulted in a stronger position for history at universities and schools as well as in history didactics. This resulted in a specific construction and role of Geschichtsdidaktik in Germany which helps to explain why there is a difference in comparison to other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1893, Annie Besant touched the shores of India as a leader of the Theosophical Society. In India, Besant is widely known for her involvement in the Home Rule Movement and as president of the Indian National Congress, the chief political organisation in the Indian freedom struggle. Before entering into the political arena of the country, Besant was actively involved in the religious education of Hindu youths. After six years of establishing a college and a school for upper caste Hindu boys, she founded a school for upper caste Hindu girls in the city of Benares in the United Provinces of British India. The formal education of girls was in a nascent stage in the United Provinces compared to those in the presidencies of Bengal, Bombay, and Madras. One of the reasons behind this lag, particularly in Benares, was the deep-rooted orthodoxy which was either opposed to the formal education of girls or enforced restrictions on it. The paper aims to throw light on Besant’s engagement with the question of female education not only in terms of physical access to school but also with regard to “what” the girls were being taught at the school. Did Besant strive for “true” education of upper caste Hindu girls enabling them to liberate themselves from the fetters of orthodoxy or did she perpetuate the orthodox ideals to make them “ideal” Indian women? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a review of history of education statistics in Spain, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, describing their traditional means of operation based on censuses, flat tables, and macro-statistical data, which usually display a purely quantitative analysis. Only in recent decades have statistical analyses appeared, supported by modern office tools and parametric data processing, which facilitate qualitative research. Among other types of graphics used, for our purposes those based on serial mapping are especially revealing and useful, as they show the diachronic evolution of the variables analysed. Supported by this methodology, the present study statistically analyses the official data on state primary education in Extremadura in the second half of the nineteenth century, in order to demonstrate how significant the increase in financial investment in the late nineteenth century was and its direct impact on expanding the coverage of the educational network at a regional level. That meant the disappearance of inequalities in all educational standards (school equipment, number of appointments, salaries, gender, etc.) and, therefore, a reduction in illiteracy rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Substantial historical research indicates that during World War II Canadian schools were considered optimal sites for fostering nationalistic sentiments in teachers and learners. Policymakers directed educators and students to collect scrap metals, purchase war savings certificates, salute the flag, and undertake marching drills. These wide-reaching directives give the impression that schools were considerably reshaped during the war. Nevertheless, since much of the literature has used official information sources, such as curriculum documents and government missives, it is unclear to what extent teachers implemented such directives. No Canadian scholarship has tapped the memories of former teachers to determine their compliance in promoting nationalistic sentiments and activities. Nor have existing histories categorised activities by geographic area (such as rural versus urban; coastal versus inland) or school level (elementary versus secondary). Thus, the “unity of purpose and experience” implied by some of the literature may be overemphasised. This paper challenges the suggestion that throughout Canada all children and teachers in schools fervently engaged in nationalistic behaviour during World War II. To supplement government perspectives found in newspapers, magazines, curricular documents, and other Department of Education sources, I interviewed two dozen teachers who taught in 40 schools throughout British Columbia between 1939 and 1945. Despite policymakers’ intentions, there were many factors influencing schools’ abilities to support the war effort. These included a community’s geographic proximity or access to centres of larger war-related activity, such as munitions factories or collection stations; the values and social circumstances of families and communities; and teachers’ individual preferences, often reflecting their career stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From its beginning in 1885, the Hull House was beacon for social progress and urban reform. Founders Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr recruited talented, passionate partners from diverse fields to address issues from street sanitation to education in Chicago’s immigrant communities. Among residents’ many projects, their involvement in the “social hygiene” movement for sex education and contraception is perhaps the least recognised, in part because the Hull House did not save materials directly related to these services. As a result, the professional activities of Hull House residents Drs Rachelle Yarros and Alice Hamilton reveal a productive relationship between the Hull House and the social hygiene movement. Part of their critical work was to dismantle the cultural association of contraceptives and sex education with “fallen women” and reframe these services as necessities for maternal health. The papers of their professional organisations chronicle their delicate efforts to challenge assumptions about reproductive healthcare while preserving Victorian ideals about sex as a private, procreative endeavour strictly between married, monogamous people. Rachelle Yarros was particularly active, producing a dearth of literature on sexual health, teaching classes on the subject, and overseeing the opening of Chicago’s first public birth control clinics. Each of these advancements, including the birth control clinic, was available on Hull House grounds. By capitalising on the financial and medical resources available to them as physicians and reformers, Yarros and Hamilton achieved significant gains in women’s healthcare and initiated a national conversation about sexual health as a human right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the example of the establishment, functioning, and closing of bilingual schools during the Soviet occupation of Hungary, this paper aims to introduce this segment of public education in Central-Eastern Europe. In the period between 1945 and 1989, the learning of Russian as a compulsory subject was introduced, teaching other languages was restricted, and Hungarian-Russian bilingual schools were launched. The features of their establishment can be connected to political and professional power relations in different sub-periods within the structures of closed language policy. The objective in both states was the education of committed political elite. The first school was established by direct political control and closed because of the 1956 revolution. The second school was established in 1974, through professional and political compromises. The third school opened at the end of the period, as part of a top-down development project involving 14 schools. A number of European target languages (still including Russian) were introduced, which can be regarded as the opening up of language education policy. Relying on sources, documents, and personal recollections, the study aims to reveal the dynamics of the interrelations between controlled language education, University and the changes in Hungarian economic, social, domestic, and foreign policy in the given periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to reconstruct the pedagogy of Leonor Serrano, a Spanish school inspector working and developing her theories between 1914 and 1939. We use an interrogative-analytical methodology based on content analysis of her texts to reconstruct her educational theory. The theoretical deductive elements are uncovered in the analysis of the answers Leonor Serrano gives to the “basic questions of education”, issues that provide the bases for the scientific field of the theory of education to define a specific pedagogy and are identified through a process of historical-educational review. The study outcome is an explanatory narrative. The paper ends with a discussion of the method and the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the way in which psychologists classified immigrant children as feebleminded through the use of intelligence testing and how state organisations consequently segregated them from public schools based on the scientific evidence. First, I show the way in which the psychologist Lewis Terman utilised intelligence testing to identify immigrant children deemed feebleminded. I focus closely on a survey and on his methodology and analysis. I then discuss the possibilities of education for the feebleminded and the segregation of immigrant children from regular classroom of public schools. Through his survey, Terman concluded that the exceptionally high ratio of feebleminded children in the tested region was caused by the large population of immigrant children, although the selection of the sample was often subjective, leading to “miscalculation” in his analysis. Terman’s survey was influential in terms of segregating feebleminded children by stating their incurability; possibilities of education for the feebleminded were thus denied. At his suggestion, special classes and schools, along with a home for the feebleminded, were established. Terman’s psychological survey was a cue for psychologists to enter the school system. The State Board of Education was not only attempting to discover the percentage of feebleminded children but also trying to apply psychology to school training. With the cooperation of the Board, the training of teachers for the feebleminded proceeded. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The two decades following the establishment of the Turkish Republic witnessed the growth of the pervasive fear that vagrant and homeless children and child delinquents presented a threat to the physical, mental, and economic well-being of the nascent Turkish nation. Newspapers of the period regularly touched upon the issue, alerting the public and state officials to the increase in the number of vagrant and homeless children on the streets of Istanbul, and to the crime and other troubles caused by theseküçük sefiller(“little miserables”), as a deputy from Istanbul called them. The language of these newspaper articles was an amalgam of both humanitarian sentiments such as showing charity and mercy to these groups and fears that necessitated their social and moral control in order that they become re/productive citizens of the new Republic. In this paper, I explore how certain child populations gained visibility and intelligibility during the first few decades of the Turkish Republic. I particularly focus on a modern child rescue institution,Çocukları Kurtarma Yurdu, founded in this period as an amalgam of numerous – at times competing – discourses that fixated on the bodies of “street children”, a colloquial term that referred to a heterogeneous group of children including child delinquents, vagrant, homeless, and destitute children. The institution blended modern mental hygiene principles derived from psychology/psychiatry with progressive vocational education and humanitarianism, with the ultimate goal of fabricating mentally and physically sound and economically productive republican citizens out of these “abnormal bodies”. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Delivered as one of the keynote addresses at the International Standing Committee on the History of Education (ISCHE) Conference held in Chicago in August 2016, this paper offers a broad review of how the body and embodiment have been incorporated into histories of education. Based on this historiography, I extend three “inspiring provocations” intended to set the stage for new questions, new theorising, and new methods regarding the body in the field. By asking new questions of the past, drawing on innovative theoretical and methodological frameworks, I argue, historians can continue to give proper empirical standing to the body and embodiment in our histories of education. I conclude with a central question: What are the important questions in the history of education that the body might help us to answer? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

European physicians long worried that the scholarly life was harmful to health. Neurological and digestive problems flowed from sedentary, seated lives. In the late eighteenth century, when the Enlightenment began spreading education to more people, educators inspired by Rousseau’sEmilesuch as Johann Guts Muths, Friedrich Jahn, Johann Pestalozzi, and Philipp von Fellenberg explored ways to add exercise to schooling. In the northeastern United States, educational reformers were also concerned with how to expand schooling without subjecting more children and teachers to the diseases of scholars. Particularly in New England, educators such as Catharine Beecher, Mary Lyon, Alden Partridge, and Joseph Green Cogswell tested new forms of exercise in academies for both girls and boys. Educational reformers had in common a tendency toward ill health, so the dilemma of scholarly frailty particularly engaged them. Spinal curvature and pulmonary consumption added to the previous concerns for students and teachers. In addition to exercise, improving schoolhouse ventilation, heating, and desks could keep students healthier, and teaching physiology could train them to keep themselves healthier. Boston’s highly developed and prevention-oriented medical culture and its medical and education publications made the city the ideal home for the first seven annual meetings of the American Institute of Instruction, which were rich with health content. This paper focuses on the keen interest in health among American educators of the common school reform era before Horace Mann, which puts his interest in phrenology in perspective as only one of many paths to health concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The general focus of this paper is on religious teaching brothers, a very much neglected group within the body of historical scholarship on Catholic education generally. Notwithstanding the existence of an extensive body of literature of a hagiographic nature – much of it commissioned by male religious orders – as well as a small number of academic theses, brothers occupy a field wide open for research on many fronts, internationally and using a wide variety of research approaches. The paper concentrates on a particularly neglected area: the recruitment practices of the orders. It does so in relation to the situation in Australia from 1930 to 1960. First, the broad background to the work of Catholic religious teaching brothers from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century is considered. This is followed by a general overview of three of the four principal ways in which the orders sought new recruits: through the influence of the Church on the Catholic home, through the work of the Catholic school, and through the efforts of special recruiting agents. The paper then moves to the central area of concern – namely, a social semiotic analysis of the special recruitment literature produced by the religious orders and used by them in Australia from the 1930s to the early 1960s. The analysis draws on an analytic approach based on a theory of social semiotics. What the analysis reveals is the sets of practices and textual mechanisms through which the orders enticed young men to join their ranks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the educational and religious lives of Dominican Sisters in nineteenth-century Ireland and New Zealand. It considers developments in Irish society and culture that shaped the educational mission of Dominican Sisters, as well as some of the challenges facing 10 Sisters who, in 1871, journeyed from Dublin to establish a foundation in Dunedin, New Zealand. Drawing on previously unpublished archival sources, including Sisters’ letters “home” to Ireland, this paper explores ways in which the expectations of the Founder Sisters were initially shaped by “Old World” social and cultural structures and their dependence on their motherhouse in Sion Hill, Dublin. It examines changes in the lives of Sisters as their links with Ireland diminished and they began to reshape their educational mission around a new cultural and religious identity. This paper challenges educational historians to acknowledge the role Catholic sister-teachers played in the formation of national education systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Power over education and the upcoming generations has always been an important instrument in shaping religious and secular values. As a consequence, control over schools, pupils and teachers was, particularly in periods of war, an important means for bringing about acceptance of the new regime. The aim of this paper is to discuss priest-teachers’ wartime memories of German interference in Belgian education during Second World War, on the basis of a survey conducted in the 1970s. By looking at teachers’ memories, this paper contributes to a neglected field of study in the history of education and the historiography of Second World War. The analysis of the questionnaires illuminate how certain aspects of German educational policy were remembered by teachers and how they positioned themselves in the landscape of Second World War memory. As a result, this paper demonstrates that the survey not only offers an interesting source for investigating the war itself, but also sheds light on the changing post-war relationship between education, society and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines militarisation in child culture in Israel’s transition from a pre-state society engaged in the nation-building process to statehood. The paper studies children’s culture and the literary corpus for children created in the 1940s and 1950s in Jewish Palestine, before and after Israel’s establishment. It investigates the main stages in the rapid development of the militaristic narrative for children – from the beginning of World War II in 1939, through the War of Independence in 1948, and during the first decade of statehood. By examining the nature of the national-military children’s story, I demonstrate the extent to which militarisation in Israeli children’s culture was dictated from above. I also argue that society’s rapid change following the founding of the Israeli state in 1948 brought about a dramatic shift in the attitude of state institutions, and especially the education system, towards the militaristic narrative addressed towards children that was vigorously promoted prior to 1948. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using a transnational framework, this paper focuses on four graduates of Gipsy Hill Training College (GHTC) for nursery school teachers in London, United Kingdom, in the early to mid-twentieth century. Firstly, I explore GHTC’s progressive ideals and highlight ways in which its principal, Lillian de Lissa, encouraged students to “think internationally”. She was especially proud that a handful of students from countries such as China, Turkey and Canada studied at Gipsy Hill. These included Nevin Nouri and Bek Keng Chui, whose experiences are explored in the second section of the paper. Likewise, British graduates “who carried Gipsy Hill to the ends of the earth” featured prominently in the college magazine, the Gipsy Trail. Finally, I examine reports from Marjorie Sanders and Barbara Boal for the ways in which they represented their lives and work overseas to readers of the Gipsy Trail. Together, de Lissa and GHTC graduates constructed the college as a progressive educational institution whose influence transcended national boundaries. However, they exposed a range of social divisions in their portrayals of people and places “in the uttermost parts of the earth” in the process of articulating their ideals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The subject of this paper is the construction of childhood as a time of happiness in different historical periods. It first analyses the construction of childhood as a time of happiness in the German romantic period in the eighteenth century. Secondly, the paper discusses the construction of happy mothers and children in The Century of Childhood (1900) by the Swedish writer Ellen Key and thirdly, the idea of happy children in educational programmes within the movement of 1968 in West Germany, especially in the so called “Kinderläden” and within the alternative milieu of the 1970s and 1980s, also inspired by the US psychotherapist Jean Liedloff and her famous book In Search of Happiness Lost (1977). The paper focuses on differences and similarities in the construction of the happy childhood. It shows that the discussion about children’s happiness is part of the history of childhood and plays a decisive role in the pedagogical thought concerning childhood. The several discoveries of childhood in modern history were often connected with the idea of childhood as a happy time. In the twentieth century the discourse about children’s happiness is linked with the history of the psychological self and his education. A tendency to psychologise the self is an impact of the discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The successful introduction of formalised anti-Judaic policies in mid-1930s Germany was one of the steps toward the extermination of European Jewry through the implementation of the Final Solution. The current paper seeks to examine the role of social institutions, particularly educational systems within the greater German community, as agents of Nazi policy or agents of resistance in the years leading up to the Final Solution. In particular, the paper will emphasise the first years of Nazi power and the rise of the Third Reich. Documentation will include a general investigation into the reaction of professional educators as the nationalist hegemony of the Party came to rule curriculum and educational environs across Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From the late sixteenth century, in response to the problem of how best to teach children to read, a variety of texts, such as primers, spellers and readers were produced in England for vernacular instruction. This paper describes how these materials were used by teachers to develop, first, a specific religious understanding according to the stricture of the time and, second, a moral reading practice that provided the child with a guide to secular conduct. The analysis focuses on the use of these texts as a productive means for shaping the child-reader in the context of newly emerging educational spaces, which fostered a particular, morally formative relation among teacher, child and text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consciousness1 of the specificities of childhood, as we know, has lasted for centuries. However, the history of childhood – in other words, the representation of it – should not be confounded with the history of the children in their everyday reality, although both influence each other. The history of the "discoveries" of childhood can, in fact, be interpreted as historically situated social constructions. And the myriad of "eurekas" that have punctuated the long history of childhood can be considered as a kaleidoscope that has reflected contrasted images of the projections by those who considered themselves as inventors of different faces of childhood. Occidental societies that have generalised education since the nineteenth century have largely disseminated the idea that childhood can be defined as a period specially dedicated to education and learning. In the first part of this paper, the huge phenomenon, with manifold consequences, of the transformation of the children into pupils – girls and boys – not, however, without discrimination, is analysed and contextualised. This phenomenon was accompanied by the appearance of a multitude of new specialists in childhood who scrutinised – as naturalists, experimentalists, social entrepreneurs, internationalist reformers – the conditions of children's development, of their learning and education. The kaleidoscope of images emanating from their observations and discourses is the object of the analysis presented in the second part of this paper. Three "paradigmatic turning points" or "eurekas" that materialise in a particularly significant way the theories, figures and places of such images have been chosen: (1) the spreading of evolutionist theory that invested the child as origin and future of humankind; (2) the pedological blaze that installed the science of the child as queen of the sciences; (3) the so-called "Copernican revolution", as described by Claparède, that positioned the child – and not the pupil – as the centre around which pedagogy had to turn; consequently, with Piaget, the School of Geneva became a global reference of new theories of development. The analysis presented, based on a wide range of literature and on copious research in archives, led to putting forward the following thesis. Although many emblematic representatives of this new science of the child studied the development of and were interested in childhood because of its evolutionary potentials and capacities for learning, they inclined in their theories to leave aside the questions of teaching and education. The social reality of the learning pupil was hidden in favour of a point of view heavily influenced by a sort of "naturalism" of the child, which postulated and stipulated that nature and its laws were inviolable and prominent. This naturalism was nourished both by a certain form of scientism based on the credo of the experimental approach and on a form of romanticism that regard as sacred "this piece of nature supposedly intact" that should be the prime state of childhood. 1Cet article constitue une réécriture de la Conférence de clôture d'Ische 32, donnée à Amsterdam, en août 2010. J'en ai conservé le concept, visant à proposer une réflexion générique qui s'inscrit en écho aux travaux du Congrès – d'où aussi le choix d'un fil rouge autour des "eurêkas" réinventant l'enfance – et j'y avance des thèses, à dessein assez engagées, pour susciter la réflexion et la discussion. Tout en étant spécifique par le fil rouge qui y est déroulé, cette réflexion se fonde sur des analyses historiennes empiriques plus approfondies et circonscrites, dont les références sont fournies en notes, aux endroits opportuns. Ces recherches sont liées au subside Sinergia CRSII1-127576/1 "Acteurs de la fabrique des savoirs et construction de nouveaux champs disciplinaires". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational concepts, such as enrolment, attendance, passing or failing students, school retardation, and school desertion, which made it possible to describe the course of children through the school system, went through a gradual process, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century and throughout the first decades of the twentieth. In the early 1960s, a systematic set of categories was distilled, with deserción (school abandonment) occupying a central place. This paper analyses the development of these categories in the first half of the twentieth century, maintaining the hypothesis that toward the end of the 1950s, a new semantics was systematised for classifying children’s course through school, which moulded and regulated the paths of schooling; the passage occurred from the psychometric and biotypological concepts of the 1920s to 1940s to concepts derived from economics and efficiency. The paper also analyses how this semantics, which originated in the school environment, spread to other social environments. For this purpose, it focuses on examples of the legal discourse aimed at regulating “juvenile delinquency” and proposes some reflections regarding the conceptual passages between fields. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A general lack of scholarly works on various aspects of the history of the lives of female teaching religious has recently been highlighted by Hellinckx, Depaepe and Simon. This paper, which reports a preliminary study, is offered as one contribution to addressing the deficit identified. The hope is that it will provoke further scholarship in the field. It is based on an oral history project on the perspectives of female religious in Ireland on themselves over time for the period 1950-2008. Three main 'frames' were identified in the participants' testimony in this regard: they saw themselves as emulators of their own teachers; they placed great emphasis on having had to deal with various challenges of a personal and social nature; and they were acutely aware of having been prepared from their early years as full-professed religious for being required to respond to leadership expectations of their superiors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper illustrates the factors and features of the revival of paid care and domestic work in Italy. While Italy is experiencing a boom in the recourse to carers for the elderly, there is not a corresponding expansion in paid private childcare, in spite of growing female employment and limited public services for children. One of the reasons for this is the growing involvement of grandparents in childcare. In Italy, a country characterised by a 'Mediterranean welfare regime', people also have recourse to their own mothers (and fathers) to care for their children, in spite of the fact that they can afford to pay for childminding and babysitting. Thus it is not only (migrant) domestic workers who frequently rely on their parents to care for their own children, an issue widely discussed in the literature on global care chains. Their employers, too, may rely on them. Grandparents, however, have turned out to play an important role in childcare not only in Italy but also in Western countries with better childcare services. Focusing on these issues, the paper contributes both to the debate on global care chains and to that on the role of the family within different welfare systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper articulates the concepts of political culture, schooling and slavery in order to comprehend the process of instituting modern schools in Brazil, during the period immediately after Independence in 1822. With a view to this, it takes as its starting point the strategies and proposals of different groups disputing the direction of the nation-building movement, and the importance they attached to instruction amidst this process. Analysis focuses on the province of Minas Gerais, a region in which issues related to education received particular attention. A fundamental characteristic of this region was the hegemonic presence of blacks in its demographic structure, a large proportion of whom were slaves. The paper thus seeks to relate the profile of the population to the educational proposals which circulated in debates on the process of organising and structuring the province. Various documentary sources were used in the analysis, especially projects proposed by politicians, minutes and reports of the Provincial Presidents, newspapers and provincial censuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnic segregation has become an emerging feature in Malaysia's education system even though the institutional role of education should have been a unifying force for the country's multi-ethnic society. The underlying problem is that, at all levels of education provision in Malaysia, alternative streams are allowed to coexist alongside mainstream education provided by the government. Alarmingly, these alternative streams are not reinforcing what mainstream education is trying to do: foster ethnic integration. Instead, the alternative streams have become divided along ethnic lines. This paper looks at the development of Malaysia's education system and examines two main factors that have contributed to the current state of ethnic segregation: enrolment choices and preferential policies. These two factors have in one way or another helped to strengthen the coexistence of alternative streams alongside mainstream education from which ethnic segregation emerges. These alternative streams have become competing rather than supplementary/complementary forces capable of challenging mainstream education. This paper explains how these two factors contribute to ethnic segregation at all levels of education notwithstanding their causal relationships at certain levels of education. Second, it evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the measures taken by the Malaysian government to desegregate the education system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the way French language and literature teachers have addressed the question of social inequities at school in France from 1959 until today. Classical Humanities, which had constituted the basis of elite education for many centuries, were harshly questioned from the eighteenth century on as being inadequate to a modern world. During the twentieth century, a new criticism was expressed against classical education: it was considered as a way of reproducing the domination of the bourgeoisie by setting up a barrier against the popular pupils, who frequented the so-called primary schools, and were thus excluded from this classical culture. The democratisation of the French school system, through the transformation of primary and secondary systems from parallel systems (for lower-class pupils and upper-class pupils) into sequent degrees, was therefore accompanied by the extension of a new subject: French literature. French authors, read, studied, commented on from the lowest grades of primary schools to the last grades of secondary schools, seemed to offer the common cultural references needed by a democratic society. The creation of the “Agregation de lettres modernes” in 1959 crowned this controversial evolution, a few months after the Berthoin reform had theoretically opened the secondary schools to every pupil whatever his or her social background. However, far from being a triumphal decade for the French literary studies, the end of the 1960s witnessed violent attacks against this traditional teaching. Considered as a part of bourgeois culture, it was accused of dooming pupils from a popular background to inexorable failure. Just like the Classical Humanities earlier, French literature appeared as an instrument of ideological domination and social reproduction. At the same time, the success of structuralism in linguistics and literary studies opened alternative possibilities to the classical literary history and proposed new ways of analysing texts and literary works. In this context the transformation of the discipline itself appeared to some teachers as both an adequate and legitimate way to democratise secondary schools. This paper describes the rise, the extension, and the abandonment of this original attempt from the 1950s to today. The proposals made by the promoters of the reforms are considered, in this paper, as a complex construction where social experience, political engagement, praxis, and theory are inextricably intertwined, thus questioning the relationship between politics and school culture. This paper also examines how the emergence of didactics as a scientific field at the end of the 1970s, and the subsequent rejection of political considerations from its technical and pedagogical discourse, tended to prevent teachers from grappling directly and efficiently with the issue of social inequities in French literature and language courses. This “de-politicisation” of the curriculum debates may well have been the symptom of an inability to conceive how culture might be defined and what role it might play in a democratic society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first provides an overview of the topics featured in China's Educational Journal in the period 1909-1948, in order to sketch briefly the history of that country's pattern of selection from among various modes of foreign educational thought. It becomes clear that, in each case, China absorbed from outside only those ideas that could fit with its own traditional forms of educational thinking, and that for this reason it tended to oscillate between turning toward the outside world for new ideas and drawing back into itself to reflect on its own educational culture, policies and institutions. The paper then interprets this dynamic in terms of Niklas Luhmann's theory of self-reference. In Luhmann's social systems theory, any system defines, identifies or constitutes itself at each (in this case historical) moment in relation to another system by absorbing from that other system only what it perceives as being compatible with its own inner organisation, or (as Luhmann puts it) by always absorbing the difference between what already lies within it (e.g. traditional Chinese culture, values and ideas) and what lies outside it (e.g. the culture, values and ideas of the West, with which China found itself already inevitably interconnected). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presentism is generally regarded as a necessary evil in historiography. This paper explores the upside of that inevitability. Using a philosophical approach to discourse analysis in the tradition of new cultural history, the paper distinguishes between a strategic use of presentism on the one hand, and a rationalistic approach to history on the other hand. The paper concludes by considering some political implications of rationalistic accounts and strategically presentistic accounts in historiography. Rationalistic accounts inscribe expectations of the past into visions of the future; they cast the historian in the role of prophet; and they perpetuate notions of ahistoric agency. In contrast, strategically presentistic histories incorporate an orientation that deliberately uses the lenses and perspectives of the present in order to bring current assumptions and perspectives into focus. When assumptions are examined in relation to presentistic perspectives, those assumptions loosen their reins on thought. Since presentism is unavoidable, presentism should not be dismissed outright, but ought to be subject to probing and critical examination. With such a focus, strategically presentistic historiography allows for a reflection on the limits of what it is possible to think. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on the author's experiences of interviewing seven men and seven women who graduated from a Danish high school in 1980, at a moment when the upper secondary system underwent a process of democratisation. She questioned the informants as to the role education has played in their lives, and as to the sense their choice of education makes to them. In addition to providing extensive narrative data about the experience of going through the educational system in the 1970s and 1980s, her interview process also raised two fundamental methodological issues. The first regards the relationship between the narrative and its historical context. The second relates to how narrated truths can be understood more as split and divided between the interviewee and the interviewer than as negotiated, as is frequently argued. In the paper it is suggested that these narratives act more as a testing ground for the development of interpretations and reflections about the early years of the so-called “educational explosion” that has taken place in Denmark from the 1960s until today than as ultimate truths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the concept of gender script is applied to examine the cases of two women educationists trying to construct a professional “self” in confrontation with gender scripts that constantly recited meanings of gender, in particular of femininity. The research focus is on the period 1890-1940, when in the Netherlands, like abroad, New Education became influential, also in the developing field of Child Studies, in which women educationists were prominent. The two cases in this paper show how negotiating the gender script on professionalism in the field of education and educational sciences, for example by professing gender as a starting point for participation, made women's role in the educational sciences a complicated and delicate one. The first example is taken from the domain of schools. Between 1890 and 1920 the participation of women in primary education greatly increased. Despite a rather marginal female participation in teacher education and in professional organisations, the increasing numbers of teachers must have had an impact on women educationists and their professional confidence. How contradictory this impact was is first analysed in the work and career of Ietje Kooistra (1861-1923). The second example concentrates on women's roles in the first Dutch institutions for the care and education of children with mental disabilities. Although often invisible in the official structure of these institutions, women formed an important part of the staff of these institutions, as both caretakers and nurses, and within the educational staff. Moreover, women were able to put their marks on the educational atmosphere within institutions and to influence the first construction of methods and tools used in this context. The example is that of the nun Ida Frye (1909-2003). Her case shows how, before the Second World War, it was very problematic to obtain any professional esteem as a woman within the educational sciences. This is despite Frye's important work that contributed to the development of the domain of special education in the Netherlands. Both cases show woman educationists who, although sometimes unwillingly, professed gender in their scholarly careers. Thus, they negotiated the gender script in order to open up a career of their own, which, however, in neither of the two cases ended as the story of an academic heroine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses biographical approaches to recover the contribution of hitherto neglected figures in the history of education and the political history of the Left in London. Place and location are important since it is important to grasp the uniqueness of the London County Council within the framework of English local government and of the London Labour Party within the framework of the Labour Party. In the 1920s and 1930s, under Herbert Morrison's leadership, the London Labour Party made a deliberate policy of encouraging able women to run for election to the London County Council, particularly those who had received a good education. By the 1950s Labour women were well represented in this public-sector site and the Education Committee was dubbed “the Shrieking Sisterhood”. By this time, three women had been appointed to the chairmanship of the Education Committee (one Conservative and two Labour) and women formed the majority of its membership, although they later lost ground. When a biographical approach is adopted a more spacious idea of politics emerges to accommodate hitherto neglected figures. This article tells the stories of two Labour women whose participation in English educational policy-making has been missed: Helen Bentwich (1893-1972) and Eveline Lowe (1869-1956). It is based largely on a new source of manuscript material, personal papers in the Women's Library at London Metropolitan University and the archive of Homerton College, Cambridge, and is part of a larger project examining the role of Labour women in London government. It contributes to revisionist debates about the place of women in the history of education, by providing new interpretations of urban education evolution that begin to appreciate the significance of women's political journeys and the impact of their involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses some fundamental aspects of the circulation of knowledge connected with the spread of the first global model of school management and classroom organisation in the early nineteenth century: the so-called “monitorial system of education” or, as it was named after its “inventors”, the “Bell-Lancaster Method”. By looking at the communication of educational ideas between England and the early British possessions in India, this paper first analyses the actors involved in this process, especially their agendas and means. Inspired by the widespread belief in the powers of education to improve both society as a whole and individuals, educational activists gathered in a number of committees and organisations - among whom the “British and Foreign School Society” proved most influential. Protestant missionary societies also became active in the field of popular education. The monitorial system of education attracted social reformers, British as well as Indian, and missionaries to whom it appeared to be a technology with civilising powers, a rational instrument to morally uplift and, at the same time, subject individuals “to their respective places” in society. Second, the paper looks at the processes of hybridisation and transformation of the pedagogical knowledge that was communicated between India and England: the origins of the monitorial system in an orphanage school at Madras, its export to London, where it was developed into a standardised model, and its subsequent “re-import” into India. Finally, reports about the implementation of the monitorial system in India again had an impact on English public discourses on education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an account of the earliest attempt in Africa to make education available to all within the context of what has been called fundamental education or a mass education programme. The paper draws attention to how the demand for mass education during the Second World War years was met by the British government, which, following what appeared to be a revision of its initial policy of exclusion, restriction of access and general hostility to mass education, made an unprecedented "large capital and recurrent grant" available for medical and educational work in its Colonial Development and Welfare Fund, and subsequently published the historic document entitled Mass Education in African Society. Using materials from the archives in Nigeria and Britain, the paper seeks to examine the reasons for the collapse of the promising literacy campaign in that country. In the process, it attempts to address, in particular, the issue of colonial policy and practice towards literacy acquisition by the "natives", and in particular the attitude of colonial government to mass literacy promotion. It draws attention to the complex colonial machinery, involving ideological differences and a personality clash that may have frustrated concerted efforts that were required to translate the programme into reality and contributed to the collapse of the literacy efforts. For while some of the officials were receptive to the idea of assisting the colonies in developing a literate citizenry, some remained strongly opposed to providing access to a large population. In the end, the frustrations and neglect led to discouragement and the end of the campaign, which could therefore not achieve its objective of making Africans literate. It then asks whether the failure of the literacy campaign may have been deliberately programmed for failure by the colonial administration to prevent the provision of mass access to literacy for the African population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia is a federation of six states and two territories. Each state and territory has its own legislature, which may not be of the same political persuasion as the Commonwealth (Federal) Government. Under the Australian Constitution primary control of school education is with the State and Territory Governments, with the Australian Commonwealth Government having no specific constitutional responsibility for school education. However, this is complicated by a dual-tiered funding system, whereby the Australian Commonwealth Government has responsibility for some funding of government schools and majority funding for non-government schools. Since 1975 there have been moves by the Commonwealth Ministers for Education to acquire a significant role in identifying national priorities for education and constructing policies and assessment tools to achieve such goals. Financial provision and national policy formation have increasingly become the means by which Australian Commonwealth Ministers for Education have "shaped" educational debates and policies. In November 2004 the then Australian Commonwealth Minister for Education, Science and Training announced the details of the Australian Government National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy. The focus of the Inquiry was examination of research into reading, preparation of schoolteachers and literacy teaching practices, especially reading. The Inquiry may be seen as the latest move by the Commonwealth Government to influence the teaching of literacy in Australia. In this paper official notions of literacy, as outlined through the various Australian Commonwealth Government's inquiries into literacy and national policy documents for the period 1975-2005, are examined using metaphor analysis. Metaphor analysis provides a means of analysing discourses about literacy in each of the reports and policies in order to interpret the underlying ideology. These official constructs of literacy are briefly considered within the competing and wider notions of literacy in Australia academic debates and the tensions that exist in defining literacy. Why did the Australian Commonwealth Government become involved in the literacy debates during this time? In particular, how has the Australian Commonwealth Government defined literacy and why did it take a more controlling role in both the definition of literacy and the shaping of education for literacy? The reasons for the Australian Commonwealth Government becoming involved in the literacy debates remain largely unresolved. In this paper it is proposed that involvement in the literacy debates constituted a way for the Commonwealth Government, in a time of economic rationalisation, to change their role in educational reform from one of financial assistance to one of leadership in curriculum. It is also proposed that a metaphor analysis of the policy documents and associated reports indicates a move from a wide definition of literacy to an increasingly narrow and utilitarian definition of literacy, reflecting the predominantly economic focus of the Australian Commonwealth Government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the western border of the old German empire the secularization of secondary schools' curriculum began at the end of the seventeenth century. Secularizing tendencies are delineated in the present paper with regard to the aspect of rationalization of life. In this regard religious and secular motives separated under the influence of Cartesian philosophy. In 1700 the reception of Descartes began at the Lutheran classical secondary school of Soest in the Prussian part of Westphalia with the discussion of Passiones animae in the senior classes. The present paper shows by the example of three disputations De Affectibus held at Soest's secondary school between 1700 and 1702 that strong self-reflective elements were introduced in the higher grade curriculum of this school. Biographical information is given on the teacher who led the disputations, and on the students involved. The students' rationalistic reflection on human feelings and passions aimed at an enlightened conduct of life. This reflection in search of a morale provisoire combined the appreciation of one's own emotional life, affects and corporality with rationality, and it established the purpose of tolerance. The present paper argues that there is a certain incompatibility of the Lutheran doctrine of sola gratia, and the doctrine proposed at Soest that a reasonable and virtuous style of living belongs to the responsibilities of man, which are to be taken over voluntarily. This scrutiny of the disputations also illustrates the role of humour in higher grade instruction of the early Enlightenment. The evaluation of these disputations throws light on an intermediate phase between the predominance of Lutheran orthodoxy on Soest's higher grade curriculum before 1700, and the success of the pietistic curriculum in Soest after 1730. So far this paper is a case study of a secularizing tendency in a secondary school that was followed by a re-Christianizing tendency. Additional information is given on the influence of the Cartesian system on the higher grade courses of Westphalian Calvinistic secondary schools at Hamm (1669) and Steinfurt (1700). No evidence for the reception of Descartes could be found at the Lutheran secondary school in Dortmund or at the Catholic secondary school of Münster, although Cartesian Principia philosophiae were studied in Münster from 1660. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how the legitimization of the territory of a national community was going through a territorial and citizen-oriented pedagogy in which geography and history texts contributed to the elaboration of certain social representations that were part of the new Latin American nations' development process. Therefore, this paper reviews social representations of territory and citizenship that appeared in some geography and history school handbooks used by nineteenth-century Colombian Caribbean region schools. These texts played an important role in the education of Colombian citizens. The paper is divided into two parts: first, it focuses on the representation of the national territory to which former republican governments attached great value promoting a number of geographical studies and the exploration of the country by foreign travelers and geographers who produced various works that influenced greatly geography handbooks used in the school. The second part refers to the representation of a citizenship drawn through History, Civic and Urbanity handbooks. These publications became cultural tools used not only to educate people but also to describe and to teach about the territory of this young republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will address the role of early-modern (1550-1800) English servants in the training and education of the children residing in the households in which these servants worked. Some resident servants were employed primarily, if not solely, to educate the children of their masters and mistresses. These tutors, governesses and chaplains are more visible to the historian than their ubiquitous fellow servants and apprentices, who also played an important, if more obscure, role in the education and training of children. The duties of both servants and apprentices, who to their contemporaries were another form of servant, were seldom recorded. Instruction that such servants provided was certainly only one of their many functions. Evidence for their teaching role appears incidentally in diaries, letters and other personal accounts, few of which servants themselves wrote. The paper will discuss the two groups of resident servants: the relatively small group of professional teachers and the much larger group of servants who were occasional teachers and whose educative function was reported sporadically in both pre-literate and literate English society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of developments in France and the United States where early psychiatrists such as Pinel, Esquirol, Belhomme and Séguin advocated ‘moral treatment’ of the insane and classified ‘idiots’ and ‘imbeciles’ as incurable though educable, the Revd C. E. Van Koetsveld initiated his ‘School for Idiots’ in The Hague in 1855. Within two years, he had also opened a boarding facility that accommodated many of his pupils. Legal regulations (the Insanity Act of 1841) demanded a judicial authorization for placing a child in the institution. Thus, the admittance to the first autonomous Dutch institution for the medico-pedagogical treatment of children with mental deficiencies involved a systematic registration of the children’s specific characteristics. A local figure of authority, often a physician, was required to fill in a short questionnaire on the condition of the child nominated for placement in the institution by their legal representative such as a parent or guardian. The first aim of this paper is to outline theoretically how physicians and educationists used medico-pedagogical selection to develop a notion of the mental boundaries they thought could be recognized in children’s minds. The work of E. Séguin was crucial in this development. He considered these boundaries as hindrances to a ‘normal’ life, for example, for participating in education and at work. Based on his work, other physicians and educationists were stimulated to contribute to new interventions in minding and educating ‘idiotic’ children. The second part of the paper offers the Dutch example. It includes the analysis of 187 files on girls and boys who were admitted to Van Koetsveld’s institution during the years 1857 to 1873. The analysis reveals the gender and family characteristics amongst the children, as well as information on medical factors and hereditary properties, which made Van Koetsveld and his staff decide to classify these children as eligible for treatment at the first Dutch ‘School for Idiots’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the authors’ primary concern is to outline the cultural and spatial boundaries delineated in the representation of children and childhood in a selection of Australian feature films. To this end they explore in some depth the depiction of children’s worlds in three films: The Kid Stakes (1927), Smiley (1956), and Storm Boy (1976). The analysis canvasses class, gender, race and ethnic, as well as geographic, boundaries. These films demonstrate the historicity of the concept of childhood in Australian cinema. They show how over time the boundaries between children and adults became blurred and, while free movement through the landscape was maintained, children’s worlds became more restricted and emotionally laden. In Weberian terms, childhood became increasingly disenchanted. These findings are supported by childhood research based on other approaches and sources. At the same time the authors contextualize the films under discussion and begin the larger task of constructing a map of the two genres of Australian feature films concerning childhood: children’s films and films about children. To this end, the paper traces the brief prominence of the child as central character in The Kid Stakes, through the 1950s when there was something of a ‘golden age’ of films about children, to the re-emergence of child-centred films in the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the prevalent attitudes toward foreign influences and methodologies in Russian mathematics education at different periods in Russian history. The words ‘universal responsiveness’ belong to Dostoevsky, who, in his famous speech on Pushkin, used them to characterize Pushkin’s openness to the genius of all other nations. Moreover, Dostoevsky considered universal responsiveness to be typical of Russians in general. However, the isolationist tradition in Russia has been no less influential. At times this tradition has prevailed, at times it has retreated. It has expressed itself openly in political life – Stalin’s campaign against ‘cosmopolites’ was an especially striking example – and its impact on the development of literature and science has been the object of extensive research. Mathematics education, however, has rarely been looked at from this perspective. This paper will focus on a few select episodes from the history of mathematics education in Russia. These episodes, however, clearly demonstrate that a conflict between the isolationist and the internationalist traditions has taken place in this field as well. The paper contains a discussion of Leo Tolstoy’s article ‘On the People’s Education’, little‐known in the West, in which Russian mathematics education is aggressively and favorably contrasted with German methodologies. It also examines a methodological work from 1951, which includes a chapter entitled ‘From the History of the Struggle against Foreign Influences in Russian Mathematics’. On the other hand, the article also looks at materials from Russian mathematics teachers’ congresses from before the Russian Revolution, which illustrate Russian involvement and participation in processes taking place abroad. It also analyzes correspondence between the well‐known Russian and American mathematics educators Dmitriy Sintsov and David Eugene Smith, discovered by the author, which facilitates a deeper understanding of certain aspects of the issues under investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reviews school practice in Spain through the long historic period of the dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco between the 1936 Civil War and Franco’s death in 1975. For this purpose, an analysis is made of the most relevant documents (school materials, reports, direct testimonies by practising teachers, scientific papers on education and education legislation) of each period of Franco’s Regime. Those different types of documents objectify, in accordance with Agustin Escolano’s terminology, three distinct modalities of school culture: the practical, experience‐based culture which is shaped and transmitted by teachers while practising their profession; the scientific culture, which is organized around the knowledge acquired from teaching speculation and research; and the political culture, which comprises political‐institutional discourses and practices that are translated into regulatory provisions supporting the formal organization of education. These three different cultures were supported by three different logics, which proved to be autonomous and at the same time interdependent during the long Franco period. The result will be a presentation of the different importance attached in school practice to tradition, teaching innovations, professional routines and changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the idea of “race” is represented in high school Canadian history textbooks. It looks at textbooks authorized by the Province of Ontario between 1940 and 1960 and those authorized after 2000. It is argued in this paper that even though historical racisms have increasingly made their way into Canadian history textbooks as valid and important topics of study, and despite explicit efforts by those responsible for the production of these textbooks to clarify the meaning and consequences of racism, the idea of “race” has persisted in much the same way as it did centuries ago – as a take-for-granted fact of Nature tied to ideas about human type, lineage and heritage. Through problematic use of the term “race” and through a redundant emphasis on seemingly neutral categories such as origin, ethnicity and descent, the textbooks preoccupy themselves with human typology and articulate a sense that blood matters in the constitution and construction of the Canadian nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The First World War ended with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, German and Ottoman Empires. In planning for the peace negotiations the allied governments considered not only the European boundaries but especially the national aspirations and future development of the peoples of the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East, Africa and East Asia. American President Woodrow Wilson created a secret commission of academics and experts to prepare studies that would inform and support the American peace negotiators. Almost all of the studies on education, covering education in Austria, Prussia, Albania, the Ottoman Empire, Central Africa, Japan, and the education of minorities in Western Europe, were prepared by Paul Monroe, professor of history at Teachers College, Columbia University, with various assistants. There was a certain logic to Monroe's selection, since he had edited the five-volume Cyclopedia of Education, published 1911–1913, and was connected to a worldwide network of educational experts who had contributed to that project. Monroe's reports, like most of the expert reports prepared for the American commission, are in part compilations of ‘objective’ information, such as educational statistics, legislation and policies. But at crucial points they develop critical analyses of existing structures and define a proposed role for education—a kind of educational self-determination—in what we might call nation-building in parts of the collapsed empires and in the preliminary steps towards de-colonization in other parts. While Monroe's ideas about the role of education could play only a small part in contributing to the plans for the Treaty of Versailles, they had a continuing impact in shaping American efforts in international education in the 1920s. Monroe himself played a large part in bringing American educational ideas to bear on modernization efforts in China, the Middle East and other developing areas in the 1920s and 1930s. This paper is part of a larger biographical project on Paul Monroe and the spread of American influence in international education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the monitorial system was for some elites the pedagogical invention that could realize the project to provide education for all children of the popular classes. Despite this not being the main pedagogical method, its diffusion was large at first but after a few years it was gradually abandoned. To understand this pendulum movement, this paper tries to show the political, ideological, social and pedagogical involvements of the method. What was its role in providing education for popular classes? Which social and political projects sustained it? Which actors and factors supported it and then gave it up? What were its practices? What was the evolution of the method? From the viewpoint of social and cultural history, this paper aims to analyse and explain the process of this pedagogic innovation through the case of the monitorial system in Geneva from 1815 to 1850. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on a library collection containing around 9,000 titles of Pädagogische Lesungen [Pedagogical Lectures] (PL), compiled and centrally awarded in the GDR from 1961 to 1989. This contribution gives an initial overview of the current state of research and a comprehensive description of the material diversity of the collection. Besides the historical specificity and heterogeneous composition of the unique material, the article also examines the function and use of the lectures within the centrally organised system of teacher training in the GDR. From an educational and contemporary educational perspective, the scientific utilisation of this multilayered source material is highly lucrative, since it can provide information on the (re)production, mediation and transformation of subject-specific content and school-specific knowledge. Professional debates reflected in those lectures provide valuable inspiration for research into the history and practice of subject teaching in the GDR, as well as for the professionalisation of teachers. In addition to questions concerning the relationship between theory and practice or terminology, the collection can also be used to trace the availability and emergence of new media and materials, which were reflected in the methodological-didactic design of subject teaching and also in the preparation of the PL themselves. Thus, the expansive material offers diverse approaches to research for a wide range of disciplines such as linguistics and cultural sciences, historical and political sciences, and information and media sciences as well as subject didactics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September 1773, the educational work of the largest and most powerful teaching body then in existence was brought to an abrupt end. The order Pope Clement xii for the total and universal suppression of the Society of Jesus resulted in the summary closure of 728 Jesuit establishments responsible for the education of some 250,000 students. The prohibition on the existence of Jesuit schools and colleges, engendered intense political pressure on the papacy for a variety of reasons, was to endure for more than forty years, until 1814, with massive repercussions for education worldwide. The effects of the suppression on education have been the subject of numerous national studies, with one important exception - the fate of the educational work of the English Province of the Society of Jesus. With members in England, Wales, Maryland and Pennsylvania, as well as in educational outposts in continental Europe, the English Jesuits were to prove a unique body. Unlike their counterparts in every other country, the Russian Empire excepted, they were to retain their corporate identity throughout the suppression period, as a result of quirks both of history and of geography. The English Jesuit college founded in exile at Saint-Omer in the Spanish Netherlands in 1593, because of the penal laws against Catholics in England and Wales, moved to Bruges in the Austrian Netherlands in 1762 when the Paris Parliament dissolved the Society of Jesus in France. At the time of the universal suppression in 1773, the prince-bishop of Liege, François-Charles de Velbruck, invited the English ex-Jesuits to consolidate all their educational activity in the principality of Liege, where they had operated a house of studies since 1614. The suppressed English Jesuit developed and furthered their educational activity, first at the newly formed Académie anglaise at Liege, from 1773 until 1794, and thereafter in England at Stony hurst, in Lancashire, developing their curriculum in important new ways, beyond the confines of the Ratio Studiorum. Despite a series of major calamities, they were able to use their educational successes as a springboard for the further development of Jesuit education, not only in England and Wales but also in the early United States of America, at Georgetown, where they created a secondary-level academy that led on to the foundation of the present-day university. The aim of this paper is to indicate how the suppressed English Jesuits succeeded in their educational work, against all the odds. From research undertaken in surviving, hitherto largely unexplored, archival sources in Britain, continental Europe and the United States, the paper aims to throw new light on this significant but neglected period of educational history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In answer to economic needs and social demands, a structural innovation was introduced in secondary education in most West European countries, mainly in the 1960s. Contrary to the traditional schools, organized in vertical categories, the so-called comprehensive schools brought together all branches in one school. There was protest against this type of school from the start but it was mainly in the 1980s and 1990s that comprehensive schools came under siege. In most countries the comprehensive structures have been abandoned or adjusted to a more moderate form. This paper tries to explain the factors that stimulated innovation in the 1960s, and those that counteracted comprehensive education. As will be shown, these factors were not always related to ideological positions. In fact, the reasons for local educational authorities to "go comprehensive" (or not) were often practically rather than ideologically inspired. Theories of "dominant rationality" by Matthijssen and the "referential" by Jobert succeed in surpassing ideological parameters, and can be interesting tools to explain changing mentalities. However, a satisfying explanation for the history of comprehensive education cannot be offered without paying attention to everyday pragmatics, that - in the author's view - have been decisive for the evolution of comprehensive education. The paper will be illustrated with examples from the Belgian case. Comprehensive schools were introduced in Belgium in 1969. All state public schools went comprehensive in the 1970s, and the number of comprehensive private schools grew rapidly until growth ceased around 1980. The ongoing struggle between Catholic comprehensive and traditional schools led to a compromise created by the Catholic educational authorities, a fusion of comprehensive and traditional elements. This structure was imposed by the Flemish government as a unitary structure for all secondary schools in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium in 1989. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the educational project of Belgium’s acclaimed socialist and modernist architect Renaat Braem (1910–2001). While Braem is foremost remembered as a militant opinion maker, his work as an educator and an artist has received little scrutiny. When Braem was appointed interim director at the Antwerp National Higher Institute for Architecture and Urban Planning (NHIBS) in 1962, his first action point was not to change the curriculum. He instead reconstructed the physical configuration of the school. With an eye-catching staircase painting, he accentuated an important passage in the school building: the one from the administrative offices and library to the architectural studios. Claiming a central position in the institute, the staircase functioned as a stage and an auditorium on which an ideological and educational programme was enacted in an implicit, yet very physical manner. This article not only looks atwhatthe painting represents, but also athowit represents by applying Randolph Starn’s three categories of seeing: the glance, the measured view, and the scan. This threefold reading of the painting enables us to unpack (a) Braem’s educational project based on a socialist ideology and (b) the institutional climate of the 1960s. In the institutional debates, hovering between tradition and the rationalisation of education, Braem’s staircase painting proposed a third way. It revised the existing doctrines by reconciling the rational approach with a stronger focus on the human in the built environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]