In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a group of intellectuals and Spanish scientists found it necessary to resume cultural relations with Latin American countries that had been Spanish colonies in the past. In order to do this, they promoted a school of thought called "Hispano-Americanism", which aimed to create a Spanish-speaking…

International exhibitions provide a good arena in which to study the circulation and transfer of educational ideas and practices in the second half of the nineteenth century. Structured around themes of industry, progress, and civilisation, and defined as ephemeral museums of the new world of commodities for the consumption of the masses, they…

The rise during the 1950s of a discourse centred on "development," together with the elaboration of the concept of "human capital," led to an altogether new paradigm of economic modernisation. The expansion of education and professional training was now viewed as a key strategy for those countries wishing to join the developed world. As a result,…

Paulo Freire's pedagogy was developed in reaction to the state of "periphery" of illiterate farmers in Brazil and Chile. However, his thinking, which illuminated capitalism's oppressive nature in the classrooms, was enthusiastically accepted in the "centre" and he became a global point of reference for social action. In this article I trace his…

There has been little study of political exile as a means for transferring pedagogic ideas and models, which has been important in Latin America, especially in the case of the Spaniards exiled in Mexico after the defeat of the Second Republic at the end of the 1930s. The Mexican government's sympathy with the Second Republic allowed many teachers…

In this article we wish to propose a debate on postcolonialism and its role in the history of Latin American education. Our starting point is the acknowledgement of the reality that postcolonial historiographic perspectives have yet to be applied in studies of one of history's great empires, namely, the Spanish Empire. This is surprising for…

The present article examines the development of a diagnostic and therapeutic technique named The Sandtray at the Erica Foundation, a privately-run child counselling service in Stockholm. Originally it was called The World, developed by the British paediatrician and child psychiatrist Margaret Lowenfeld. In the 1930s it was imported to Sweden,…

This article is an attempt to shed some further light on the people and the processes involved in the identification of mental deficiency in children and young people. In order to do this, it turns away from the themes that have been most prominent in the historiography to date: elite and professional ideas, parliamentary and public debates and…

British child guidance was a form of psychiatric, preventive medicine for children and young people and centred, at least in principle, on specialist clinics led by psychiatrists. From small beginnings in the aftermath of the First World War, child guidance expanded steadily, in terms of both numbers of patients and numbers of clinics, and came to…

This study examines foster child case records to understand how intelligence testing was used by guidance counsellors and social workers to negotiate welfare resources with poor youths in the early twentieth century. Psychological testing justified racial hierarchy in a scientific language suited for a rational professional bureaucracy. Yet, it…

In recent years sensory history has emerged as a research topic of growing interest to historians and has been accompanied by a call to incorporate the senses into our understanding of the past. Under modernity, social direction and control were built into the infrastructure of modern life as specialist institutions emerged and multiplied in the…

This study looks at how education policies in colonial Korea changed over time in order to accommodate the needs of the colonial authorities during the period of Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1910-1945). The colonial experience can be divided into four different periods according to the four Educational Ordinances issued in 1911, 1922, 1938,…

This article attempts to reconsider and re-evaluate the often misunderstood and mis-conceptualised notion of "progressivism" within education by examining it through the lens of intentionality, specifically the textual kind prescribed by Quentin Skinner in his seminal work "Visions of Politics" (2002). Locating and explicating his ideas will…

Through a close analysis of the links between nineteenth-century Protestant missionary thought and the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) this article suggests that to distinguish Enlightenment educational and social reform from evangelism is mistaken. Emblematic of the social reform projects which emerged in England as responses to the…

A general lack of scholarly works on various aspects of the history of the lives of female teaching religious has recently been highlighted by Hellinckx, Depaepe and Simon. This paper, which reports a preliminary study, is offered as one contribution to addressing the deficit identified. The hope is that it will provoke further scholarship in the…