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.     

The educational afterlife of Greater Britain, 1903–1914

Following its late nineteenth-century emergence as an important element within federalist thinking across the British Empire, the idea of Greater Britain lost much of its political force in the years following the Boer War. The concept however continued to retain considerable residual currency in other fields of Imperial debate, including those concerning policies and practices of education across the Empire. This paper explores aspects of such debate by examining the intellectual contexts, theoretical assertions and conceptual formulations deployed in relation to questions about education, leadership, Imperial unity and racial identity in the early twentieth century. These issues are illuminated by an analysis of proposals by the Imperial theorist E.B. Sargant for the educational “colonisation” of the Empire of white settlement by “daughter” schools transposed from the traditional public schools of the metropole and staffed by teachers conceived as “the regulars of the State”.     

Christianity and the character education movement 1897–1914

This article discusses the extent to which middle-class Christians, many of whom were progressive liberals, involved themselves in the Moral Instruction League (MIL) to intervene in ‘improving’ the moral character of the English working class. It considers how they reconciled their motivations and underlying theology with secular goals that sought to free morality from its theological basis in late nineteenth-century England. It argues that Christian members and supporters of the MIL, in a series of steps, began to distance themselves from the theological basis of their faith. This was in an age when people were overwhelmingly persuaded that religion and morality were inseparable and that moral education must be religious education in schools. It was the Christian faith, not doubt, that was widely assumed in Victorian England at all social levels. What was the philosophy that the organisation promoted in its approach to character-building?.     

Social investigation and economic empowerment: Trade Schools for Girls, 1892–1914

Women workers are at the bottom of the industrial scale. In almost every trade they do the least skilled portion of the work and the wages average not more than 12s a week. They work long hours, partly because their occupation is in workshops or the home rather than in the factories, and their trades are for the most part those in which overtime is allowed; and to this legal overtime is freely added, often . . .without payment. What a mockery to preach self‐help to women so placed! They cannot help themselves . . . Wages in the trades which are filled by women are always tending to fall lower and lower. The women are unorganised, and they will take work at any price. ^{1 1}Karl Pearson, quoted in H. Morten, ‘Technical Education for Girls’, Fortnightly (January 1901), 174.      

The first ‘Hebrew’ teachers in Eretz Yisrael: characteristics,difficulties and coping methods (1881–1914)

The founding fathers of the new Jewish community in Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel, or Palestine) as well as many philosophers, public figures, educators and authors both in Israel and in the Diaspora were preoccupied with the image of the new Israeli Hebrew. The educational system was seen as an instrument to create the ‘new Hebrew’ (identifying with the ancient Hebrews) and to instil new values and behaviours in the young Palestinian‐born generation. During the first three decades (1981–1914) of Jewish education in Palestine, the typical teacher had neither pedagogical training nor prior experience in education, lacked the vocabulary for teaching subjects in Hebrew, and was familiar only with educational systems that differed from the one that she/he dreamed of creating. Individual teachers had no contact with one another and no institutionalised support system. They worked as ‘lone soldiers’, contending with a severe shortage of reference books, textbooks and reading material, struggling with the necessity to create a curriculum and set its priorities, and to translate and prepare material. Yet despite these tremendous difficulties, many educators did manage to realise their educational aims. What characterised these early teachers? What were the difficulties they faced? How did they manage to achieve their aims? This article attempts to answer these and other relevant questions.     

The making of the dull,deficient and backward pupil in British elementary education 1870–1914

Abstract

Michel Foucault's concept of normalisation is taken as a basis to explore the factors involved in the identification of dull, deficient and backward pupils in British Elementary Education between 1870 and 1914. Normalisation consists of the five processes of comparison, differentiation, hierarchisation, homogenisation and exclusion. These processes operate through dividing practices which distribute groups socially and are supported in this work by scientific ideas. In this instance, the norm of the intellect is the basis of the dividing practices. The empirical focus opens with an examination of the main features of Elementary education. It then moves to consider the deliberations of the Royal Commission on the Blind, Deaf and Dumb, etc (1889) and those of the Departmental Committee on Defective and Epileptic Children (1898). The analysis concludes with a consideration of the consequences of the Elementary Education (Defective and Epileptic Children) Act, 1899, and its effects up until 1914.     

The formation,development and contribution of the New Ideals in Education conferences, 1914–1937

This paper seeks to explore the development, impact and contribution made by the New Ideals in Education conferences, which were held between 1914 and 1937. In particular, it will examine how the group emerged from the English Montessori Society and forged an identity of its own based on the thoughts and ideas of its two major protagonists: Edmond Holmes and the Earl of Lytton. This was especially manifest in its commitment to a form of non-partisanship that sought to be inclusive as possible towards those agitating for liberty within the classroom. The paper will also examine the profound impact played by the First World War, whose events were a catalyst not merely for impelling the group to discuss and showcase practice but also how this could be applied in the reconstruction process. In so doing it will chart the evolution of the New Ideals movement, which fizzled out just prior to the Second World War.     

The Defects of 2.13H and its Improvement

This paper discussed the reasons for 2.13H CCDOS with MS DOS uncompatible, cive resolved methods, solved well problems of some English softwares, which can't execut under 2.13H CCDOS.     

European Perceptions of American Coeducation, 1865–1914: Ethnicity,religion and culture

In the era between the American Civil War and World War I, European observers considered coeducation, especially at the secondary level, to be one of the most remarkable features of American education and society. This article explores how Europeans tried to explain why mixing the sexes could work in the New World but, in the eyes of most, was impossible or unacceptable in their own countries. Although some commentators referred to “race” or ethnicity as the crucial factor that allowed American boys and girls to mingle in school without producing significant immorality, most visitors ultimately saw cultural differences as more important. An intriguing paradox in their perceptions was that many saw the United States as the progressive “land of the future,” but considered coeducation a holdover from primitive frontier conditions.     

Mathematics in English education 1860–1914: Some questions and explanations in curriculum history

Sherlock Holmes. Look at those big isolated clumps of buildings rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead coloured sea.

Watson. The Board Schools.

Holmes. Lighthouses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules, with hundreds of bright little seeds in each out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future.

     

‘Science to the Glory of God’. The Popular Science Magazine Ibérica and its Coverage of Radioactivity, 1914–1936

This paper provides a first approach to the history of Ibérica, one of the most important popular science magazines published in Spain before the Civil War. Founded in 1914 by members of the Society of Jesus based at the Ebro Observatory, Ibérica reached a weekly circulation of about 10,000 in the mid 1920s, and was instrumental in extending science education in Jesuit education facilities and in developing a “reactionary modernist” culture that embraced Catholicism and modernisation. By focusing on its coverage of radioactivity and the radium industry, the article aims to examine the magazine’s popularising style and ideology, and to determine its role in the debates regarding the cultural value of science in the first decades of twentieth century Spain.