The professionalisation of teaching: teacher training and education reform in Austria, 1867–1914

This article examines Austria’s efforts to reform teacher education during the period of the Dual Monarchy, 1867–1914. It offers insight into the role of teachers in Austrian society and how this role changed over time. It demonstrates that, during this period, teaching became an institutionalised and professionalised occupation. This process of professionalisation brought teachers firmly under state control, leading to conflict between teachers and the Austrian educational bureaucracy. This process also led to the development of a robust network of teachers’ associations to represent the interest of Austrian teachers and to contribute to their professional development. This article utilises documents from the Austrian educational bureaucracy, printed curriculum and pedagogical journals to illustrate that Austrian teacher training reforms offer crucial insight into the development of public education in the late nineteenth century.     

From education for peace to education in conflict: changes in UNESCO discourse, 1945–2015

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the global education community has focused significant attention on the promotion of education in fragile and conflict-affected contexts, embodied in the growth of a new sub-field called Education in Emergencies. This article points out the surprising distinction of this new sub-field from the more established and closely related field of peace education. It examines United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) documents for insight into the changing global ideas that have facilitated the shift in focus from peace to conflict. Empirically, we draw on a quantitative content analysis of more than 450 UNESCO documents published between 1945 and 2015. We find that education for peace remains a constant, if evolving, concern in these texts, but that a powerful emphasis on individual rights has shifted the discursive focus away from inter-state relations and towards the educational needs of young people. In the documents, conflict is now theorised as a threat to education and peace is re-envisioned not just as the desirable outcome of education, but also as its pre-condition. We show how this ideational transformation has re-cast an expansive array of conflicts, natural disasters, and other emergencies as threats to education.     

The democratic argument for science curriculum reform in Britain and Australia: 1935–1945

The dominance of “academicism” in science education can be shown over the last century. However in the period of this study, when access to a universal secondary education was the main thrust of social reconstruction in Britain and Australia, a key struggle was for a socially-centred general science. The struggle, concerned the terms on which “the spirit of Science alive in the world”, could enter and transform education in schools to meet human needs. The epistemological arguments of the reformers were pragmatic. This study, set initially in an earlier period of depressive capitalism, is an account of how curriculum and cultural change was mediated by educational actors, employing pragmatic arguments for reform which drew on the metaphoric power of a scientific achievements which emanated from their society, to pursue democratic agendas within their workplace and locality.     

For Knowledge: Tradition,progressivism and progress in education—reconstructing the curriculum debate

This paper draws upon realist theories of knowledge and naturalised epistemologies in the philosophy of science in order to argue that databases around the school curriculum could benefit from such approaches. It is suggested that the traditional/progressive distinction that has structured much of the curriculum debate for a long time is both of little value in describing how schools actually work and outmoded in terms of understandings of knowledge. Realist approaches make a reappraisal possible because they begin from the understanding that knowledge is socially and historically constructed but do so in a way that avoids the relativism and reductionism that results when epistmology and the sociology of knowledge are seen as opposed rather than complementary. The paper reviews a number of ways in which knowledge has been conceived of as social in educational thinking and, from a realist perspective, criticises their reductive and relativist tendencies whilst outlining a realist epistemological alternative.     

The myth of The Phoenix: progressive education,migration and the shaping of the welfare state, 1985–2015

Abstract

Since the 1970s, many western welfare states have been subject both to increased migration and to a renewed interest in progressive education. The present article addresses the question of whether these two phenomena are related and how changing notions of the welfare state shape and are shaped by this relationship. To answer the question, we concentrate our attention on the case study of Ghent (Belgium), which from the 1970s onwards has been characterised not only by a growing ethnic diversity but also by a renewed interest in progressive educational initiatives. Drawing on oral history with key figures in the local educational field and research in school archives, this article indicates that progressive initiatives in the last few decades have indeed emerged as an answer to migration patterns. But whereas initial initiatives in the 1980s arose from an endeavour to cater for the migrant child, some recent initiatives arose from an attempt to exclude the same child.     

Decolonization,educational language policy and nation building in plural societies: The development of Chinese education in Malaysia, 1950–1970

The two decades from 1950 to 1970 were a crucial period of educational reorganization in Malaysia that stemmed from the decolonization after the Second World War. This educational reorganization sought to address the perennial issue of nation building via educational language policy. The development of Chinese education was under severe threat as the British colonial government opted for a national school system that used English and Malay as the media of instruction in place of the segregated vernacular school system that had existed during the colonial period. Much to the relief of the Chinese, the national school system failed to materialize due to the lack of financial resources to reorganize the entire educational system. But the Chinese were unable to maintain the Chinese school system within the ambit of the national educational system advocated by the postcolonial Alliance government. The Alliance government had only allowed the Chinese to undergo Chinese education at the primary level. At the secondary level, it opted for a monolingual system of education based on Malay as the main medium of instruction in order to foster national integration through a common language. The Chinese had to switch to this medium of instruction if they wanted to remain in mainstream education. Such a system of transitional bilingual education was aimed at incorporating the Chinese into the nation building process.     

“Trickle-down” reform: Hispanics,higher education,and the excellence movement

The current excellence-in-education movement has dealt a heavy blow to the advancement of Hispanics seeking degrees in higher education. Attempting to reform education while ignoring the concerns of minorities who traditionally have not fared well in schools strongly suggests that reformers expect the benefits of reform to trickle down to minorities after first benefiting mainstream students. The result is that reform measures such as the raising of college admission standards, the restructuring of financial aid, curriculum changes, and competency tests for teachers have added additional hurdles for Hispanic students, placing greater restrictions on their access to higher education. Reconceptualizing the definition ofexcellence to include not only higher standards, but educational equity, is a demographic imperative as the nation moves to a minority majority.     

History of education in Canada: historiographic “turns” and widening horizons

This paper explores major historiographic “turns” in history of education with a focus, although not exclusively, on English-speaking Canada. It addresses the transformative intellectual impact of the turn toward social history on the history of education, the impact of cultural history and the linguistic turn, the reception of Michel Foucault, and the state of the debate in history at-large today and its implications for the history of education. It also attempts to contextualise the intellectual trends permeating the writing of the history of education in light of developments in education, and signals new directions in historiography influencing history of education. Given the limitations of space, rather than engaging in a historiographical analysis of individual historians of education, the paper traces broad trends, while highlighting the contributions of a significant few.     

Experts and exiles: organic intellectuals,education, and the “Indian Problem” in postwar Ontario,Canada

Abstract

This article brings the Italian activist and thinker Antonio Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectualism and the Canadian historian Ian McKay’s theory of liberal state-formation to bear on the “Indian Question” – or how best to yoke Indigenous children and young people to the modern Canadian state. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, often violent and disease-ridden “Residential Schools” were the primary means to this end. In the 1960s, a new approach was sought by the province of Ontario, culminating in the landmark education reform document, Living and Learning: The Report of the Provincial Committee on Aims and Objectives of Education in the Schools of Ontario (1968). Gentler forms of progressive educational “normalisation” informed by social science were pursued by the committee as a means of generating consent to a Canada now redefined as a postwar “Peaceable Kingdom”. This ostensibly kinder strategy nevertheless carried the colonial assumptions of the earlier period into the later one. This was made clear to the committee during the report’s preparation by Indigenous intellectuals advising them on Indigenous issues. They saw this liberal-technocratic approach for what it was – a novel form of neocolonial pedagogical violence. Though they were largely ignored by the committee, their dissent is instructive (as is the committee’s resistance to it) and allows us to put the darker corners of Canadian progressive education into historical perspective.     

The Norden Associations and international efforts to change history education, 1919–1970: international organisations,education, and hegemonic nationalism

During the interwar period, a number of organisations started to look into education as part of an attempt to understand how nationalism was fuelled through education and to what extent it had forced the outbreak of the Great War. In response to nationalism and a perceived need for reformation of national narratives, the school subjects of history and geography became the primary suspects as advocates of chauvinism and militarism. In 1919, associations for the promotion of understanding and cooperation between the Scandinavian countries – the Norden Associations [föreningarna Norden] – began investigating history textbooks. This revision of textbooks was expanded in the 1930s to explore, assess, and develop the entire teaching of history in the Nordic countries. The Norden Associations converged on many levels with the disparate international movements for educational change. This article presents the Norden Associations as part of a process of hegemonic isomorphism in which cultural hegemony set the institutional boundaries within which the organisations could work in order to attain legitimacy. The article demonstrates how an organisation with a specific political agenda, and with only limited international objectives came to be – not only a part of – but, to some extent, an organisational role model for loftier efforts aimed at global and cosmopolitan history teachings.     

‘The Rag-bag of All the Subjects’: English in a London Grammar School, 1945–1963

Evidence from a recent study of English teaching in three London schools in the post-war era suggests that changes to curriculum and pedagogy, commonly attributed by historians to the 1960s, were well underway in the 1950s. Major changes associated with ‘New English’ occurred when teachers began taking the lives and experiences of their pupils as material for English lessons. However, changes in an all-boys grammar school followed a different path. Using oral history methods combined with mixed documentary evidence (including teachers’ records and pupils’ work), we reconstruct the experience – the aims and beliefs – of a left-wing grammar school teacher, and we show how, under the influence of F. R. Leavis and the Scrutiny movement, he made response to literature a central activity at a moment when the place of English was uncertain, and the subject lacked academic prestige.     

“Inside out”: a collaborative approach to designing schools in England, 1945–1972

This article explores the European dimension of a collaborative approach to school design through the lives and relationships of a group of key individuals who in England set about transforming school in the post‐war era. The philosophy and practice of this group of architects, educators, designers and policy makers, who regarded the school environment as reflecting the essential humanity of children and their teachers is explored through archival documentation as well as oral testimonies. The notion that teachers might be spacious in their thinking is traced through the personal histories of HMI, architects and artists who collaborated during the years 1945–72 within a culture of commitment to public service. Design from the ‘inside out’ is explained as a process that was rooted in the development of a common vocabulary generated by research through practice.