Since the late nineteenth century, teachers have come together to found associations and unions in Europe and beyond. Drawing on oral histories, primary and secondary documents, and media reports, this paper delves into this rich historical background, leading to the founding of Education International in 1993. In particular it explores the…

After World War II, the colonial rule imposed by the Kuomintang (KMT) in Taiwan was symbiotically connected with its project of nation building. This project of "national colonialism" initially spurred the KMT to build an extensive public education system and to marginalize private schools. Financial concerns after 1954, however, forced…

British Columbia (BC) charted its own course in 1949 when it passed legislation permitting Indigenous children to be schooled in provincial public schools. That is, BC's law predated federal legislation allowing integrated schooling by two years. This paper examines how and why BC followed its own policy path with respect to the schooling of…

The nineteenth-century debate about the role of the US Bureau of Education was marked by negotiations between the civic republican language of antebellum common school advocacy and a social scientific language of educational professionalism. To advance this argument, this essay traces how members of Congress defined, criticized, and delimited the…

"Newsweek" ran an article on "The Homosexual Teacher" in December 1978. At the end of a tumultuous two-year period framed by Anita Bryant's anti-gay campaign in South Florida and John Briggs' proposition to bar gay and lesbian educators from working in California public schools, reporters concluded, "Most homosexual…

This article focuses on the period between 1966 and 1968, when the original vision of the policymakers of the National Teacher Corps (NTC) and the federal staffers who created the NTC initiative held sway. In their vision, the "best and brightest" (according to their criteria) could better solve the problems of educating so-called disadvantaged…

The headlines "Who's Trying to Ruin Our Schools?" and "Danger's Ahead in the Public Schools" grabbed the attention of the American public during the early 1950s as mainstream publications reacted to efforts by right-wing organizations to influence the curricula of America's elementary and secondary schools. "A bewildering disease that threatens to…

The Russian Revolution of February 1917 displaced the autocracy of the Romanov royal family and aimed to establish a liberal republican Russia. The Bolsheviks, who came to power a few months later in the revolution of October 1917, announced that their new policy in education "had no analogy in history." Their reforms sought to establish…

This paper focuses on conservative women and education in the 1930s. Conservative women were particularly concerned, if not contentious, about the alleged state of affairs in the schools. Their ideas about education and their imperative, as they saw it, to preserve a patriotic heritage and to agitate against perceived threats to that heritage are…

In the early twentieth century, many American educators pinned their hopes for a revitalized nation on the character education of "youth," especially adolescent boys. Although the emphasis on student morality was far from novel--nineteenth-century common and secondary schools operated as bastions of Protestant republican virtue--new perceptions of…

This article traces back to the time when virtually no educational research or policymaking takes integration seriously, when the courts regularly declare segregated districts unitary, when the rhetoric of race-blind social justice has been abandoned by the left and appropriated by the opponents of equality. This leads students' and other…

In the Netherlands, the first girl admitted to a qualifying secondary education and the first female university student were sisters, Frederika and Aletta Jacobs, after the father and Aletta had made successful requests. In each case, the admission brought an end to a long-standing male privilege. And in each case contemporaries conceived of these…