This essay recontextualizes the Yale Report of 1828, arguing that the report's advocacy for classical liberal education should be understood alongside the racial concerns of its authors, some of whom were well-known colonizationists who viewed African American education as a threat to New Haven's social and economic stability. The Yale Report's…

This paper uses the writings of European teachers and Chinese students at St. Stephen's Girls' College in Hong Kong--published in English periodicals of its school magazine and local English newspapers--to examine how the school tactically positioned itself as an educational site for the "useful women of China" during a period in…

This paper explores the movement of the New York City Interborough Association of Women Teachers (IAWT) for "equal pay for equal work" in teaching salaries, which it won in 1911. The IAWT's success sheds light on the possibilities and limits of women teachers advocating for change within a feminized profession. Leading the movement were…

Public education, at least as it has been known for the past several generations in the US, is under threat. Conservative state legislatures from Arizona to Florida have enacted sweeping voucher legislation, channeling taxpayer dollars to private schools. At the same time, a vicious culture war has engulfed the public education system in…

Student development theory (SDT) is a diverse corpus of academic and popular psychology with real-world application to the maturation of college and university students. It originated during the campus upheavals of the 1960s as part of a collective effort to reconcile restive students to mass higher education and modern technological society.…

This glimpse into sex education in the Los Angeles region illustrates the eugenic ideas about racially "fit" reproduction that emerged in family life curricula during the Second World War. Ideas about eugenic reproduction in public schools responded to broader cultural fears about increasing divorce rates, criminality, immigration, and…

Most studies of sex education center on local Anglo-Euro-American contexts, tracing the origin of sex education to a coordinated response to the spread of venereal diseases. These neglect the circumstances in which sex education developed in the developing world between the 1950s and 1980s: a growing collective anxiety about rising birth rates…

This article traces the transnational circulation of socialist reforms in the field of sex education through the work of Monika Krause, a citizen of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) who migrated to Cuba and became the "Cuban Queen of Condoms." For Krause, the overarching goal of sex education was to "teach tenderness" to…

The educational mission of most western schools today includes the nurturing of children's sexual upbringing, which many scholars see as a way of controlling their sexuality and forming them into "sexual citizens." This article examines how official Swedish school guidelines and textbooks have mediated sexuality norms through education…

Low and stagnant teacher pay has been a perennial issue in the United States public school system since the early decades of the nineteenth century. Women teachers, then as now, confronted the issue head-on by organizing together. For example, women primary school teachers in Boston, Massachusetts successfully petitioned for more pay in 1835, but…

The University of British Columbia (UBC) opened Canada's first International House (I-House) in 1959 after a decade of activism from students and faculty. Students had demanded an I-House to help them find housing, and to ensure that "brotherhood may prevail," as the I-House motto promised. The I-House campaign received support from…

In this essay, we explore the concept of path dependence through the example of the long-standing issue of racialized exclusionary school discipline. We argue that historians of education can reduce policy makers' tendency to continue down existing policy paths (especially unhelpful ones), a phenomenon known as "path dependence." We use…

Fear for the future of democracy in the 1930s and 1940s led university educators to redefine the purpose of general education as preparation for democratic citizenship. This mobilized social scientists to engage in curricular reform and experiment with progressive pedagogical practices in new general education courses. These courses have been…

The Occupation of Japan (1945-1952) sought to democratize the nation's education system; pupil guidance was expected to play a key part of this process. American reformers promoted new guidance practices (e.g., the comprehensive collection of students' personal data, guidance interventions based on the case-study method, an expanded homeroom…

From a Nordic and British perspective, the history of education is a vibrant field of knowledge production. It invites scholars from the humanities and social sciences to investigate the continuities and changes in education over time, as well as "Bildung," nurturing, learning, and teaching. By underlining the breadth of the history of…