This article aims to offer another reading of the Portuguese civilising process in Africa on the basis of an analysis of a set of alternative sources and to explore the role of other educational configurations, beyond those of the public school and the religious missionary school, such as the civilising missions. With the creation of the Lay…

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi promised his Method as a means of education for all that was easily manageable by mothers at home for early childhood, leading eventually to a wholesome person characterised by morality. In order to develop this Method, Pestalozzi published "Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder lehrt" (How Gertrud Teaches her Children) in…

Arguments for popular education in the twentieth century were articulated through a variety of media including publications, exhibitions and the press. Such arguments were also often directly linked to ideas about change and social justice. This article addresses both of these elements--the media and social justice. In so doing it makes a…

The Educational Missions in the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1936) had the purpose of making available, "especially to those living in rural areas, the feeling of progress and the means to participate in it, as well as in its moral stimuli and in the examples of universal progress, so that all the peoples of Spain, even those in remote areas…

Despite the rhetoric of failure inherent in the long-lasting debates over school music instruction in Russia, the practice of school singing teaching in Russian schools, especially those serving peasants and the urban lower classes, satisfied to a large degree the needs of the community. However, the limited role for school music and singing…

This article takes as its starting point a strike among African trainee literacy workers in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1952. While the existing literature tends to concentrate on the tensions and contradictions in British colonial education policy, this article uses the strike to investigate how these agendas were…

One of the early forms of intercultural education was the upbringing of children by foreign governesses, who appeared on the European labour market during the seventeenth century. In Germany families of the gentry and the wealthy middle-classes began, since the eighteenth century, to copy the upbringing of princely children. They too wanted their…

This paper illustrates the factors and features of the revival of paid care and domestic work in Italy. While Italy is experiencing a boom in the recourse to carers for the elderly, there is not a corresponding expansion in paid private childcare, in spite of growing female employment and limited public services for children. One of the reasons…

This article is concerned with the history of the neurological disorder that preceded ADHD: "neurasthenia" or nervousness, conceived of as a functional disease of the nervous system. Around 1900 it appeared on the scene of children's disorders and it disappeared at the time of the pharmacological turn in psychiatry by the late 1960s. In…

Educational research was established in the early decades of the twentieth century in many parts of Europe. The early years were the crucial years as they established dominant forms of inquiry, pioneer sites, and related artefacts, the tools and texts. This paper focuses on the early growth of research culture in education in Scotland, its…

This paper analyses the science of education that was formed in Ontario between the years 1910 and 1934. It is substantiated through the use of archival material such as curriculum documents, statutes, annual reports, the published proceedings of the Ontario Educational Association (OEA) and a close reading of the "Science of Education"…

After independence, the new Latin American polities adopted republican systems of government. This crucial decision stressed the importance of vast projects of popular education for the shaping of the virtuous citizenry to come, a clearly different agent from the old colonial society. As a means of creating new citizens and, at the same time,…

This article explores some of the specificities, transformations and continuities in the role of the state in education in Mexico (New Spain) over a long period of time (1788-1848) before and after independence, by focusing on the ritual of public examinations in elementary schools. In addition to a review of the laws and regulations that led to a…

This article compares the methods and means employed by the state to enforce the education of (semi-)autonomous indigenous groups in southern Chile and northwestern Mexico (Sonora), border regions in the Latin American periphery, covering the transition from colonial times to the consolidation of independent republics until the middle of the…

Latin American independence from Spain and Portugal in the first decades of the nineteenth century was a process of global relevance. A considerable number of new polities emerged that had to deal with radically new political situations. Particularly in the case of the former Spanish colonies, a general rejection of the colonial past determined…