This paper addresses the question of whether the political debate concerning comprehensive schooling in the Netherlands between 1965 and 1979 was obscured by incompatible meanings of the concept of "equal opportunity". On the basis of an analysis of ministerial plans and parliamentary debates the conclusion is drawn that Dutch…

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…

This article focuses on how Dutch newspapers represented the debate in the Netherlands in the 1970s on comprehensive education and thus influenced the Dutch Middle School experiment. Wiborg's identification of key factors of success in Scandinavia was used as a point of reference. The article shows that these key factors did not exist in the…

Fred Clarke (1880-1952), an English educationist, emerged as a leading figure with his liberal approach alongside such key figures as R. H. Tawney and Cyril Norwood in the reform leading to the 1944 Education Act. Many of his reform proposals, which were provided by the new Act, reflected his ideals of liberal democracy. Nevertheless, his…

"History of Education" has published a steady stream of papers on the history of secondary education over the first 40 years of its existence. This corpus of research has been generated in the context of renewed interest in the history of secondary education that has been stimulated by developments in social and historical inquiry as well as by…

This paper examines the connections between the school building programme in England and the raising of the school leaving age (ROSLA) from 14 to 15 in 1947 and then to 16 in 1972. These two major developments were intended to help to ensure the realisation of "secondary education for all" in the postwar period. The combination led in practice to…

This article examines the reasons behind the decline of schoolgirl cricket in the years between 1945 and 1960. It considers the impact of the Education Act 1944 and "secondary education for all" on girls' physical education in general, focusing on why certain sports, in particular cricket, were not widely introduced into the new secondary modern…

This paper explores the contribution of James Bryce as an Assistant Commissioner to the Taunton Commission from 1865 to 1868. It highlights his criticisms of the English middle class and of middle-class education represented in the endowed grammar schools of Lancashire, England. These criticisms were based partly on finely detailed observation of…

This article investigates why there is no comprehensive education in Germany in contrast to most other European countries where comprehensive education in various forms was introduced, especially after the Second World War. The article will proceed by assessing established assumptions of this German peculiarity and put forward a new comparative…

The Classical Investigation, conducted from 1921 to 1924 by the American Classical League, remains the largest study of the teaching and learning of Latin and Greek performed in US schools. The recommendations that emerged from the Classical Investigation placed less stress on the claims of mental discipline and more stress on the value of…

This paper investigates the educational philosophy and practices of Achimota School, which was established in the Gold Coast Colony (the southern part of today's Ghana) in 1927 as the governmental model school for leadership education. Achimota's education aimed to develop leaders who were "Western in intellectual attitude", "African in sympathy".…

The philosophical background of the subject history in secondary education has been mainly addressed through research based on "obvious" source types (curricula, discussions in committees or journals, ...). This article proposes a narrative method of analysing history textbooks in order to study the underlining historical philosophy of history…

In 1964-65 a teacher at London's Kidbrooke School gave a speech that appeared critical of the Labour government's nascent comprehensivization policy. A "Times" editorial based on her comments influenced the tone and content of the crucial parliamentary debate of January 1965, which continues to have implications for the organization of schools in…

The internationalization of women's organizations and of teachers' associations during the "long 1920s" provided a context for English women educators to test and discuss their ideas concerning the girls' secondary school within European transnational networks. This exploration of social change adopts a Bourdieusian and transnational approach to…

This paper investigates the history of the education of the middle classes with particular reference to the historical experience of the English grammar schools between 1868 and 1944. It indicates a general neglect of the history of middle-class education and an opportunity to develop this in greater depth in terms of the range and diversity of…