This paper explores the implementation and enduring significance of the German language program in Milwaukee Public Schools between 1867 and 1918. Despite the German language program facing challenges, notably the Bennett Law of 1889—which sought to restrict foreign language instruction statewide—the program persisted, highlighting the tension between local identity and state mandates. This study argues that the creation of the German course initiated a process of consolidation and standardization in Milwaukee Public Schools, shifting decision-making to school administrators who sought to accommodate the largest cultural group in Milwaukee. This case study of the Milwaukee Public Schools’ German Language Program reveals how school policies prioritized a multilingual approach to Americanization. The paper is structured in three sections, examining the evolution of language policy, the political implications of the Bennett Law, and the post-Bennett landscape of language education, ultimately demonstrating the interplay between consolidation and cultural inclusivity.

Educational pathways in colonial and postcolonial spaces often range far beyond the classroom. Reconstructing histories of this wider terrain of education reveals long-running arguments over what types of new knowledge might be most useful for living well amid war and within fast-changing colonial and postcolonial states. These debates over the provision of useful knowledge—including military, mechanical, linguistic, and religious training—are a window into how people have discussed changing ideas of authority, class mobility, and the future. We trace a wider terrain of education in southern (now South) Sudan, where education histories have generally either focused on a handful of mission-founded formal schools or hagiographies of powerful military men with PhDs. Drawing on archival evidence and interviews gathered in South Sudan since 2019, we argue that histories of education in colonial and postcolonial Africa are crucial to understanding intellectual histories in everyday life.

Although Philadelphia’s nineteenth-century public school system was praised by some contemporaries for its efficient administration, the city’s sudden embrace of clinical discourse and “bottom-up” hygienic initiatives between 1896 and 1898, along with critical reports on poor sanitary conditions by the early 1910s, suggest underlying structural issues. This paper contributes to the material history of education by examining the organizational context of Philadelphia’s school construction efforts, focusing on overcrowding and ventilation problems. Drawing from statistical data, works on school architecture, and a sample of representative school buildings, I argue that the city’s legacy of early Lancasterian designs, inconsistent architectural standards, decentralized school construction, and conflicts between local and central authorities hindered compliance with sanitary standards, compromising the health of teachers and pupils. Philadelphia’s lag in sanitary provisions in comparison to other US cities underscores the material consequences of these conflicts, shedding light on the city’s late-1890s push for clinics and dispensaries.

This article examines the history of learning disabilities (LDs) on college campuses, from the introduction of the concept in the early 1960s to its spread throughout American higher education during the 1990s. At first, colleges offered relatively little assistance and urged students to compensate for their LDs by working harder and adopting recommended study strategies. After legal and institutional pressures compelled faculty members to provide accommodations for greater numbers of students, many professors worried about the legitimacy of the diagnosis and the possible threat to academic standards. While casting a somewhat sympathetic light on these concerns, the article concludes that many elements of this early set of accommodations were eventually regarded as pillars of competent instruction. This history illuminates the complex tension between institutional support and student responsibilities and the murky distinction between individual accommodations and universally-effective teaching.

This History of Education Society Presidential Address considers Blackfoot education and how psychologist Abraham Maslow attempted to make sense of it after his six-week stay at the Siksika reserve in 1938. Maslow encountered an educated, secure people at Siksika, who had a fully formed system of education grounded in reverence for children, stories, ceremonies, songs, language, humor, land, and connection, all of which had been tested over millennia. Though he might not have been able to interpret what he was seeing and hearing as fully as would a member of the Blackfoot community, what he experienced stuck with him, and can be read as the basis for the theories he presented as the hierarchy of needs and self-actualization. As Maslow learned, Blackfoot history is an education history, which Blackfoot Elders sought to document and keep for generations not yet born.

This article comparatively examines expertise and policy-making related to school maturity in postwar Czechoslovakia and Poland. Through an analysis of published sources and archival material, it traces the intensive development of pedagogical and psychological expertise about school maturity from the early 1960s onward and examines how that development influenced the policies introduced in both countries in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Using the concept of the expertise as a network as our analytical lens, we show that despite considerable differences in education systems and particular features of expertise in the two countries, pedagogical expertise affected policies in a very similar way through intensive networking, leading to the introduction of measures such as preparatory departments and compensatory classes in Czechoslovakia and early enrollment in Poland. We argue that educational policy-making in post-Stalinist Czechoslovakia and Poland was largely expert-driven. Nevertheless, there were limitations on the experts’ influence, as not all the proposed changes were introduced.

This paper reconsiders long-standing debates in Canada about the relationship between language, race, and culture. Federal policies focused on official bilingualism (1969) and multiculturalism (1971) animated local movements of parents, students, and other community members demanding greater linguistic and racial inclusion in schools. This paper examines two instances of these grassroots politics, namely activism on behalf of heritage-language education and Black cultural-heritage programs, in Toronto, Ontario, between 1970 and 1987. Our analysis reveals key instances in which temporary forms of solidarity emerged between heritage-language and Black activism, as well as contradictory trajectories in this activism that undermined what Roseann Liu and Savannah Shange have theorized as “thick solidarity.” In this paper, we argue that absences of thick solidarity ultimately weakened efforts by heritage-language and Black activists alike to reorganize schools in ways that were more linguistically and racially just.

This paper compares concerted efforts to unify early instructional practice in the US in the early twentieth century and in the twenty-first century. The first effort began with the founding of the National Council for Primary Education in 1915; the second began in 2005 with calls for pre-K-3 alignment. Analysis of relevant sources indicates that today’s unifiers are attempting to achieve three of the same goals that their predecessors pursued in 1915: increased child activity, teacher autonomy, and use of early instructional practices up through grade 3. During the early twentieth century, kindergarten served as both the model for the upward extension of activity-based early instructional practice into the early primary grades and the locus of efforts to defend against the downward extension of skill-based elementary practice from the primary to the lower levels. During the second round of unification in the twenty-first century, however, preschool has become the model for extending and the locus of defending early instructional methodology.

The Highlander Nursery School, run by the Highlander Folk School from 1938 to 1953, provided no-cost early care and learning to the white working-class children of Summerfield, Tennessee. While Highlander is best known as a democratic education and movement-building hub that builds adults’ capacity to shape labor and racial justice in their communities, it has also facilitated programs for young people, including a nursery school. The Highlander Nursery School functioned as a cooperative institution that relied on the material and conceptual support of local residents, serving as a depoliticized entry point for families who might otherwise have been antagonistic toward Highlander’s pro-union and pro-civil rights agenda. This article aims to understand how the complexity of Highlander’s political vision for grassroots leadership, cooperation, and radical social change was expressed in and through the nursery school, an institution that teachers, local children, and their families worked together to sustain.

From 1493 to 1507, Hernando de Talavera, the first archbishop of Granada after the Spanish Reconquista, ran a residential school for Morisco noble boys in his palace. This article argues that Talavera’s school set the foundation for the long history of residential schooling as a tool to transform or eradicate a conquered culture through the cultural assimilation of children. A champion of Christian humanism, Talavera thought that cultivating good manners (that is, adopting Spanish customs) was the main marker of a true Christian. Thus, his pedagogy aimed to educate everyone, particularly Morisco children, in what he considered the most reasonable and natural ways of living. By examining Talavera’s spiritual pedagogy, his humanist influences, and the educational experiences of Morisco boys at his palace, this paper lays the groundwork for a genealogical study of modern European colonial residential schooling for non-European children.

In 1946, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was formed to promote peace through education and cross-cultural understanding. In the postwar atomic age, American leaders saw UNESCO and education for world citizenship as critical to the prevention of future war, the promotion of a new pluralistic vision, and the development of a well-informed society. A hyper-local case study, this article follows the story of Milton S. Eisenhower, leading UNESCO delegate and president of Kansas State College, and the series of progressive reforms he pursued to promote democracy, citizenship, and global peacebuilding at a rural land-grant college in the center of the former “isolationist belt” of America. This article traces the impact of these curricular reforms, the UNESCO campus-community partnership they inspired, and the subsequent peacebuilding movement that agitated for humanitarian action, civic participation, and desegregation from 1947 to 1950.

This article describes the multifaceted origins and dynamics of pedagogic progressive educational ideas among Mormon educators in the Utah Territory during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We propose four principal avenues through which progressive educational ideas reached these Mormon educators. These include the exigencies of desert frontier living that predisposed early Utah Mormons to progressivism’s focus on practical education; the arrival of denominational schools sponsored by the New West Education Commission (NWEC), which sparked educative improvement within Mormon communities; the Pestalozzian teachings of Karl Maeser via the Brigham Young Academy’s Normal School; and the visits of eastern progressive educationalists through Benjamin Cluff’s leadership at the BYA Summer Institutes. We additionally situate nineteenth-century national perceptions of Mormon educational ideas within this more nuanced backdrop of the migration of progressive ideas to Utah. We describe unique dimensions of Mormon educational progressivism that might set it apart from educational progressivisms elsewhere, including tensions within Utah’s Mormon educative community.

It has long been recognized that legal documents are invaluable for understanding the growth of pre-university teaching across fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England; when surveyed as a whole, they allow the general spread of schooling to be mapped with precision. However, smaller, more scattered legal proceedings involving teachers can be no less suggestive. Late medieval and early modern masters submitted legal pleas on a range of issues, and found themselves accused of a striking array of crimes, including murder, assault, fraud, incompetence, theft, adultery, and even high treason. Such episodes have more than anecdotal value—they throw into relief many of the conditions in which teachers of the period operated. In particular, they provide clear insight into the economic realities of medieval and early modern teaching, showing the pressures, rivalries, and anxieties that overshadowed the lives of masters, and demonstrating that instruction was not staged in a social or political vacuum.

The article examines the challenges that urban teachers faced in unitary systems, where students of different ages and educational levels shared the same classroom and were taught by a single teacher. It aims to compare these challenges across several cities including Alicante, Badajoz, Cádiz, Canary Islands, Málaga, and Zaragoza to determine common issues within Spain. The study is based on sixteen technical reports from 1916 to 1926 and uses qualitative methods to analyze teachers’ narratives for deeper insights. Additionally, a literature review and quantitative analysis of Spanish statistical sources were conducted. Key findings highlight parental disinterest as a significant cause of school absenteeism. The article concludes by stressing the importance of understanding historical educational contexts in informing current educational policies and practices.