This History of Education Society Presidential Address primarily utilizes evocative autoethnography and narrative inquiry to convey its main points. It is written in the storytelling tradition of the African American past and analyzes the lives of three generations of Black Mississippians as they navigated life in Jim Crow Mississippi. It highlights the impact and legacy the cotton economy had on the life opportunities of these Black Mississippians, and how the cumulative stories they shared within the family directly shaped the educational pursuits and outcomes of a present-day descendant.

India, a country with more than 1.3 billion people living in an area of 1,269,219 square miles has only three teaching positions dedicated to the history of education. This denotes little importance given to the discipline. India produced no historian of education during the first twenty-six years after attaining independence. Bhagaban Prasad Majumdar, the first historian of education in independent India, published his First Fruit of English Education in 1973, through a local publisher that no longer exists. The book analyzed the answers written in annual examinations during the first half of the nineteenth century to evaluate the growth of modern education in India. It is indispensable for anyone seeking to understand curriculum history in India, particularly a teacher education student. However, the book is seldom quoted and difficult to find. In all of Delhi, only one library holds a single copy. This is representative of the fate that has befallen even scholars who have worked in the field at the international level and published books and papers in recognized journals. This year, India is celebrating seventy-five years of independence, and so far, it has produced six sets of major historical works and five micro studies that are limited in scope, again, are seldom quoted and recognized in the public debates on education in India.

This paper examines the first mandatory Black history curriculum in a US public school system, implemented in Chicago Public Schools between 1942 and 1945. Researched and designed by Madeline Morgan, the curriculum supplemented existing social studies lesson plans with Black people's contributions to US society. How did she win approval for the curriculum in this highly segregated and inequitable city? The commitment of Morgan and her network of Black women educators to “intellectual emancipation” during the 1940s aligned with white schoolteachers and administrators’ interest in promoting interracial tolerance in the US during World War II.

This article summarizes and assesses federal K-12 compensatory education policies during the past six decades. It focuses on the centerpiece of that effort, Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Related programs such as America 2000, Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, and Every Student Succeeds Act are discussed. It analyzes the increasing use of ambitious federal education goals since the 1990s as well as greater reliance on high-stakes testing. It also considers the role of presidents as well as governors in this process.

Although chiefly framed in the context of domestic education policy, debates about the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) echoed international education policy debates and the workings of global education governance. As this article demonstrates, both domestic and international efforts were shaped by three key features: tension between centralized goals and historically localized practices and authorities; links between education policy goals and a set of rhetorical arguments centered on human capital; and competitive comparisons among education systems that mixed market rhetoric with prestige dynamics. These common features can be attributed to the development of a “soft governance” layer, in which multilateral surveillance plays a major part. In the US, such development began before NCLB, accelerated during the NCLB era, and remained after NCLB was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015.

Starting in the late nineteenth century, the teaching profession became increasingly feminized. This article examines the results of this process, exploring the working and living conditions of rural female primary school teachers with a focus on the experiences of loneliness, harassment, and violence that they suffered in early twentieth-century Sweden. By investigating the public debate on these issues 1900–1940, we found that two main threats to the well-being of female teachers were identified: isolation and the threat of male violence. Male politicians as well as female authors and teachers acknowledged that female teachers faced loneliness, anxiety, and possible threats from violent men. The consequences of these threats were both emotional and practical, but the debate focused to a large extent on practical solutions such as providing the teachers with telephones, guard dogs, or weapons.

This article explores the conflict between US public and private higher educational institutions by tracing the long struggle for a public university in Boston between 1890 and 1980. This history reveals how the competitive relationship between public and private institutions was central to the formation of each sector, while also complicating a clear dichotomy between the two. Educational innovations such as state scholarships, teacher-training initiatives, university extension courses, and junior colleges are also recast in this story as strategies to limit, rather than expand, the public sector. Finally, this history should prompt a reinterpretation of the current neoliberal moment. Rather than view contemporary budget cuts and public-private partnerships as novel historical departures of the late twentieth century, they appear in this Massachusetts story as a return to a political landscape long hostile to public higher education.

The long history of Montessori education in India dates to 1915, and it was expanded through Maria and Mario Montessori's work in India between 1939 to 1946 and 1947 to 1949. The article characterizes a century of Montessori education in India as a series of adapted, competing, and contested framings with key disputes over Montessori education's intended purpose, audience, and how much it could be adapted. First, from 1915 to 1939, Montessori education was connected to the Indian independence movement as nation-building education, but it was eclipsed by a parallel rise of elite, private Montessori schools, a framing reinforced by Maria Montessori's insistence on fidelity to her method. Starting in the 1950s, other Indian educators adapted Montessori for poor children, an emphasis that continues today with government and foundation-funded schools. Finally, in the last thirty years, India's new middle class has driven demand for early childhood education, leading to branded Montessori franchises, some bearing little resemblance to Montessori's original pedagogy.

Scholars have demonstrated that a range of institutions, organizations, and “social movement schools” aimed to advance the civil rights movement through education. What remains unclear is how those institutions balanced conversation, direct instruction, role-play, and other pedagogical methods. This article focuses on the Highlander Folk School, a radical, racially integrated institution located in the hills of Tennessee. Drawing upon audio tapes of civil rights workshops at Highlander, I argue that the folk school's workshops blended a variety of pedagogical styles in a way that previous scholarship has failed to acknowledge, and that close attention to Highlander's varied pedagogies can help us rethink the relationship between education and the civil rights movement.

Syed Ross Masood (1889-1937), grandson of the Muslim modernist Syed Ahmad Khan and former principal of Osmania University, traveled in 1922 from India to Japan as Director of Public Instruction for Hyderabad to assess Japan's educational system. In Japan and Its Educational System, a report published in 1923, Masood concluded that education had been key to Japan's rapid modernization and recommended that Hyderabad follow the country's model of modernization and educational reform: transmit Western knowledge through widespread vernacular education, and focus on the imperial tradition, freedom from foreign control, and patriotic nationalism. Masood sought to use mass vernacular education to create in Hyderabad a nationalist subject, loyal to the ruling Muslim dynasty, who absorbed modern scientific knowledge with its Western epistemic foundations but who remained untainted by Western norms. This study contextualizes and historicizes Masood's attempt to create in Hyderabad a new nationalist subject, focusing on his 1923 report about Japan.

Historical policy stories that situate teachers as the root cause of problems in public schools have long accompanied educational reforms, including No Child Left Behind. This article portrays the history of teacher blame as a defining component of the grammar of American educational reform. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformers identified teacher quality—a later trademark of NCLB—as a panacea for school improvement, but it remained an amorphous idea bound up in gendered and racialized assumptions. The historical results were a swirl of policies that increased standardization across the schools. This article concludes that teacher blame was a critical driver for federal intervention in local public education, and that the roots of that intervention extend far deeper than historians have allowed.

Situating the endeavors of Asa Shinn Mercer and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento within the broader settler colonial histories of the US and Argentina, this study provides two cases in which men representing prominent settler groups in the Americas attempted to regulate via internal educational colonialism populations they considered divergent from the nations’ ideals. Both projects recruited women to serve as civilizing agents who would help align disparate groups with the desired standards of citizenship. The female participants, however, did not blindly conform to their leaders’ expectations of behavior, instead asserting their own will at key points during the projects’ execution. Examining the groups’ dynamics in tandem provides new examples of the gendered processes at play within the settler colonialist structures of two nineteenth-century American countries.

In the mid to late nineteenth century, many missionary women from Western countries arrived in Japan to engage in educational work. They made a significant impact not only on the establishment of Christian kindergartens and kindergarten teacher training schools but also on the dissemination of Friedrich Froebel's theory of kindergarten education across Japan. This paper considers the role of religion in the missionary women's implementation of Froebel's theory to understand how Christian faith and values have influenced pedagogy and practice at their training schools, with a particular focus on the case of prominent American missionary and Froebelian Annie L. Howe (1852-1943) and her Glory Kindergarten teacher training school in Japan. By highlighting the curriculum and day-to-day training experiences at Howe's Froebelian kindergarten teacher training school, this study contributes to the body of knowledge about how teaching, learning, curriculum, and pedagogic discourse were transformed not just by the decisions of the Froebelians but also by Howe's Christian faith and values.

Since the late nineteenth century, teachers have come together to found associations and unions in Europe and beyond. Drawing on oral histories, primary and secondary documents, and media reports, this paper delves into this rich historical background, leading to the founding of Education International in 1993. In particular it explores the relationships and tensions within and between these predecessor organizations, as well as the ways in which they interacted with the larger political forces of their times. Education International is now a significant organization, representing teachers and related workers situated across 178 countries. This paper attempts to provide a critical historical background for the development of this institution.

Andrew Monroe [pseud.] (b. 1894) was a Colorado street kid whose acts of truancy and theft landed him before the state's early juvenile courts, and his youth was marked by attempts at escape from reform school. His childhood and youth provide insights into the mechanics of how systems of juvenile corrections operated in the early twentieth century. To enforce new truancy laws, Progressive Era child-savers relied on report cards for the surveillance of probationers, categorizing children like Andrew as “stubborn,” “unyielding,” and “disobedient.” Ultimately, Andrew's refusal to comply with these new forms of institutional control serves as a case study for the challenges that children faced in escaping an apparatus that reduced them to the label of “delinquent.”

By the end of the nineteenth century, social hygiene was a topic of great importance for states experiencing fears of national degeneration. The health of children was of particular concern, as it was thought to reflect the future health of the nation. Although this prompted nation-states like France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States to develop intricate theories about the prevention and treatment of childhood illnesses, it was imperial Russia that became an unacknowledged trailblazer in the institutionalization and implementation of school hygiene measures. As this article will show, autocratic Russia's institutions and ideology allowed the tsarist state to surpass its Western neighbors in the drawing up and application of school hygiene measures.