In recent years, visual records have come to be seen as important sources of information in the study of education and its history. However, most of the images used in this way simply provide a glimpse--though admittedly a precise one--of only one moment in the educational process. Graphic verisimilitude is not only to be found in these images; it…

This paper is based on the author's experiences of interviewing seven men and seven women who graduated from a Danish high school in 1980, at a moment when the upper secondary system underwent a process of democratisation. She questioned the informants as to the role education has played in their lives, and as to the sense their choice of…

Central to the assembling of the New South Wales public education system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the setting of borders and boundaries between different categories of students. These boundaries were particularly decisive in the institution of the public high school, where entry and progress were regulated by tests…

In New South Wales as for other Australian colonies, the achievement of mainly free, compulsory and secular public education systems in the 1870s was a cause of self- satisfaction and a belief that late nineteenth-century Australian public schools were among the best in the world. In this paper, the process by which this self-satisfaction was…

This paper examines how the idea of "race" is represented in high school Canadian history textbooks. It looks at textbooks authorized by the Province of Ontario between 1940 and 1960 and those authorized after 2000. It is argued in this paper that even though historical racisms have increasingly made their way into Canadian history textbooks as…