Within the field of history of education, there is a growing interest in the movement of influential actors and texts that have crossed national borders. One of the main driving forces for influence, knowledge, and innovation is comparison, a tool used within the governing of education in diverse ways and with different intensities, over time, to…

Searching for development paths and suitable educational policies, postcolonial governments often turned to the experiences of other countries and sought to adapt these to their own contexts. Research on such processes has largely neglected the resulting entanglements between postcolonial and European socialist countries, and between different…

Over half a century since the last wave of political decolonisation, the handling of "dark" colonial histories remains topical. Influenced by the postcolonial turn, this study aims to examine, from a novel historical and comparative perspective, evolving textbook representations of Belgian colonialism and its legacy in Belgian and…

This study examines how origami has been implemented, practised, and developed in the early childhood education of Japan over the past 140 years. Historically speaking, paper-folding has been part of Japanese symbolic art, craft culture, and religious ceremonial artefacts since paper and paper-folding techniques were first imported from China…

This essay explores the historiography of American and European education, considering how educational historians communicate powerful messages about the purposes and promises of schooling through their writing. I divide the historiography of American education into four interpretive traditions: traditionalism, radical revisionism, progressive…

Ways of talking about social histories tend to follow social realities as well as personal inclinations. The very terms we use reflect and refract particular histories. The authors of our sources foretold many concepts as they carved out the domains and marked the paths later historians were to follow in their attempt to understand the past. It is…

Although progressive education was an international phenomenon, historical interpretations of it may be affected on the national level by academic and institutional contingencies. An analysis of how US and English historians of education interpret progressive education reforms in their respective countries identified a strain of condescension…

Korea opened up to foreign intercourse in 1876, when the country concluded its first international treaty with Japan. Similar treaties with European and American nations followed during the 1880s. The period until 1910, when Korea was annexed to the Japanese Empire, saw manifold attempts to reform as well as resistance to these reforms. Against…

In this article we wish to propose a debate on postcolonialism and its role in the history of Latin American education. Our starting point is the acknowledgement of the reality that postcolonial historiographic perspectives have yet to be applied in studies of one of history's great empires, namely, the Spanish Empire. This is surprising for…

This article introduces the notion of the "educational franchise" of Australia's public universities established in the mid-nineteenth century. In his recently published study of the public university and social access in the United States, John Aubrey Douglass suggests that from the mid-nineteenth century a social contract was formed…

In the context of missionary endeavours of the early nineteenth century there were considerable similarities in the religious and education blueprints for providing the "blessings of civilisation" to the young native "heathen" child in various parts of the British Empire. The three case studies presented illustrate a relatively…

The monitorial system of education was the most promising device in the field of primary education at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Its astonishing spread across the five continents represents one of the earliest processes of internationalization in the field of elementary schooling, which has rarely been analysed from the point of view…

Developed by the German pedagogue Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), the Kindergarten offered a revolutionary educational program for young children. In the mid-nineteenth century, after several decades of limited success in the German states, Froebel's Kindergarten began to be transplanted to other countries, including the USA and England. The…

The Academy of Philadelphia (today known as the University of Pennsylvania), founded through Benjamin Franklin's influence in 1751, and the Dessau Philanthropine, founded by Johann Bernhard Basedow in 1774, were arguably the first non-denominational schools in the eighteenth century. Yet, the congenial educational ideas of their founders have…

This paper examines the grammar of schooling and educational innovations that were being promulgated transnationally in the 1920s and 1930s. First, the paper explores how some elements of the grammar of schooling such as age grading, year-long courses of study and annual employment contracts for teachers were mediated by local circumstances in…