Enlightened paternalism: the prohibition of corporal punishment in Spanish public schools in the nineteenth century

In order to analyse the cultural values of Spanish liberalism, this paper describes the prohibition of corporal punishment in secondary education. The evolution of education laws and codes during the nineteenth century reveals great hope and confidence in building up an academic authority based exclusively on the power of reason and capable of ruling an ordered society. However, the study of documents found in the Instituto de Valencia historical archives highlights the difficulty of maintaining discipline as well as managing the political motivations of rebellious students, who demanded more autonomy from the academic authority.     

十九世纪交响乐与交响诗

交响乐与交响诗的真正确立是在十九世纪浪漫主义时期。本文从交响乐和交响诗的体裁,内容,演变历程,历史意义这四个方面入手,着重阐述十九世纪这两种重要音乐形式,即交响乐与交响诗。     

The impact of charter schools on the efficiency of traditional public schools: Evidence from Michigan

This paper examines the competitive effects of charter schools on the efficiency of traditional public schools. The analysis utilizes a statewide school-level longitudinal dataset of Michigan schools from 1994 to 2004. Fixed effect and two alternative estimation methods are employed. Overall, the results suggest that charter competition had a negative impact on student achievement and school efficiency in Michigan's traditional public schools. The effect is small or negligible in the short run, but becomes more substantial in the long run.     

Establishment of academic standards for early twentieth century Texas high schools: The university of Texas affiliated schools program

During the last quarter of the century several universities including those in Michigan, Illinois, and Texas launched initiatives to ensure that high schools’ academic standards prepared students for admission to the state university. This paper illuminates affiliation programs that foreshadowed the accreditation movement. Not only did affiliation serve the expectations of the universities, it also enabled high schools to emerge from their confused origins into increasingly stronger institutions.     

From faith to good fellowship: Sunday school magazines in the late nineteenth century

Maureen Nimon has taught high school and college students and is currently teaching in Librarianship at the South Australian College of Advanced Education in Adelaide. She holds a doctorate from Flinders University.     

The last place to look: the place of pupil councils within citizen participation in Scottish schools

This article critically examines pupil councils as a means of developing pupils’ citizenship participation. It draws on findings across two research projects. The first study is a mixed method study commissioned by Learning and Teaching Scotland (LTS) that reviews the range of participatory activities in Scottish schools and their contribution to Scotland’s major curriculum revision, the Curriculum for Excellence (CFE). The second is a longer ethnographic study examining young people’s experience of participation projects in more detail. The findings lend strength to the argument that pupil councils as a stand-alone approach are not an effective means of citizenship participation. When pupil councils are complemented by other participation activity across spheres of school interaction, young people’s understanding of and interest in participation can be greatly enhanced. The article examines the cross curricular linkages schools are making, the barriers that impede such linkages and the benefits derived from successful coordinated approaches in light of criteria for ‘graduated participation’ developed through decades of work internationally on children’s participation.     

Edinburgh University,schools and the civil service in the early twentieth century

This article is a case study of the relation between urban schooling and university education, using two main sources. Data on the schools attended by history students at Edinburgh University between 1899 and 1933 illustrate the diversity and social ranking of schools in the city. New higher grade schools had a key role in increasing access to university education for both men and women, especially for prospective teachers; the significance of the Education (Scotland) Act of 1918 for Catholic schools, and the continuing importance of small private schools for girls, are also shown. The second source analyses the school origins of successful Edinburgh candidates in civil service examinations between 1896 and 1944, supplemented for other parts of Scotland by the report of the Royal Commission on the Civil Service of 1912. This elite career drew mainly from older schools, and contemporary claims for equality of opportunity in Scotland need to be treated with reserve.     

Disproportionality in special education: identifying children with emotional behavioural difficulties in Irish primary schools

Within categories of special educational needs, emotional and behavioural difficulties have received much attention in recent years, particularly in relation to their definition and identification by parents and teachers. This paper stems from previous research which highlights how children from disadvantaged backgrounds and those attending schools designated as socio-economically disadvantaged are significantly more likely than their peers to be identified as having a special educational need of a non-normative type such as emotional behavioural difficulty (EBD). Using data from the Growing Up in Ireland study, it examines whether the EBD identified by teachers or within certain schools is matched by the child’s own performance on an internationally validated emotional and mental health measure – the Piers–Harris. Findings show that overall self-reported social emotional well-being bears a strong relationship to the probability of being identified with an EBD. However, boys, children from economically inactive and one-parent households and children attending the most disadvantaged school contexts are more likely to be identified with having an EBD, even after taking into account their social background characteristics and their scoring on the Piers–Harris measure. These findings suggest that the subjective nature of EBD identification is resulting in a disproportionate number of these children being identified with EBD. The implications of this study are explored for existing disability/SEN classification systems, school-wide intervention models and the impact on individual students labelled as EBD. Overall, the findings pose searching questions about the validity of employing SEN classification systems in deciding eligibility and types of appropriate provision.     

Froebelian women: networking to promote professional status and educational change in the nineteenth century

Recent comments by Baroness Warnock have reignited controversy over the relative merits of policies designed to promote inclusion and address special educational needs. These debates, conducted mainly between practitioners and parents, do not encourage input from historians but can usefully contextualize earlier models of service delivery. This paper concentrates on the interwar period when provision for children, whom we would now understand to have a moderate to severe learning disability, was shaped by the requirements of the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. Existing studies that have examined the implementation of this legislation have tended to concentrate on the management of long‐stay institutions. This has led to a focus on medical care and the social control of adolescents and adults. Education has featured in these accounts but often in a fairly limited way, with more emphasis on school failure leading to admission than the educational potential of either the mental deficiency institution or its inmates. This paper seeks to redress the balance by offering a brief survey of the way education served as a way in, through and out of one of the largest specialist institutions in the South West of England before 1948.