In this article Copeland's model of visualising the classification of children with learning disabilities is applied in examining the development of special education schools in the Netherlands during the interwar period. Central are three intertwined social practices: the teacher's professionalism (in pedagogic and practical concerns), the…

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…

The present article examines the development of a diagnostic and therapeutic technique named The Sandtray at the Erica Foundation, a privately-run child counselling service in Stockholm. Originally it was called The World, developed by the British paediatrician and child psychiatrist Margaret Lowenfeld. In the 1930s it was imported to Sweden,…

British child guidance was a form of psychiatric, preventive medicine for children and young people and centred, at least in principle, on specialist clinics led by psychiatrists. From small beginnings in the aftermath of the First World War, child guidance expanded steadily, in terms of both numbers of patients and numbers of clinics, and came to…

This study examines foster child case records to understand how intelligence testing was used by guidance counsellors and social workers to negotiate welfare resources with poor youths in the early twentieth century. Psychological testing justified racial hierarchy in a scientific language suited for a rational professional bureaucracy. Yet, it…

In this article, I compare two distinct uses of "Popular Education" that emerged in Tlaxcala in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. I examine archival and oral evidence to reconstruct the situated meanings and political rationales that led to the use of the term in each case, beyond their contrasting pedagogical content. In 1917, a…

In a significant 1925 essay, "Western Education in Moslem Lands", Paul Monroe addressed the emerging cultural and political forces faced by American educators in the Middle East. Monroe was widely recognised at the time as editor of the Cyclopedia of Education and director of the International Institute of Teachers College, Columbia…

This paper will examine the attitudes of progressive educators toward poverty in developing countries. The reformers who formed the New Education Fellowship (NEF) in 1921 will be the subjects. They expanded their thinking from concerns about student freedom to efforts to encourage social reform, and by 1946 they participated in the creation of…

In the second half of the eighteenth century, an enlightened reformist spirit spread among Hamburg's bourgeois upper classes. This was exemplified by the activities of the "Gesellschaft zur Beforderung der Kunste und nutzlichen Gewerbe" ("Society for the Promotion of the Arts and Useful Trades") founded in 1765 as well as by a…

Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a new method for the provision of popular education emerged in Europe. The Sardinian Kingdom represents a good example of this evolution: in 1729, Piedmont was the first state in Europe to launch a "modern" educational policy with the creation of a public school system. Education was…

Local administrations in the Republic of the United Netherlands determined in the seventeenth and eighteenth century the conditions of the local educational provisions. Several towns published separate regulations for educating poor children in separate schools. Others left the responsibility to local charity committees. The regulations are…

Prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, successive presidents and officials at the Board of Education made it clear that they believed there were three types of children in Britain--those who needed nursery schools to rescue them from degradation, those for whom a less expensive nursery class would do the job adequately and those who would…

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…

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…