The Occupation of Japan (1945-1952) sought to democratize the nation's education system; pupil guidance was expected to play a key part of this process. American reformers promoted new guidance practices (e.g., the comprehensive collection of students' personal data, guidance interventions based on the case-study method, an expanded homeroom…

This article provides a historiographical survey of significant African American historians researching, writing, and interpreting Black people's education history. At the heart of this article are the following questions: Who were the African American historians of education who produced this work? What has been the significant scholarship of…

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…

In the late 1970s Iranian student activists in the United States worked to educate the American public on the history of the US-Iranian relationship and the long-term consequences in Iran of the 1953 CIA-sponsored coup that placed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on the Iranian throne. The students directly challenged local and state governments to respect…

For over forty years, presidents of the Summer School Association of Queen's University wrote annually to teachers across Canada, encouraging them to attend summer courses for credit toward a bachelor of arts. In the 1920s, presidents' messages associated attendance with societal progress and the professionalization of teaching. In the 1930s, such…

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…

How can we better situate resource inequities between schools in the longer history of racial oppression and discrimination in the United States? This article provides both a historiographical panorama of the field on a range of topics related to school finance and a roadmap of archival and research paths. It seeks to sketch out the contours of a…

When the South Carolina legislature created the anti-NAACP oath in 1956, teachers across the state lost their positions. But it was the dismissal of twenty-one teachers at the Elloree Training School that captured the attention of the NAACP and Black media outlets. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, South Carolina's Black and…

This article examines the nature of school days and school years in later medieval Western Europe and considers the societal functions of the temporal cultures that emerged. The forms of the school day and year in elementary and grammar schools--alongside school-and youth-centered festivals--were replete with meaning and possessed utility beyond…

This glimpse into sex education in the Los Angeles region illustrates the eugenic ideas about racially "fit" reproduction that emerged in family life curricula during the Second World War. Ideas about eugenic reproduction in public schools responded to broader cultural fears about increasing divorce rates, criminality, immigration, and…

Schooling in the United States has never been a public good, nor has "the public good" been its primary goal. Since its origins in the early nineteenth century, schooling has been a "white" good, designed to promote white advantage. Three mechanisms, among many, have been key to this process: the relationship of schooling to…

This essay provides a holistic review of what girls and young women learned, and the settings in which they learned, in the Middle Ages in England between the Norman Conquest (1066) and the Dissolution of the Monasteries (late 1530s). Education of girls was carried out in households, elementary schools, and nunneries, as well as through employment…

This article traces the transnational circulation of socialist reforms in the field of sex education through the work of Monika Krause, a citizen of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) who migrated to Cuba and became the "Cuban Queen of Condoms." For Krause, the overarching goal of sex education was to "teach tenderness" to…

In this essay, we explore the concept of path dependence through the example of the long-standing issue of racialized exclusionary school discipline. We argue that historians of education can reduce policy makers' tendency to continue down existing policy paths (especially unhelpful ones), a phenomenon known as "path dependence." We use…

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…