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.

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.

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.

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.

This article examines the complex drivers of change in language education that have resulted in Australia having the highest number of students learning Italian in the world. An analysis of academic and non-academic literature, policy documents, and quantitative data helps trace the trajectory of the Italian language in the Australian education system, from the 1960s to the 1990s, illustrating the interaction of different variables that facilitated the shift in Italian's status from a largely immigrant language to one of the most widely studied languages in Australia. This research documents the factors behind the successful mainstreaming of Italian into schools, which, in addition to the active support it received from the Italian community and the Italian government, also included, notably, the ability of different Australian governments to address societal transformation and to respond to the emerging practical challenges in scaling up new language education initiatives in a detailed and comprehensive manner.