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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.

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. publishedVersion

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.

This text introduces the themed issue “Imperialism, Internationalism and Education in Africa: Connected Histories”. It provides an overview of the history of education in twentieth-century Africa, highlighting its major problems, themes, and actors. Arguing for a transnational and connected approach to this field of research, it also explains how the four papers included in the issue allow to address the multiple entanglements between educational internationalism and imperialism in the late colonial and early postcolonial period

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 pursu...

The 1960s in Australia was a politically turbulent time with assimilation policies being questioned by moves in various spheres, including education, to address inequality. The late 1960s also saw the emergence of activist responses to racism as well as the groundbreaking 1967 Referendum, which called for the alteration of two clauses within the Australian Constitution that discriminated against the Indigenous population. A few months after the Referendum was held, a conference called Aborigines and Education was convened at Monash University. Education was seen to be vital in addressing what was described as “profound educational disadvantage” experienced by Indigenous people. The debates that ensued show how education was imagined to be able to solve the problems Indigenous students were encountering. In this article I confine my interest to a selection of papers and examine the features of two distinctive discourses that emerge: that of “uplifting the Aborigine” and that of “upholding” Aboriginal dignity and pride. In doing this, I demonstrate how particular “race logics” were employed and contested in these debates. I argue that the insights garnered through analysis of these discourses offer opportunities for education research and practices that are in solidarity with the emancipatory goals of marginalised communities.

In his 2001 Different: Contemporary Photography and Black Identity Stuart Hall, writing on black arts in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s, commented on the emergence of the “black body” as a subject of visibility and identity which challenged the racialised body which for so long had been produced and reproduced by racial discourse. “On the site of the body”, he wrote, “racial discourses had long undertaken the work of systematically reducing history to biology, culture to nature”, but it was also a “surface … of resistance from which alternative counter-narratives can be produced”. Cultural identities have histories and are subject to the continuous “play” of history, culture, and power. This paper will: (1) document the history of how artists, photographers, and filmmakers in the 1970s and 1980s deconstructed and challenged the stereotyped black body of racialised discourse to produce counter-visual narratives of the “black body”; (2) map the different mechanisms through which these counter-visual ...

At the heart of the nineteenth-century educational soundscape lies a paradox. Whilst “modern” classrooms generally strived for orderly silence, the goal of its educational practices was the production of competent “citizens”. Middle-class boys in particular were expected to acquire a voice fit for business, the professions, or even (political) public speech whilst quietly listening to a teacher. This silence within the educational institution has generally been understood as an element of discipline. In this paper I want to examine the paradox of the silent classroom and the speaking citizen. I will focus specifically on those instances where the clear goal of education was vocal sound (i.e. fluent speech, civilised pronunciation, and song) and look at how silence was mobilised by educators. I will argue that the silences employed in these educational practices were not (only) tools of order and discipline, but rather means to create a “borderland” where the leap between childhood and its uncivili...

Writing is basically representation. Ways of writing evolved and were adapted to circumstances and necessities, on material, symbolic, formal, technical, social and cultural levels. There are ways of writing within educational writing. In the history of educational writing it is possible, at first glance, to distinguish educative writing, pedagogical writing and didactic writing. In this paper, we tried to record an historical evolution which reports the framework, configuration and constitution of writing within education, very particularly pedagogical writing. One of the aspects in which this evolution gained more notoriety was in the planning process and in the drawing up of the inspection records, where variations are noted and an evolution in the configuration and type of discourse. Substantive, intentional, normative and processed, the pedagogical writing gave sequence to the scholar internationalization. Two relevant aspects of pedagogical inquiry were the formal and the professional. In view of Inquiry of portuguese schools (1875) and other historical registers which came about at the end of the XVIII century, the hypothesis has been put forward and founded that the school inspection is the basis of pedagogical writing in the way in which it became structured in the second half of the XIX century. This pedagogical writing establishes the figure of a new professional, the school inspector, for whom an authorial space to give his opinion, commentary and normalization is reserved.

This paper discusses the role brain disease has played in the discourse and practices of child scientists involved in the study of learning disabilities and behavioural disorders from the 1950s up to the mid-1980s, particularly in the Netherlands as part of a developing international scientific community. In the pre-ADHD era, when child sciences established themselves as academic fields of study and special education expanded quickly, brain-related psychiatric labels like “minimal brain damage” (MBD, later “dysfunction”) were often used for inattentive or hyperactive children. These diagnoses seem to have contributed to the academic status of the developing field of study by connecting neurological research into brain dysfunction with the study of learning problems and their treatment. The increasing differentiation between medical and educational research provided opportunities for those who focused on the development of American-style treatment such as behaviouristic conditioning. By 1980, more than a decade after their Anglo-American colleagues had done so, Dutch child scientists had finally lost confidence in the unspecific and overinclusive MBD label. Its popularity among the larger public, as well as concern about the rapidly growing number of diagnoses, continued to stimulate demand for more research into the nature of learning disabilities and methods of remedial teaching

The business side of the Lancasterian system of mass schooling has been highlighted by some researchers. However, this feature is usually considered of minor importance compared to other dimensions of that system, namely the social control role of popular education in early nineteenth-century Britain. The present surge of projects and mechanisms directed to capitalist valorisation within public education systems provides an enhanced relevance to the study of past experiments with similar meaning and content. In this paper, I seek to understand the processes of educational production and capital valorisation in the Lancasterian undertaking. Succinctly as it may be, I refer to initiatives originated in the Benthamite circle in support of the Lancasterian system and aimed at extending it to superior branches of knowledge and to other social classes.

The nurse already appears in the Odyssey as a key character in Greek family life, showing all the characteristics that will remain hers throughout Greek Antiquity: she is a slave and has been working in her master's house before the child's birth; she has been chosen specially for the task of nursing and rearing the newborn, as she attends the delivery and is the first one to take the baby in her arms; later on, she takes care of the general education of the child and follows her “protege” in his/her adult life; sometimes, she carries out the same tasks for her protege's children. While recent research has often focused on her servile status, basing its arguments mostly on literature, this paper is based on iconography. The Greek nurse has the peculiarity of being very often represented as an old woman, even in the company of small children. The analysis of the context of representations of the trophos and of their chronological evolution allows us to reach a conclusion about this peculiar feature that go...

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 gen...

This article aims to present the transformations as well as the decline of the Froebelian occupation of paper folding that took place in Great Britain between 1851 and the 1920s. Froebel’s original intention was to transmit implicit mathematical knowledge to be learnt by means of folding several shapes. In contrast to his account of paper folding, which presented it as a way of understanding several abstract mathematical concepts, the manner in which this occupation was re-conceptualised in Great Britain tells a different story. After surveying the changes in the British conception of Froebelian ideas in the second half of the nineteenth century through the various published manuals, I then explore the period between 1892 – the opening of the Froebel Educational Institute – and 1924. Looking at the examination syllabi of the National Froebel Union, the examination papers, and their various appendices, as well as studying the approaches of the British mathematical community to folding at the end of the nineteenth century, the article will try to illuminate – via the inspection of the decline of mathematical education via folding in kindergartens – how formal work became discredited and eventually, in part, disappeare