The past few years have seen a vigorous resurgence of public and academic debate and controversy regarding the British Empire, its place within Britain's own history and the legacies of British colonial practices. In spite of this reinvigorated discussion of empire, education and schooling seem to have been an area largely overlooked within the…

Education played a vital role in the shifting nature of colonial administration and the reshaping of colonial relations in the nineteenth century. The activities that occurred within classrooms shaped the behaviour and identity of children towards an imperial norm while beyond the school walls the changing management structure tied various local…

By examining the widespread enthusiasm for education during the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-1945), this article sets out to contribute to historiography on so-called 'education fever' (kyoyungyol), which so far has largely concentrated on researching the period after 1945. In the 1920s and 1930s the term was used to describe a multifaceted…

The Christian Council was at the heart of promoting sex education in Ghana in the mid-twentieth century, through its own institutions and through schools. It was responding to perceived and real shifts in Ghanaian society, and the need to control sexuality, as the nation pushed for 'modernity', whilst some worried about the loss of 'tradition'.…

This article explores elite international education in the late twentieth century through the case of the Leysin American School (LAS), an international boarding school in Switzerland. From LAS's founding in 1961 to its re-branding in 2011, broader geopolitical and economic frameworks shifted from a period dominated by the Cold War to one informed…

German colonialism has long been treated as a sort of footnote in the epoch of the Empire due to its relatively short time span. The focus was mostly on the reconstruction of a story of 'white' men -- as the story of pioneers, 'discoverers', missionaries or traders. But how were children included in the colonial project? This article deals with…

By the time political independence was achieved in the 1920s in Ireland, its national education system over the previous century had been underpinned by imperial ideology and values. In the early 1920s, curriculum planning was influenced by the post-revolutionary and post-war context and, unsurprisingly, placed an emphasis on building nationhood…

This article explores the establishment of Queen Elizabeth School (QES), the first government secondary school for girls in Northern Nigeria in 1956, and commemorations in 1961, 1981 and 2016. Connecting past and present, several invented traditions were deployed to socialise students, secure QES's reputation and status, and foster national unity…

This article analyses two secondary school competitions -- the International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) and the International Chemistry Olympiad (IChO) -- as platforms for early elite fostering in science between the years 1967 and 1984. It argues that the two arrangements can be understood as one of many Cold War arenas of the time period. The…

From their inception in New Zealand in 1816, until the end of the century in some cases, most mission schools in the colony maintained instruction solely in the Maori language. However, from the 1840s, successive colonial governments promoted a secular schooling system in which English would be the language in which students were taught,…

In 2016, Britain voted to leave the European Union: over-65s were more than twice as likely to vote for Brexit as under-25s, amidst campaign rhetoric steeped in colonial nostalgia. This article explores how this generation was taught in many English state schools to imagine Britain's place in the world during a period of rapid decolonisation from…

Contemporary Australian curricula require teachers to promote reconciliation through the teaching of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories, cultures and languages. Engaging with First Nations knowledges and histories in education comes with a very complex and historically layered legacy. This paper examines the role of education in the…

This article explores the intersection of aspects of imperialism and internationalism in discussion of cinematography at the League of Nations, at the International Council of Women (ICW), and as they played out in the imperial, national and local flows around educational cinematography in the work of Suzanne Karpelès at the Institute of Buddhist…

This study aimed to analyse the text and context of history textbooks that established Dutch colonialism as a determinant factor in the New Order era and later. Two research questions were postulated: (1) Why was the discourse of colonisation maintained in textbooks after the proclamation of independence in 1945? (2) How was the colonial discourse…

This paper examines how two Britons, working in Western Australia and Natal, respectively, engaged with ideas about the civilisation and education of Indigenous people. It is argued that concepts of civilisation were debated by missionaries, researchers and members of the public. Using the correspondence, publications and private journals of two…