In 1950 in France, Dr Max Fourestier introduced the concept of dividing the school day into two parts. In the morning, students followed activities that were intellectual and classroom-oriented, and in the afternoon, they had physical education classes. This programme was implemented in Gambetta Elementary School in Vanves, a city on the outskirts…

This article brings the Italian activist and thinker Antonio Gramsci's theory of organic intellectualism and the Canadian historian Ian McKay's theory of liberal state-formation to bear on the "Indian Question" -- or how best to yoke Indigenous children and young people to the modern Canadian state. From the mid-nineteenth to the…

This article reports on the opening up of a new, rich seam of interdisciplinary research that brings together historians of education with historians of art and architecture to examine the meaning and incidence of "The Decorated School". It examines the origins of the idea of art as educator in the nineteenth century and discusses how…

The New Social Studies movement was an effort by social scientists to reform US social studies/history curriculum at all levels during the 1960s and early 1970s. In the end, more than 50 different projects attempting to revitalise social studies were developed. Many of the projects focused on inquiry-based teaching practices and curriculum.…

Teachers' institutes for public elementary school teachers in Ontario began to be implemented in the middle of the nineteenth century as a result of the efforts of Egerton Ryerson Superintendent of Schools for Canada West as Ontario was then known. They were based on similar practices that Ryerson had observed on an educational tour in 1845 during…

In 1885, following a period of severe economic depression and social unrest in colonial Canada, state teachers in rural Perth County, Ontario met and formed the nucleus of what could clearly be described as a teachers' union. The idea spread quickly, and within six months the founding convention of a province-wide union was held in Toronto.…