In the mid to late nineteenth century, many missionary women from Western countries arrived in Japan to engage in educational work. They made a significant impact not only on the establishment of Christian kindergartens and kindergarten teacher training schools but also on the dissemination of Friedrich Froebel's theory of kindergarten education…

Syed Ross Masood (1889-1937), grandson of the Muslim modernist Syed Ahmad Khan and former principal of Osmania University, traveled in 1922 from India to Japan as Director of Public Instruction for Hyderabad to assess Japan's educational system. In Japan and Its Educational System, a report published in 1923, Masood concluded that education had…

Historical policy stories that situate teachers as the root cause of problems in public schools have long accompanied educational reforms, including No Child Left Behind. This article portrays the history of teacher blame as a defining component of the grammar of American educational reform. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformers identified…

As colleges and universities respond to the COVID-19 outbreak, many in the media call it "unprecedented." This is not the first time that institutions of higher education have had to respond to an epidemic, however. A historical review of college and university reactions to illnesses such as yellow fever and the 1918 influenza pandemic…

This article considers issues of race and ethnic identity experienced by immigrants and students who came to the United States from Asia. For Asian Americans, the meaning of race and ethnicity underwent significant transformations from the nineteenth through the twentieth century as perceptions of their cultural values and traits shifted in the…

Chicago's magnet schools were one of the nation's earliest experiments in choice-driven school desegregation, originating among civil rights advocates and academic education experts in the 1960s and appearing at specific sites in Chicago's urban landscape during the 1970s. The specific concerns that motivated the creation of magnet schools during…

Progressive education swept across Canada in the early to mid-twentieth century, restructuring schools, introducing new courses, and urging teachers to reorient the classroom to the interests and needs of the learner. The women religious who taught in Vancouver's Catholic schools negotiated the revised public school curriculum, determined to…

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…

After the First World War, the League of Nations, through its International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, attempted to reshape the teaching of history in its member states. The League's supporters realized that its long-term success depended in part on supportive public opinion and that this, in turn, had implications for education. Aware…

From the early 1960s through the early 1970s, a new idea drew the interest of local leaders and national networks of educators seeking to further desegregation but concerned about how to do so within the bounds of white resistance. Huge single- or multischool campuses, called education parks, would draw students from broad geographical areas and…

Rather than banking enormous gifts, Harvard University built its wealth by adhering to a coherent strategy that gradually became the common sense--the prevailing ideology--of how to build and maintain the wealth of private universities. President Charles W. Eliot formulated this "free money" strategy over the course of his administration from 1869…

This article features Ruth Wright Hayre, Philadelphia's first black high school teacher and principal whose work at William Penn High School for Girls became a model for counseling and motivation programs at other majority-black high schools in Philadelphia, expanding educational and career opportunities for thousands of "able" students.…

Historians such as Seth Koven and Carolyn Steedman have shown how visual and literary depictions of children helped move late-nineteenth-century middle- and upper-class audiences to join in child-saving philanthropy aimed at the deserving poor. This essay focuses on an analysis of the promotional literature of the free kindergartens. Starting from…

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…

In this article, the author presents the memoir of Angelo Patri, a very important and well-known educational figure during the first of the last century in his educational career. In 1917 Patri published Schoolmaster of the Great City, which gives readers vivid impressions of his early life in Italy and New York, his family and community, his…