This article reveals perspectives based on experiences from twentieth-century Danish educational history by outlining contemporary, test-based accountability regime characteristics and their implications for education policy. The article introduces one such characteristic, followed by an empirical analysis of the origins and impacts of test-based…

In the late 1930s the Spanish Civil War captured the international imagination to an extraordinary degree. As in other countries British men and women were moved to intervene directly and the memory of the war, and of British participation in it, has held an enduring appeal in the UK. The Civil War was also notable for its use of the visual as a…

Over the past two decades there has been a growing interest in the exploration of "transnational history". This work has focused in general on understanding the "movement, ebb and circulation" of ideas across borders and in particular on the introduction, transmission, reception and appropriation of ideas through the process of…

From 1870 until the outbreak of the Second World War there were various attempts at educational reform in Greece, one of the most significant being the intention to establish a national technical-vocational education. The aim of this study is to examine why such a reform was deemed necessary and yet failed to be implemented. The first part…

This comparative analysis of Luxembourg's early school (law) system reveals the extent to which European school systems reflect "national-cultural idiosyncrasies" apart from "structural isomorphism". It first examines the legal soil into which the Luxembourg school system was implanted. Legislative pendular swings,…

This research explores political-educational debates regarding the concept of women's emancipation in women and family programmes on Belgian television between 1954 and 1975. From the very beginning, the women's episodes were regarded as explicitly educational. The episodes were created to increase women's participation by means of their…

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…

ISCHE 33 was convened in San Luis Potosi to re-examine a relationship--that between society, education and the state--that had been largely taken for granted in official histories of education of modern nations. This theme was inspired by the bicentenary celebrations of the relatively early nineteenth-century movements (from 1804 to 1824) that…

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…