In the past two decades, the interdisciplinary push to denaturalise the concept of society has historicised the very object of social history. In this paper, I propose a way of studying the social history of education that eludes the presupposition of the social as a transcendental or pre-discursive object. My central claim is that it is possible…

Delivered as one of the keynote addresses at the International Standing Committee on the History of Education (ISCHE) Conference held in Porto in July 2019, this paper offers an example of a hitherto overlooked embodied space and place in the history of education. Taking the simple pocket found in children's clothing as a significant, if hidden,…

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has risen to prominence as one of the most influential international organisations in the world, in large part due to its country reviews and comprehensive comparative testing portfolio. This article starts from two proposition: (1) that fields of tension and antagonisms lie beyond…

This article -- the second part of a two-part contribution -- offers a number of suggested directions for the historiography of adult education in Britain. It identifies opportunities to address longstanding areas of neglect that have been overshadowed by a focus on the "Great Tradition" of adult education. Although a key theme of recent…

At the heart of the nineteenth-century educational soundscape lies a paradox. Whilst "modern" classrooms generally strived for orderly silence, the goal of its educational practices was the production of competent "citizens". Middle-class boys in particular were expected to acquire a voice fit for business, the professions, or…

The present article investigates what consequences for educational policy and/or educational administration were drawn from the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. A popular diagnosis in political science is that political decision-makers were pushed into a "reactive" role. In the context of a general "planning euphoria", and an…

The outbreak of the First World War had a powerful impact on German schools. Undoubtedly, schools were institutions of socialisation that did offer support to the war. Indeed, research has shown that a specific "war pedagogy" made an aggressive propaganda possible in the classroom. This research usually emphasises the enthusiasm for war…

Debates in science seem to depend on referential language-games, but in other senses they do not. This article addresses non-representational theory. It is a branch of newer approaches to cultural geography that strive to get a handle on spatial relationships not by representing them, but rather by presenting them. In this case, present connotes…

Early American historians provided the public and policy-makers with information about US history that provided both entertainment and policy suggestions. As American historians became more professionalised in the early twentieth century, they concentrated more on their own scholarly concerns and less on policy-relevant writings. In recent…

In the past few years, worries about decreasing jobs or even the possible disappearance of the history of education as a field of study have frequently surfaced. Hence, the question arises as to whether the history of education, as a field of study, has a future--or is it, as many authors have remarked, in danger? This article starts from the idea…

With this article we intend to fill a large gap that exists in the field of educational research--examining the history of teaching. We chose a critical historical moment that initiated the great labour transformation in the exercise of the teaching profession. In this context, we investigated the pedagogical benefits introduced by the Portuguese…

ISCHE 33 was convened in San Luis Potosi to re-examine a relationship--that between society, education and the state--that had been largely taken for granted in official histories of education of modern nations. This theme was inspired by the bicentenary celebrations of the relatively early nineteenth-century movements (from 1804 to 1824) that…