As a neutral and multilingual country, Switzerland struggled with major domestic political conflicts during the First World War due to the two cultures of the French-speaking and German-speaking parts of the country. The divided cultural loyalties ("fossé moral", "Röstigraben"), consisting of Swiss-Germans supporting Germany…

This study examines a Victorian geographical card game entitled "The Counties of England" published by Jaques & Son. Advertised as highly instructive and educational, it was designed to teach children about the principal towns in each county, their products and notable buildings. The aims of the study were to discover whether the…

This article examines educational rhetoric in Ontario, Canada, during the Great Depression. It notes how the government, through the Annual Reports of the Minister of Education, and the College of Education, through its journal, "The School," espoused themes of social efficiency regarding educational ideas and policies. The Depression…

Educational publishing sits at the intersection of industry, culture and education. Pedagogical aims must be balanced with the need for publishers to make a profit, while also acknowledging Canadian national identity and culture. The events of central interest are related to the tensions between two publishers' associations in the wake of the…

This paper examines the emergence of schools "micro-computing" in the UK between 1977 and 1984--a period of significant educational, technological and political change. During this time, computing developed rapidly from a niche activity in a few select schools to the state subsidized purchasing of a "computer in every school"…

This article explores how infant school reform took hold in London's schools from the 1890s to the 1930s through examination of the work of two Froebelian head teachers, Elizabeth Mary Shaw and Frances Emily Roe. In contrast to teacher-led rote-learning methods and rigid discipline they implemented play-based activities drawing on…

Many religious orders and congregations that were deported from France between 1904 and 1914 established themselves in neighbouring countries (Belgium, Switzerland, Italy and Spain). One of the affected congregations was "Los Hermanos de las Escuelas Cristianas," which worked in the field of popular education. Many of its members found refuge in…

The blackboard, a useful teaching tool in nineteenth-century England, was transformed into a teaching necessity in the decades following 1870, when the Education Acts made school free and mandatory for all children. The resulting huge population of schoolchildren inspired the development of teaching techniques appropriate for large-group learning.…

This article provides a detailed reconstruction of the processes leading to the formation of the widely influential Birmingham "Agreed Syllabus of Religious Instruction" (1975). This is contextualised within one of the most significant periods in the history of race relations in the United Kingdom. The authors discuss how this syllabus, and other…

This article aims to give an overview of the use and the meaning of images in two types of school textbooks used in Spain from the early twentieth century until the end of the 1960s: the textbooks "Lecciones de cosas" ("object lessons") and those used for the teaching of religion. For this analysis the iconographic-iconological method will be used…

In 1804, John Wallis published a game that converted learning about astronomy into a race to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. This essay uses "Science in Sport" to explore the cultures of Georgian recreative science, analysing how the rules and conventions of playing a game affected the gaining of natural knowledge. New familial audiences and…

This article reconsiders the way in which the French language was taught in British schools from 1780 to 1830. In particular, it is shown that (contrary to recent claims) the use of recitation- and conversation-based techniques, as opposed to rule-based grammatical learning, persisted well into the 1820s, both in influential pedagogic textbooks…

This article examines the approach to "character training" in the early years of the Outward Bound movement in Britain between c.1940 and c.1965. It examines the key components of the concept of "character-training" promoted in the Outward Bound schools by Kurt Hahn and his early followers, and some of the criticisms to which the four-week courses…

This article looks at the way in which patriotism and citizenship were used almost interchangeably in educational circles during the first half of the twentieth century. It traces the development of patriotism, citizenship and civics teaching during this period by discussing the way in which the London County Council approached these areas in the…

From its inception in 1922 the BBC pioneered a new medium in the education of children. This article traces the origins and development of a particular broadcast, "Children's Hour Prayers," a short worship time for children (appended to "Children's Hour") which began in wartime, and ended, along with the host programme itself, in the early 1960s.…