This article examines the Japanese historical concept of nature in early childhood education and care (ECEC). Through modernisation, Japan was infused with Anglo-European philosophy. However, Japan's pre-modern concept of nature differed from that of the West or modern Japan and latently affected the Japanese modern educational system. The concept…

Martinus Jan Langeveld (1905-1989) was a key figure in Dutch academic educational studies after the Second World War. This article investigates the origins and sources of Langeveld's theory by examining his prior publications and the main references in conjunction with the intellectual movements of his time. This research shows, first, that…

As the ideological pillar of modern Japan's imperial system, the Imperial Rescript on Education was profoundly imprinted on Japan's modern education. But, in fact, multiple alternative proposals for developing modern education were put forth in the mid-Meiji period. One such proposal was the ethics ("rinri") education promoted by the…

Brian Simon (1915-2002), a Marxist historian and educationist in Britain, was a leading pioneer in the comprehensive education movement. Although Simon's great contribution to this movement has been recognised by historians, the development of Simon's ideas and his actions in this movement have hardly been examined in great depth by previous…

This article concerns the educational philosophy of S. Margery Fry (1874-1958) and its impact upon the design, organisation and functions of university residences for women in the twentieth century. According to Carol Dyhouse, Fry, the only woman on the University Grants Committee from 1919 to 1947, 'exerted considerable influence over the shape…

This paper argues that Aboriginal children's engagement with education in the central Australian region of the Northern Territory in the mid-twentieth century can be understood as strategic engagements with formal western education systems and assimilation policies. It addresses a methodological problem stemming from a project that focuses on the…

Rousseau is among the most influential and important public moralists of the eighteenth century. His popular treatise on education, Emile, argues that parents should ideally rear their own children. It is small wonder, therefore, that his decision to place his own children in a foundling hospital has exposed Rousseau to the charge of hypocrisy and…

Philipp Abraham Kohnstamm (1875-1951) was one of the founders of Dutch educational science and a key figure in the New Education movement in the Netherlands. This article has three aims: first, to depict Kohnstamm as an insightful example in the process of sharing and adopting ideas around New Education and the implementation of these ideas in the…

This article has as its focus the life and thinking of the practitioner and theorist Norman MacMunn (1877-1925), whose experimental work in a number of schools outlined a new conception of freedom and one that drew initially upon the thinking and practice of Maria Montessori. It explores how MacMunn used these new psychological ideas to develop…

Examining developments in the history of education in Africa as a whole raises far-reaching philosophical, anthropological and historical questions about what Africa is and whether such a history is even possible "as such." The course of that history and its tributaries wend around social theories; its dominant issues, tensions and gaps…

Reading methods are valuable cultural and educational objects. They guide students into the world of the written word and, since the end of the nineteenth century, they have associated letters, sounds and words with illustrations. In French schools, in the reading methods published between 1880 and 1960, the word 'boxing' was often associated with…

Drawing from the Sheldon and Manktelow collections at SUNY Oswego's Penfield Library, along with sociological criteria for a profession -- graduate-level training, autonomy, peer evaluation and responsibility to the public -- this article reassesses Oswego State Normal School's impact on nineteenth-century teacher education. Descriptions of Oswego…

The Portuguese policies of colonisation and Christianisation were closely linked. In 1549, the Portuguese monarchy adopted Catholicism as the official religion of the colonial administration and requested that the Society of Jesus establish the Catholic faith among the indigenous people in Brazil. The Jesuits established catechesis, founded the…

This article offers the first modern explication of the educational writings of Charles Hoole (1610-1667), arguing that his writings offer significant insight into the educational aims and methods of school instructors in seventeenth-century England. From attending to the needs of slow learners, to promoting learning games, to emphasising that…

Paul Natorp is better known as a key figure of Neo-Kantian epistemology than as a great educationist. This paper discusses the affinity for Natorp's theory of education in Japan in the first decades of the twentieth century. It presents an overview of Natorp's educational way of thinking and analyses the interest of Japanese educationists in the…