‘No subject … more neglected’: Victorian elementary school history, 1862–1900

The appropriateness of history in primary schools is yet again questioned in the Rose Review (The Times, 8 December 2008). This age‐old debate was in part silenced with the subject’s inclusion for all pupils in the National Curriculum, but is raging once more. The Office for Standards in Education (OfSTED) has cautioned that history is becoming endangered in all key stages and the President of the Historical Association has warned that its dilution in a skills‐led curriculum is a cause for social, as well as educational alarm. It is therefore opportune to investigate the rationale for its teaching, not in a new analysis of the well‐trodden twentieth‐century curriculum, but in the largely neglected Victorian period, using the evidence of Her Majesty’s Inspector (HMI) reports. The paper is divided into two sections, the first analysing the Victorian rationale for studying the subject in elementary schools and the second investigating the numbers of children actually studying history and the extent of this study. It shows the avid debates on its appropriateness, particularly for the poor, although the vociferous concerns of many HMI finally led to it being brought into the mainstream classroom by the beginning of the twentieth century.     

Education,Class and Culture: the Birmingham ethnographic tradition and the problem of the new middle class

The ethnographies of youth culture and schooling produced by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and its followers had a major impact on educational sociology during the late 1970s and 1980s. Despite this invaluable contribution, important theoretical and methodological problems emerged in their treatment of class and culture. In particular, the untheorised presence of the ‘new middle class’ and a confusing notion of ‘dominant culture’, weakened the coherence of their analyses. This article traces these problems from the early studies of youth culture through to more recent school ethnographies. It concludes by stressing the relevance of critical concepts like class and culture within contemporary debates emerging from the ‘new’ educational settlement     

学术争鸣与中学历史教学的几点思考——以高中历史教材中“封建”概念的表述为例

自高中历史实施新课改以来,在实践与理论探索中取得了显著的成就。由于教材中将学术争鸣的成果引入教材中,因而对高中历史教材的编排产生了影响。现行高中历史四套教材中对＂封建＂概念表述迥异,这涉及学术争鸣与教材编写之间的关系。将学术争鸣的问题与研究成果引入教科书,不仅可以体现教材编写中多视角、多层次的特点,而且可以为学生在学习过程中提供更为广阔的空间,同时也应当兼顾中学基础教育的普遍规律,保证知识结构体系的合理、有序。     

Portraying Science as Humanism – A Historical Case Study of Cultural Boundary Work from the Dawn of the ‘Atomic Age’

In the late 1950s, when a new curriculum for the Danish upper secondary school was under construction, the reform debates on science were strongly concerned with the scarcity of technologically and scientifically educated labour, and thus relations between science, technology and welfare were stressed. Simultaneously however, the relationship between science and humanism was likewise emphasised and discussed. It is this latter issue that is the subject of analysis here. I argue that describing science as a form of humanism served a number of different purposes both within and without a narrow school context. It was far from clear what the practical consequences of this rhetorical figure was to be, although some attempts were made within the new curriculum plan to break down the boundaries between the sciences and the humanities. However, picturing science as humanism also served legitimising functions both with regards to the new science curriculum and with regards to a general political program of progress and welfare through support of science and education. Thus, the curriculum debates on science education were part of a much broader cultural and political debate in which the image of science was negotiated and transformed. Such curriculum debates can, I argue, be understood as cultural boundary work in Thomas Gieryn’s sense.     

高中历史教科书“模块-专题”式编写体例的特点与检讨

普通高中历史＂模块-专题＂式课程结构的重大变革在课程性质、课程基本理念和课程设计思路三个层面体现了全新的价值取向和理想追求。这是高中历史课程内容体系的大破大立,是对传统课程设置模式与教科书编写＂系统性＂的挑战。人教版、人民版、岳麓版和大象版等各版高中历史教科书呈现出＂模块-专题＂体例的鲜明特点,在中学历史教科书编写领域作了许多有益的探索,同时也引发了人们对高中历史教科书编写体例的争鸣。     

Crossing borders in educational innovation: Framing foreign examples in discussing comprehensive education in the Netherlands, 1969–1979

In the Netherlands, crossing borders to study comprehensive schools was an important strategy in the 1970s, a decisive period for the start and the end of the innovation. According to policy-borrowing theory, actors that engage in debating educational issues are framing foreign examples of comprehensive schooling to convince their audiences. Framing therefore became the leading concept behind our study of the intellectual debate, examined through the leading Dutch scientific journal Pedagogische Studiën (Educational Studies), and the public debate, examined through recordings of television programmes. Assuming that those debates were influential in the political middle school process, our analyses show that foreign examples indeed functioned as a framing device in the form of legitimisation, glorification, sensationalisation and caution. However, the impact of framing differed. In the phase of cross-national attraction, the reform-minded perspective in the scholarly debate had a stimulating effect on the development of the plans, but little influence on the governmental decision-making process. This contrasts with the frames that were brought forward by television programmes. Although the negative frames, such as “a factory-made sausage”, were rejected by the programmes, such frames could linger in people’s minds as a means to interpret ideas about middle schools. At the end of the 1970s, the middle school was reduced to a minor feature of educational policy and, eventually, the middle school experiments were brought to a close. As a result, the foreign solution of introducing comprehensive education was never transferred to the Netherlands.     

At the interface: academic history,school history and the philosophy of history

How history is learnt and taught must to some extent be shaped by conceptions of what history is. Historians tend to conceptualize what something is by investigating what it has been and what it has meant in different contexts. This article explains how a debate in the philosophy of history between positivism and intentionalism provided the context for history to be defined as a distinct school subject. It traces the epistemological underpinnings of history pedagogy over the past century, illuminating the close relationship between attempts in the philosophy of history to defend history’s disciplinary autonomy and the formulation of a disciplinary model of school history education. Eschewing a one-way account from the philosophy of history to the school history classroom, it attributes the interest of leading history educationalists to use philosophical analyses of history to an educational paradigm eager to distil the disciplinary essence of the school subjects. At the interface of academic history, school history and the philosophy of history, it describes a process whereby these separate threads became part of a common fabric, shaping conceptions of what it means and what it takes to be educated in history.     

Something More than Straws and Sticks and Bits of Coloured Paper: English at Hackney Downs (formerly The Grocers' Company's School), 1876–1881

Herbert Courthope Bowen was a progressive spirit in English teaching during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Ideas about the role of activity in the development of the child – ideas usually associated with progressive teaching in the 1960s and 1970s – may be found in Bowen's published papers. In connection with the time that Bowen was Head Master of a London secondary school, I explain what turned on the amount of Latin in the school curriculum, why Latin mattered so much at the time and why English teaching at Grocers' (Hackney Downs) where Bowen taught, was so controversial. Bowen published a series of remarkable papers on key themes. At the core of all these writings lies his passionate interest in the psychological development of the individual child. From Froebel Bowen gained a rich conception of the productivity of mind as well as a sense of children's individual worth and dignity. I argue the case that his writings deserve revisiting as pivotal contributions to a theory of English that has a strong psychological component. Bowen acted as a conduit for a rich legacy of largely German ideas about self‐cultivation (Bildung). His emphasis on ‘self‐activity’, ‘creativity’ and the ‘constructive imagination’ prefigures the working out of principles usually associated with progressive English Teaching in the post‐war period, such as ‘personal growth’. Indeed, many of the presuppositions, norms and assumptions of progressive educators were shaped by the ideas I discuss. By historicising them, and stripping them of their aura, I envisage opening up fresh possibilities for interrogation and critique.     

A history of the right: The battle for control of national curriculum history 1989–1994

Abstract

This paper explores the manner in which educational and political conservatives attempted to control the content and purposes of the history curriculum in English schools during the period 1987–1994. It focuses upon this particular coalition because, since the late 1970s, it has set the agenda for the debate and dominated the race to produce a history curriculum designed to help produce a particular kind of society. The paper argues that the New Right's claim to be engaging in an educational debate is spurious. Rather, its concern is primarily ideological and only educational in terms of its use of history education as a vehicle through which to disseminate a specific set of values and beliefs.     

Perilous times: an oral history of teachers’ experience with school inspection in the 1930s

School inspectors and school inspection were integral features of the elementary public school system in Ontario from the 1840s until the practice was abandoned in 1967. From its earliest beginnings and subsequent development, school inspection and school inspectors were established as an important institution of the educational state. By regulation every teacher in the province could expect a twice-annual unannounced visit from a state-appointed male school inspector – more frequently if difficulties arose. This study explores teachers’ experiences of school inspection and inspectors during the 1930s by drawing on the oral history accounts of 17 women and four men who taught elementary school in various regions of the province.     

Britannia’s children grow up: English education at empire’s end

In 2016, Britain voted to leave the European Union: over-65s were more than twice as likely to vote for Brexit as under-25s, amidst campaign rhetoric steeped in colonial nostalgia. This article explores how this generation was taught in many English state schools to imagine Britain’s place in the world during a period of rapid decolonisation from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Drawing on history and geography textbooks, surviving school-work, BBC broadcasts to schools and school wall-maps, it is argued that English schools embellished the idea of a powerful Commonwealth to depict the continuation of Britain’s global might during dramatic imperial decline. Attempts to reconcile decolonisation with the famous red-bespattered ‘imperial’ map are particularly revealing. By presenting decolonisation as the continuation of empire by other means, many educationists attempted to minimise the external changes to Britain’s global status, allowing imperial ideas to survive in schools into the 1970s.     

The European ideal of a university: Portugal's views from the 1950s and 1960s

This study stems from research on the ‘Standing Conferences of Rectors and Vice-Chancellors of the European Universities' (1948–), an experimental initiative for co-operation among European universities, emphasising the reformative ideal that appeared in international circles in the years following the Second World War. These conceptions were gradually received in the sphere of Portuguese national education, enabling an internal and already on-going debate on the role of the university in Portugal to proceed and possibly providing a base for a ‘last-minute’ and delayed attempt to reform higher education in Portugal during the 1970s – just before the outbreak of the Revolution in 1974. Based on a historiographical methodology, this article attempts to understand how and in what shape recommendations from international circles (mainly from these European University Conferences) were assimilated by the thought and philosophical insights of the Portuguese elite, mainly concerning the gauge of National Education and the concept of the university. Thus, an effort is made to understand the official view of the Portuguese ‘New State’ regarding the ‘aims of the university’, contextualising the Portuguese higher education problem in the 1950s and 1960s, and in its relation to Portuguese national science policy rationales.     

Schulbau jenseits der Norm: Hans Scharouns Mädchengymnasium in Lünen

The school building as a form of pedagogy has been paid more attention since it has been considered as a space for living and making experiences and as a ‘third teacher’. Searching for an up‐to‐date school one often looks for schools with a different appearance from normal schools. This is due to the practical purpose of building schools and classrooms in which pupils have a good experience. This article deals with such a different school, presenting an example that has very much influenced the debates about school architecture in Western Germany after 1945. The architect of the school was Hans Scharoun. This example of a building beyond the norm is the contemporary Geschwister‐Scholl‐Gesamtschule (comprehensive school) in Lünen, North Rhine‐Westphalia. This school was built between 1956 and 1962 as a grammar school for girls. From a historical point of view the school is above all interesting because its architecture was connected with pedagogical intentions and hopes that are not dissimilar to such considerations today. The outline of this architecture followed ideas of democratic school architecture that Scharoun presented in 1951 at a conference called ‘Darmstädter Gespräch’ alongside an exhibition about ‘Man and Space’. These ideas were paid much attention and they have become part of the history of school architecture. But as the school system in Germany expanded and school buildings became more rationalized in the 1960s and 1970s they were no longer followed. Thus the grammar school for girls in Lünen is an example of the shift in opinions and trends of school architecture that had been influenced by social developments and education policy. Scharoun, who is well known beyond the borders of Germany for his buildings, is considered a representative of organic architecture. In school architecture this idea of an organic combination of the single parts of a school as if they made up an organism was decisive too. The consequence was that he grouped and concentrated the rooms and that he assigned the form of the rooms to the nature of the activities taking place in them. One group of rooms comprised the class apartments of the female pupils of the lower, middle and upper grades of the school. They were conceptualized in a different way according to the age of the girls. The rooms should emphasize the different stages of development and consciousness of the girls by colour and light. The rooms for the youngest should thus have the character of a nest while the middle groups were characterized by exactness and the higher ones by the peculiar phase of development between childhood and becoming adult. These areas with their more individual and almost private character were designed to be connected with the other parts of the school (classrooms for lessons in science, assembly hall, offices and library) by way of encounter. Thus the connection of the individual and community should not only be symbolized but made possible in the everyday life of the school. The rooms for the girls were formed like pavilions without rectangles. It is characteristic that they were thought of as class apartments. They were intended to form a second home and to provide a feeling of security, of belonging and of protection. Each of these class apartments consisted of a classroom and a wardrobe, a room for the group and an area for teaching in the open air. Although built with the same elements the class apartments for each of the three age groups show differences in the relations of inner and outer area. The different grades of openness were justified by Scharoun according to the different levels of development of the girls. Those for the younger ones would be more open than those for the older ones. Inside, the class apartments achieved a comfortable character through their forms and by use of colours. This was emphasized by the lighting conditions – daylight was dispersed evenly by small high windows around the room beneath the ceiling of the classroom – and by the different height of the rooms. The greater community of the school was reached only by crossing a great hall; the assembly hall and the specialized classrooms were placed nearby. The great break hall was not only an area of movement but was designed as a room for meetings and assemblies. With regard to the class apartments the break hall can be characterized as a public space. This public character was supported by the fact that the school library, the school council and the assembly hall were associated with the break hall. Moreover there were fountains with drinking water, benches, notice boards, showcases, plants and a milk bar within the room – elements that are typical of a public space. The plan of the grammar school for girls in Lünen shows the correspondence of relatively small and shielded class apartments to spacious and generous public rooms. This connection of extraversion and introversion, of inner space and the outside, of openness and unity in Scharoun’s opinion shows most obviously the essence of school. There is no doubt that by following the idea of an organic architecture Scharoun built his school from the pupils’ point of view – but without ever asking them what they wanted. The pupils who would live and learn within these rooms played the main role, not the teachers. Thus the rooms for the teachers were located at the edge of the building. This also makes clear that Scharoun was not interested in rationalizing time and space for the purpose of teaching. On the contrary, he tried to take the knowledge or assumptions concerning the needs of children into account by building the school in order to support their learning. Attachment to the space they should live in, the feeling of well‐being and identification were more relevant to Scharoun than organisational and technological efficiency. When the school was finished it was praised for its polygonal forms that were felt to be a liberation from formal obligations and inflexibility. Only five years after the opening of this school Scharoun’s ideas for school buildings met with little response. They did not stand up to public demands for simpler and cheaper solutions, for rationalized and fixed types and series production of school buildings, which became an item on the agenda following an enormous growth in the number of pupils. It was suggested that Scharoun’s subjective architecture would have regulated the order of the lessons, the relationship between pupils and teachers and their possibilities of participation in school. In opposition to his idea of a democratic school architecture there would be no liberty and no possibility for individual use of the rooms. Everything would be determined and the complex educational situation would have been intolerably simplified. In addition the everyday life of school would have shown that the room for meetings could not be used as Scharoun supposed. The criticism could not be denied and indicated the failure of Scharoun’s plan for a school. But it was not the architecture that failed. It was rather the regulated school with its fixed divisions of time that was not able to appreciate and use the potential offered by the building. After a period of less esteem, Scharoun’s architecture of schools recovered when new debates concerning the quality of life of schools and the aesthetic dimensions of school buildings came into being. In the meantime the school in Lünen is described by the keywords variety, warmth, security, aura. In contrast to the criticism of the 1970s the architecture and the structure of rooms of the grammar school for girls in Lünen are now praised by pupils and teachers for their richness of stimulus and their possibilities for individuality. But there has been no empirical research into the notion and of the use of the building and its rooms by teachers and pupils in everyday life. What can be said almost certainly is that Scharoun’s school in Lünen would be appreciated today with regard to contemporary recommendations for good learning environments for pupils.     

Australia’s 1988 Bicentennial: national history and multiculturalism in the primary school curriculum

As in many countries, such as Germany, Turkey, the United States and Japan the history/culture wars of the past two decades have increased public interest in what is taught in schools. This has resulted in rigorous debates in the general community, encouraged and sustained through regular media coverage. Partly as a response to this, History has been designated as a separate subject in the first wave of planning and implementation of the Australian National Curriculum. Two of the reasons for this include first, to recognise the importance of teaching historical skills as a distinct subject; and second there is an ongoing bipartisan political interest in privileging history disciplinary knowledge and content to ensure that national history narratives are taught to students. To contribute meaningfully towards the development and implementation of a National Curriculum, it is important to understand past curriculum constructions, so that the disciplinary knowledge and content of history remains independent, and not subsumed within current (or future) political trends. Based on examples of national history from the Queensland Social Studies syllabus and government endorsed sourcebooks in the lead-up to the 1988 Bicentennial of British colonisation of the Australian continent, this article examines the influence and role of multiculturalism in History teaching in primary schools. Particular attention is paid to Indigenous representations and British heritages, as an example of two groups that have often been represented as binaries to each other throughout Australian history. An analysis of the curriculum materials illuminates the differences between multiculturalism and history—highlighting how the two are merged at the expense of accurate historical knowledge and concepts, particularly in the area of national history. This study will demonstrate that as a result of the infiltration of multiculturalism into history content within the Social Studies curriculum, historical knowledge becomes silenced in the school curriculum – resulting in vague and sometimes historically inaccurate information being presented to students; and the privileging of certain types of multiculturalism.     

‘I feel I am really pleading the cause of my own people’: US southern white students’ study of African-American history and culture in the 1930s through art and the senses

Abstract

In the 1930s there emerged an initiative to teach black history and culture to white students, which pre-dates more widespread efforts of the post-Second World War era. This article analyses student work – considering sight, sound and text – and investigates what white students learned about African-American history and culture. Curriculum history has generally relied on textbook analysis, while this study examines non-traditional teaching materials and student work. It is argued that, while most of the student work reveals the reification of stereotypes of blacks as lazy and in need of white oversight, the school work of white students reveals an eagerness to understand African-Americans. However, white students could only understand African-Americans in relation to themselves and could not remove themselves from the centre of their study of black history and culture. Such attempts at learning an inclusive history from the learners’ viewpoints are rarely documented in the history of education.     

Pedagogies for social justice: did Bernstein get it wrong?

This paper explores the often‐touted incompatibility between ‘intellectual rigour’ and ‘relevance’ as this has manifested in Australian debates over Queensland’s New Basics and ‘productive pedagogies’, and associated initiatives such as the New South Wales Quality Teaching Framework. This debate can be located in longer‐standing concerns about how best to meet the educational needs of students who experience social disadvantage. In particular, we focus on the way Bernstein’s concept of ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ discourse has been used by him and others to argue against attempting to make academic knowledge more ‘relevant’ by introducing elements of students out of school lives into the classroom. Drawing on examples from the literature, we trouble Bernstein’s contention that academic and ‘everyday’ knowledge represent different, incompatible knowledge forms that cannot be successfully integrated. This troubling creates an opening for reconsidering the relationship between ‘intellectual rigour’ and ‘relevance’. We argue that we can and should pursue the bringing together of ‘intellectual rigour’ and ‘relevance’ as a means to engage better all students, but particularly those who experience social and educational disadvantage, and improve their learning outcomes. Accordingly, we call for challenging, at a theoretical, practical and policy level, the perception that learning cannot be made relevant without sacrificing intellectual rigour. We also call for more research on teachers already integrating ‘intellectual rigour’ and ‘relevance’, and for teacher professional development and scaffolding to achieve this and to moderate multiple student perspectives and claims to ‘relevance’.     

The International Standing Conference for the History of Education and Paedagogica Historica: a historical view on institutional strategies and practices

This article seeks to contribute to the institutional history of the discipline of history of education by examining the publication strategies and the associated institutional practices of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education, the international organisation representing those working in the field, and Paedagogica Historica, the most significant journal in the discipline internationally, as well as illuminating the interactions and interrelationships between the two institutions. It will focus on the early 1990s, due to the fact that, at the end of the 1980s, both institutions found themselves facing crises which led to profound and far-reaching processes of reform, which in their turn engendered a rapprochement and, eventually, cooperation between the two institutions. After providing brief overviews of the development of both ISCHE and Paedagogica Historica up to and into the 1980s, the article will concentrate in its third part on the long-lasting – commencing after ISCHE’s foundation in 1979 – and multi-faceted relationship between the two, both of which made significant contributions to the emergence of an international academic community of those working in history of education. The article will additionally explore the range of strategies used by the two institutions in relation to the publication of findings in the field and the institutional practices of cooperation with and demarcation from one another exercised by ISCHE and Paedagogica Historica.     

中国史学和(西)德/西方史学:一种对话?--始于1980年代中国社会史转向

全文分三部分:第一部分讨论比较方法中的一些问题,并通过比较揭示中国和西方/德国的史学研究中的不平等关系及其后果。第二部分,作者把1980年代以来中国史学研究中出现的社会史研究潮流称为“社会史转向”(Soc ialH istory Turn),分析其特征并以其为例呈现中国史学研究在全球学术结构中的自我定位。第三部分,通过比较德国与中国社会史兴起过程中的异同来“构建他者”(to Construct the O ther)和“衡量差异”(toM easure the D ifference),从而指出占统治地位的线性发展和现代化模型是以统一的全球意识形态体系为基础的,并强调对其重新思考的必要性。     

The Persistent Gap between Education and Care: a ‘History of the Present’ Research on Belgian Child Care Provision and Policy 1

The first Belgian crèches for children from birth to three years of age date from the nineteenth century. From 1919, formal legislation on child care was developed. In the early twentieth century, the origins of Belgian childcare and in its initial legislation some core aspects of present‐day child care policy and practice can be found. This article will focus on two of these historical aspects of Belgian child care. Both features have far‐reaching consequences for the organization of present child care provision, for professional qualifications and for policy matters. The first is an aspect that is very common in Western Europe, and a source of current pedagogical debate: the persistent gap between care for the infant and the education of the preschool child. The second is a typical Belgian feature of childcare: subsidized liberty as a specific form of public–private partnership. This article wishes to contribute to the debates on viewing childcare policy and practice by historicizing these issues. A close look at Belgian child care history reveals how the gap between education and care and subsidized liberty occurred and in what context. Consequently the early twentieth century will be highlighted. However, it will also focus on oppositional discourse in the 1970s. In this period, another antagonistic debate took place, namely regarding compensation programmes for ‘blue collar’ parents. The article will briefly point to some remarkable similarities between the discussion in the 1910s and the 1970s. The outcomes of these discussions, as well as the concepts underpinning them, explain the persistence of the division between education and care. The debate between Henri Velge and Elise Plasky, around which this article is composed, has been studied previously by Belgian historians. The scarce research on Belgian child care history focuses on child care as a women's employment issue, somewhat neglecting the educational aspects. This vein, i.e. that historical research itself is embedded in the discursive regime separating education from care, is the very subject of this article. Therefore, research was conducted from a hermeneutical perspective, looking at coherences between discourses and their social, economic and cultural contexts. This research aims also to acknowledge the critiques of De Certeau regarding the focus on discontinuities in the construction of history.     

National pride and students’ attitudes towards history: an exploratory study

Recent debates about “Britishness” have drawn increasing attention to the inculcation of national values within the school history curriculum. To date, however, few studies have explored young people’s attitudes towards history or how these are related to their sources of national pride and shame. This paper draws on a survey of over 400 undergraduates’ experiences of secondary education, investigating their attitudes towards the history curriculum and how these relate to their feelings of national pride. Using principal components analysis we found that students’ attitudes towards history loaded on to two distinct factors: traditional/conservative and multicultural/liberal. Bivariate correlations then revealed that pride in national sporting and economic achievements and a sense of shame about immigration were positively associated with a traditional attitude towards history. Pride in British civil liberties and social diversity and a sense of shame about racism and UK foreign policy were associated with a multicultural attitude. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.