This study examines the implications of the 'equalisation policy' and the expansion of secondary education in South Korea in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The equalisation policy is one of the most radical school reform attempts in South Korea. A random assignment or lottery system for students was introduced for all middle schools in 1968 and…

This article examines documentation from a previously unpublished architectural survey of English comprehensive secondary school music classrooms, conducted between 1976 and 1978 by a team of Department of Education and Science architects led by David and Mary Medd on behalf of a Schools Council music curriculum research project directed by John…

Establishing and implementing rules that would teach pupils to become citizens became a crucial technique for turning those spots on the map of Europe whose sovereignty had shifted after the First World War into lived social spaces. This article uses Arnold Van Gennep's notion that a shift in social status possesses a spatiality and temporality of…

In the early 1960s, colleges and universities in the United States launched dozens of new pre-college programmes for low-income and predominantly African American high school students. Many of these initiatives were inspired by the civil rights movement. Moved by the sit-ins, marches and boycotts that had riveted the nation, a range of educators…

'School league tables' summarising the performance of secondary schools in England have been published annually since 1992. Although now a firmly established feature of the educational landscape, they have attracted criticism from those who point to their unintended negative consequences. These include 'teaching to the test', entering pupils for…

History of education reveals that the perimeter of a school subject as well as the manner of teaching it may vary according to the time period, the country, its political situation and its economic needs. Furthermore, if it clearly depends on the level of the learners and on the school itself, sometimes the teacher's preoccupations can adapt it.…

The Intermediate System of schooling, which operated in Ireland between 1878 and 1922, has, generally, been considered limited in ambition and as having generated a culture of high-stake terminal examinations. This article seeks a more nuanced understanding of the system and proposes that, despite an evolving system of secondary provision in…

Staying on in national school to gain some second-level education became a feature of the Irish education system during the late nineteenth century and continued until the 1980s. Following the establishment of Ireland's Department of Education in 1924, the classes in national schools which provided second-level instruction became known as…

This article analyses two secondary school competitions -- the International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) and the International Chemistry Olympiad (IChO) -- as platforms for early elite fostering in science between the years 1967 and 1984. It argues that the two arrangements can be understood as one of many Cold War arenas of the time period. The…

August Heißmeyer was a high-ranking SS officer, a member of Heinrich Himmler's inner circle, husband to Reich women's leader Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, and the driving force behind the pan-European expansion of Nazi elite schools during the Third Reich. In light of Heißmeyer's official pardon by Württemberg state president Dr Gebhard Müller in 1951,…

This article explores representations of problems regarding citizenship in changes to the syllabi of social studies and history in Swedish secondary schools between 1970 and 2017. Previous research has shown that the general educational discourse changed from an emphasis on the societal needs of committed citizens to an emphasis on the…

This essay proposes a feminist research agenda on the history of women teachers' experiences in the latter stages of their career and life. Drawing on extant histories of white women elementary and secondary teachers in the largely Anglo, western world (centred on the United States, Canada, England, Australia and Ireland), the essay explores the…

After the First World War, the second generation of headmistresses were working in a Britain in which the secondary education of girls was generally accepted. In 1920, Phyllis Monk, a former Blackheath student and Roedean teacher, was appointed to take charge of Chorleywood College, a new secondary school for girls with a vision impairment. She…

The article seeks to answer four questions: (1) How different are the value worlds in the Estonian- and German-language songbooks used in Estonia 1860-1914? (2) To what extent do the value worlds of songbooks express the ideals of the Wandervogel movement? (3) What is the position of wandering among other values? (4) Is the representation of…

In the early 1880s, Belgian educators were confronted for the first time with calls for the use of the optical lantern in schools. Around the same time, new pedagogical theories gained ground, which argued in favour of visually aided, more experiential forms of teaching. By investigating the pedagogical discourse on the introduction and use of…