This paper focuses on "Pictures for Schools," an art patronage scheme established in postwar Britain by the artist and educationalist Nan Youngman (1906-1995) to sell affordable works of art to educational establishments. Highlighting the use of works of art as a pedagogical tool, "Pictures for Schools" is contextualised within…

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…

This article focuses on the work of three British Women Education Officers (WEOs) in Nigeria as the colony was preparing for independence. Well-qualified and progressive women teachers, Kathleen Player, Evelyn Clark (née Hyde), and Mary Hargrave (née Robinson), were appointed as WEOs in 1945, 1949, and 1950 respectively. I argue that the three…

This article aims to present the transformations as well as the decline of the Froebelian occupation of paper folding that took place in Great Britain between 1851 and the 1920s. Froebel's original intention was to transmit implicit mathematical knowledge to be learnt by means of folding several shapes. In contrast to his account of paper folding,…

As the British expanded their dominions in India, political and administrative needs made it imperative for them to acquire more information about their subjects. Hence, systematic and meticulous surveys began to be commissioned by the East India Company as it assumed charge of educating the natives. These surveys were an integral part of what…

This paper examines how politics have shaped Turkish Cypriot educational institutions and school buildings in Cyprus, focusing on the British colonial period (1878-1960). Unlike other British colonies, Cyprus enjoyed considerable autonomy on educational matters in the early decades of British occupation. During this period education, which was…

This paper focuses on the reading and educational practices of common soldiers during the First World War. It argues that the question of how war libraries were imagined and constructed by civilians needs to be framed in the larger context of pre-war Edwardian debates surrounding the "value of books" in society. Indeed, it was within…

Applying the critical lenses of feminism, autographical theory and literary analysis, this essay performs a triple reading of Vera Brittain's multi-genre writings about gender, war,and university education. Focusing specifically on "The Dark Tide" (1923), "Testament of Youth" (1933) and "The Women of Oxford" (1960),…

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…

In the late 1930s the Spanish Civil War captured the international imagination to an extraordinary degree. As in other countries British men and women were moved to intervene directly and the memory of the war, and of British participation in it, has held an enduring appeal in the UK. The Civil War was also notable for its use of the visual as a…

This article presents a collection of work that grew out of an international symposium sponsored by the History of Education Society UK and held in Hamburg in 2007. The symposium aimed to contribute to understandings of different approaches to researching the extent to which education has contributed historically to social change in respect of…

In recent years geographical concepts and the geography lexicon have been used in different disciplines to explore the diffusion and circulation of ideas and it is increasingly commonplace for academics to speak of a "geography of knowledge". Little systematic work has been undertaken by historians of education using spatialised…

This article draws a comparison between the Portuguese in relation to British and French discourses on overseas educational policies at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century until the 1930s. It focuses on three main colonial educational dynamics: school expansion (comparing the public and private sectors); State-Church relations…