In this article we attempt to explain how Spanish schoolteachers built their knowledge around Progressive Education and just how they assimilated these new teaching practices, a process we conceptualise as "appropriating the New". Our source consists of the 287 files presented by state schoolteachers from all of Spain as part of their…

This article explores how the sorting and separating of pupils into entangled categories of social/cultural disadvantage and disability in the 1960s through the 1980s created populations of concern. Even though the United States and Germany are typically contrasted in their approaches to inclusive education, a new scientisation of the…

This article explores the tensions between medical and pedagogical professionals involved with the classification and selection of pupils for the special day-schools for "feebleminded" children that were established from 1900 in the Netherlands to promote compulsory mass schooling's efficiency. These are set against the increasing…

This article explores a specific physical rehabilitation in French schooling after the Second World War. To this end, it analyses how, in concepts and as the result of data-derived information, pupils considered as "weak" physically speaking were taken care of by the school and especially how the actors of the physical education (PE)…

This article explores the role of psychiatry in the sorting of schoolchildren in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden from 1920 to 1950. Whereas the role and rise of educational psychology and IQ-testing in the differentiation processes in schooling have been examined through earlier research, the role of psychiatry in the interprofessional collaboration…

This essay attempts to show how the Social Darwinist thinking of white racial superiority, and so, ultimately, white supremacy, came to be institutionalised in law in South Africa. It looks specifically at the making and institutionalisation of the School Board Act (SBA) of 1905 of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope. It argues that the SBA…

At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War the republican authorities started organising what came to be known as "children's colonies". These children's colonies became both home and school for all the children who were evacuated from Madrid. The purpose of this article is to study in depth the transformation of many of these children's…

Educational concepts, such as enrolment, attendance, passing or failing students, school retardation, and school desertion, which made it possible to describe the course of children through the school system, went through a gradual process, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century and throughout the first decades of the twentieth. In…

The spectacular growth and equally spectacular decline of the eighteenth-century charity school movement prompts this examination of the contribution made by the movement to nineteenth-century schooling--particularly superior or secondary schooling. Educational historians have argued that the movement was a failure. This paper argues that only in…

In this article, the authors examine policies and interventions concerning special children in the United States and Europe from 1900 to 1960. They focus on concerns about, and interventions on, children defined as having "special needs". They explore interventions, both in the form of words and practices, and examine their effects on…

Although historians of psychological and educational sciences have not completely neglected early research in the field of morality testing, European contributions to the measurement of ethical judgement and moral feeling have not received much historical attention. In this paper, two principal, experimental paradigms that emerged in early…

In the wake of developments in France and the United States where early psychiatrists such as Pinel, Esquirol, Belhomme and Seguin advocated "moral treatment" of the insane and classified"idiots" and "imbeciles" as incurable though educable, the Revd C. E. Van Koetsveld initiated his "School for Idiots" in…