History of Education

The noun ‘textbooks’ provokes many, mostly negative, responses. When I tell my students and colleagues that I study textbooks, tombstones often appear in their eyes expressing painful and buried me...

(1999). The struggle for American identity: treatment of ethnic groups in United States history textbooks. History of Education: Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 251-278.

Using examples from family letters sent to the Department of Education’s Elementary Correspondence School (ECS) in the western Canadian province of British Columbia in the early twentieth century, this article discusses three potential problems or traps associated with concepts of agency in the history of children and youth. Following a brief discussion of the emergence of agency in childhood studies, it focuses on three approaches to agency that it is argued limit our efforts to demonstrate the contributions of young people to historical change: contributory, binaried, and undifferentiated approaches to agency. Investigating the ECS family letters through these three approaches demonstrates their limits while also pointing the way towards more productive pathways. By focusing on more nuanced interpretive strategies, such as empathic inference, structural and relational analyses, and explicitly theorising around the key concept of age, young people emerge more clearly as actors in history, not merely subjects of history.

edited by Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2009, 254 pp., £60.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7546-6460-4In The Child and the Curriculum (Chicago University Press, 1902) the philosopher ...

1 This is a version of a paper given to a seminar at a conference of the History of Education Society on 29 April 1978. An earlier version was read before a graduate research seminar at the Univers...

Part II of this historiographical study examines British education policy in Africa, and in the many crown colonies, protectorates, and mandated territories around the globe. Up until 1920, the British government took far less interest than in India, in the development of schooling in Africa and the rest of the colonial empire, and education was generally left to local initiative and voluntary effort. British interest in the control of education policy in Africa and elsewhere lasted only from the 1920s to the 1950s, as territories assumed responsibility for their own internal affairs as a prelude to independence. Nevertheless, critics were not slow to attack British direction of colonial education in the 1930s and thereafter.In retrospect it is clear that colonial education policy was fraught with much confusion of purpose and lack of resources, apathy and hostility. The literature has ranged from close scholarly studies of education policy in individual countries to passionate and more theoretically based critiques of colonial schooling. But as immediate passions surrounding demise of the Empire have receded, alternative analyses have begun to emerge.

Apprentice training is and always has been a somewhat delicate subject and is often handled in discussion between employers and the trade unions much in the same way as a chemist handles T.N.T. 1 1W.J. Carron, ‘Address of the President of the AEU to the Seventh Annual Conference of the British Association for Commercial and Industrial Education: East Midlands Area’, in British Association for Commercial and Industrial Education (BACIE), The Changing Pattern of Apprentice Training (place of publication not given, 1958), 38.

Blue Chippers from the Emerald Isle will be appreciated by readers interested in Irish sports migration, sports scholarships, and Irish football. Conor Curran sets out to explain “three key aspects...

To mark Leuven University’s six hundredth birthday, Christiaan Engberts has had the excellent idea of undertaking a new kind of institutional history, one that while taking an individual university...

In Land, Language, and Women: A Cherokee and American Educational History, Julie L. Reed weaves the history of Cherokee education over four centuries through the lives and activities of girls and w...

This history of early childhood education in China, beginning in antiquity and closing in 1949, is one of the few works in recent Chinese educational historiography to trace a single subfield acros...

This article examines the institutional transformation of kindergarten in German-speaking Switzerland between 1970 and 2005, focusing on the interplay between international research agendas, research-based educational governance and cantonal and local reform initiatives. Drawing on historical institutionalism and approaches to educational borrowing and lending, it compares developments in Bern and Zurich. The article shows that international forums, particularly those of the Council of Europe, circulated concepts concerning educational equality, school readiness, transition, continuity and access to preschool education. Rather than providing ready-made reform models, these ideas offered frames of reference through which existing concerns could be reconsidered and legitimised. At the same time, cantonal research and planning offices made kindergarten an object of state-sponsored research, planning and negotiation. The comparison reveals how international ideas and new forms of expertise were adapted within different cantonal and local constellations, contributing to kindergarten’s gradual integration into compulsory schooling.

This article focuses on American educator Dr. Beryl Parker’s field studies in Turkiye (1932–1934) and her 1934 Report on Primary Education in Turkiye. While scholarship often traces Parker’s work to John Dewey’s 1924 report, this article reconstructs her work as a hybrid negotiation of American progressive vision and Turkish realities – rural poverty, centralised bureaucracy and ideological nation-building. The study examines Parker’s critique of extravagant school buildings, the essence of the teacher, and her National Education Laboratories spirit. Considering Parker’s work at Ankara College and her contemporaneous press, I assert that the educational transfer is more than theoretical. It is a field practice of localisation. This article aims to help reposition Parker in the Turkish educational historiography as a pragmatic pedagogical mediator.

Modern vocational education in China neither grew out of traditional craft apprenticeship nor emerged as an imitation of Western models. Rather, it took shape amid the national crises of the late Q...

This article examines the search for an appropriate managerial structure at the Daniel Sieff Research Institute in Mandatory Palestine between 1934 and 1944. It argues that two competing managerial models – a centralistic model rooted in the German research university tradition and a pluralistic model based on collective governance – shaped the Institute’s early development and generated tensions that influenced its scientific trajectory. Drawing on archival sources and situated within the sociology of science and higher education, the study analyses how these models affected not only institutional governance but also the training of scientists, the formation of research culture and the pursuit of scientific excellence in a peripheral setting. By situating the Institute within broader processes of migration, knowledge transfer and nation-building, the article contributes to the historiography of science by demonstrating how managerial structures interact with cultural and geopolitical conditions to shape the development of scientific institutions.

While higher education underwent profound transformations in the post-war era – with the global student population expanding dramatically and becoming more geographically dispersed as universities ...

Science education in modern China developed not only within formal schooling but also through scientific journals that connected science communication and teaching practice. This article examines Wissen und Wissenschaft as a site of science education beyond formal schooling. Combining quantitative analysis with close textual reading, it shows that the integration of science and art formed an enduring editorial philosophy, reflected in its sectional and disciplinary structures. More importantly, the journal expanded science education through three related pathways: public science communication, institutional envisioning for science education reform, and interaction with science teaching practice. Wissen und Wissenschaft thus operated across the boundary between science communication and formal education. Its history reveals how scientific journals could function as vehicles for science education beyond formal schooling, and offers a perspective on the entangled histories of science and education in modern China.