This article provides a study of scholarship on religions and education, published over the past forty years, in "History of Education". It also includes reference to other publications, attempting a thematic analysis that scrutinises work on missionaries, churchmen, convents, charitable societies, denominations and education. Methodologies and…

"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…

UK-based teacher educators formed the core membership of the History of Education Society when it was founded in 1967, and they were frequent early contributors to the Society's journals. Given these origins, one might imagine that the history of teacher education would have featured more prominently in the pages of the first 40 volumes of the…

Recalling its origins as a research journal addressing educationists this article seeks to understand historical research published in "History of Education" as aimed at a professional audience. Primary schooling provides a significant focus as the study of education history was fostered especially in the training of elementary teachers.1 In that…

At the time I began work in university, I entered a world which was leisured, privileged and patriarchal, in the United Kingdom at least...I came from a world in which only 3% of the population aspired to university. I belonged to a world in which, having got where I was through the eleven-plus and "A" levels, there was almost a sense that society…

This article looks through the lens of the gendered politics of historical writing at the main forms and direction of scholarship on gender in "History of Education" since its publication. It discusses how social, women's, feminist and gender history has been treated in the journal and how developing approaches around the body, space, materiality,…

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…

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 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…

Within a 20-year period from the late 1850s to the late 1870s, most European countries created programmes in response to what appeared as a new social problem: unwed daughters of the middle classes in need of jobs. Taking off from the 150th anniversary of the English Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, this paper examines the diffusion…

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…

This article presents the scope and range of Christian involvement in establishing the field of education in England as a distinct area for scholarship between 1930 and 1960. It advocates greater study of the range of various denominational positions held in the period. This paper also illustrates the public debates of the time by focusing on the…

This article uses testimony gathered from oral history interviews and contemporary physical education sources to explore the schooling of the young female body in Scotland between 1930 and 1960. It looks at the ways in which girls were educated about their own bodies and their physical capabilities at school, taking into account official…

The three volumes of the "French Method of Physical Education" were published by the military school of Joinville-Le-Pont between 1925 and 1927 and became one of the most successful reference materials in France for sport and physical education among school, military and civilian institutions. Several authors studied these manuals, but they…

Between the years 1950 and 1974 there was a conservative view regarding physical education (PE) and the perception of the body in Greek PE curricula. PE was seen as an ideological means of legitimising political dominance. Before the Athens Olympic games of 2004, educational authorities were assigned the duty of promoting the Olympic spirit in…