Between 1972 and 1975 Eric Midwinter, Principal of the Liverpool Teachers' Centre, established a unified organisational structure responsible for delivering continuing professional development (CPD) to Liverpool schools. His ambition was to embed community education practices across the city's entire teaching force. However, during a…

This paper describes a study dealing with the reconstruction of the lives of two Spanish primary school teachers during the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975), in order to learn to what extent such a field of research can contribute to the history of education. Two family archives provide extraordinary and unique documentation to track down their…

This article provides a historical overview of how the process of curriculum change has evolved over the past 40 years. The intention is to explore how patterns of power and control have changed their configuration during different historical periods. The historical investigation of curriculum change shows a progressive movement away from the…

Historians have frequently referred to the British Association for the Advancement of Science as an institution that had the professionalisation of British science as its chief aim. This article seeks to complicate this picture by asking what, if any, concept of "professionalisation" would have been understood by nineteenth-century…

This article seeks to compare the characteristics of the academic profession as described historically by Perkin in 1969 against the definitions of a profession derived from the published views of sociologists and others. It then measures the position of the academic community today against these definitions: a common range of professional tasks…

This article brings together six talented women historians in twentieth-century England whose scholarly productions helped shape modern historical practice but who are little known in the canonical accounts of history-writing in the period. The author is looking to map and describe historical communities from a grounded and qualitative perspective…

William Torrey Harris and John Dewey were the two most important philosophers of education in America at the "fin de siècle." This paper discusses their rival idealisms through an examination of their philosophical and educational pronouncements. As I will show, both are indebted to, and align themselves with, Hegel. However, each…

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…

A body of scholarship on the history of the lives of Catholic teaching sisters has thrown up various challenges to educational historians. One challenge can be posed by asking how teaching sisters were able to go on to take up leadership positions. This is prompted by the observation that a particular body of literature for the period 1940-1965…

This paper first situates King Alfred in Winchester, in Wessex, in Anglo-Saxon England, and in the Christendom of the ninth century. Attention is drawn to Alfred's education, which included experience of court life in Wessex, Rome and Francia. The paper argues that Alfred prioritised vernacular literacy as a means of educating elites in a…

Today, the use of photographs in publications and exhibitions is commonplace, but this was not always so. This article shows how photographs of certain schools that have had lasting impact on design stand in ambiguous relationships to the buildings themselves. Photographs function as part of the design process; they record details of construction…

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…

From 1563 until the death of the last teacher in 1851, there was a prebendary in the Cathedral of the Canary Islands in charge of the education of children. In fact, it could be said that this prebendary was the only continuous secondary school teacher there was in the Canary Islands until the beginning of the nineteenth century when the High…

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…

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…