The University of Edinburgh and Moray House teachers' college began to develop a new model of research and teaching, institutionalised in a combined university department and teachers' college, with a research laboratory and advanced research degree in the 1920s. This new institution was modelled on the innovative and influential…

This article analyses the general characteristics of the construction of the field of history of education in Brazil. To do so, it highlights the existing historiography and aims to describe the process of institutionalisation of this knowledge field, which, in general terms, has been focused on the area of teacher training. Since the nineteenth…

Inaugurated in 2013, this collective research programme aims to construct an international mapping of the history of education that accounts for recent developments in the field. Our goal is to create a current and retrospective assessment of the discipline's institutional grounding and of the knowledge produced by its practitioners,…

This article seeks to contribute to the institutional history of the discipline of history of education by examining the publication strategies and the associated institutional practices of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education, the international organisation representing those working in the field, and…

Following a short introduction this article is divided into three main sections. The first provides definitions and brief histories of the nature-nurture debate and of neuroscience. The second section shows how in recent decades neuroscientific research has impacted on the debate with particular reference to our understanding of human intelligence…

This article reports on the opening up of a new, rich seam of interdisciplinary research that brings together historians of education with historians of art and architecture to examine the meaning and incidence of "The Decorated School". It examines the origins of the idea of art as educator in the nineteenth century and discusses how…

Power over education and the upcoming generations has always been an important instrument in shaping religious and secular values. As a consequence, control over schools, pupils and teachers was, particularly in periods of war, an important means for bringing about acceptance of the new regime. The aim of this paper is to discuss priest-teachers'…

In the Netherlands of the late nineteenth century, primary education became one of the central issues in relation to raising political awareness and mobilising previously quiescent Dutch citizens. Protestants and Catholics alike claimed that Dutch public education left insufficient space for religious education and teamed up to struggle for…

The first two Peronist governments (1946-1955) introduced extensive social reforms that notably improved working conditions and systematised vocational training. Thereby the foundations of the Argentine welfare state were laid and the working masses were socially included to an unprecedented degree: thus, they also constituted the majority of…

The consolidation of the Argentine Federal Government by the 1870s aimed to modernise local society, establish state institutions and reach political stabilisation. Building a modern schooling system articulated both utopia and bureaucracy by establishing the use of knowledge as an instrument of social intervention, vindicating and legitimising…

Over the last 200 years in Brazil, the notion of "public" has been established to mean the same as the notion of "state". Sergio Buarque de Holanda and, more recently, Marilena Chaui point out that the very old tradition of the appropriation of public goods by the private sector has been updated. However, the understanding of what is considered…

The historiographical tradition which developed within the history of education from the 1970s regarded religious organisations as distractions from the "real" task of developing state-funded universal compulsory education. Despite more positive evaluations of voluntary agencies within the history of social policy, since the 1980s, the schools…

Particularly after the Danish political system changed to parliamentarism in 1901, a growing interest in, and expanded meaning of, culture as a pedagogical category developed in relation to state schooling, on the road to a comprehensive school system for "the whole population". This article elaborates on the role played by theological scholars in…

The reflections presented in this article include the process of incorporating women teachers into schools during the post-revolutionary period in Mexico. From one standpoint, women teachers lived in a state of ambiguity throughout this period because they were seen as symbols of national reconstruction following a war that left more than one…

An examination of recent gender scholarship demonstrates how a gendered lens has contributed to the debates on society, the state and education. Using local and international examples mostly from about 1880 to 1930, this paper will investigate how gendered perceptions coloured the provision of education, what we mean by "the state" and how much…