The article aims at discussing the History of Education in Greece as a field of knowledge. It focuses on achievements, shortfalls, and challenges that affected pathways and critical junctures in the historiography of Greek education. Until the mid-1970s, historiography of Greek education had been closely related to positivism and historicism. It…

This article analyses the developments in computer education in French-speaking Western Switzerland in the 1980s and 1990s. It investigates how computer education changed with the arrival of microcomputers, who the agents of these changes were, and with what sociopolitical and economic developments these pedagogical changes interacted. By…

Our critical historiography of e-learning policy in Ontario, Canada, traces the policy's trajectory through three settlements (2006-2022) and shows how successive governments have mobilized neoliberal discourses of personalization, access, and choice to justify new arrangements with private actors, within a broader sociopolitical context that…

This article explores the crossover between the history of education and the history of childhood. The emergence of state-sponsored national schooling, institutions for juvenile delinquents, home-schooling and expanding higher education were legal and social manifestations of cultural assumptions concerning the needs of children and projections of…

This paper has as its focus the life and thinking of the educational theorist and schoolmaster J. H. Simpson (1883-1959), who was not only a reforming teacher at Rugby School but was also the first headmaster of the progressive Rendcomb College. His ideas around education were outlined in a number of books. At the heart of his thinking lay…

This essay considers the evolution of the historiography of eighteenth-century Russian education, emphasizing recent shifts in the dominant paradigm of secularization. It identifies three wide vectors (1) the place of the state as prime institution builder; (2) the pace of standardization; (3) the problem of "reflexivity," or laying bare…

In this article we attempt to explain how Spanish schoolteachers built their knowledge around Progressive Education and just how they assimilated these new teaching practices, a process we conceptualise as "appropriating the New". Our source consists of the 287 files presented by state schoolteachers from all of Spain as part of their…

Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) applications have been implemented across all levels of education, with the rapid developments of chatbots and AI language models, like ChatGPT, demonstrating the urgent need to conceptualize the key debates and their implications for a new era of learning and assessment. This adoption occurs in a context…

This paper explores the British art patronage scheme "Pictures for Schools," which sold affordable works of art to educational buyers at annual exhibitions between 1947 and 1969, focusing on the work of "Pictures for Schools" founder and organiser Nan Youngman (1906-1995) as an artist, educationalist and activist. It shows…

The pursuit of inclusive education in different countries is shaped by the extent and the nature of existing special educational provisions. We focus on two authoritarian regimes in the previous century: Soviet Russia (USSR) with its ideology of class (proletarian humanism and egalitarian universalism) and South Africa with its ideology of race…

Using the case study of Anglesey and its pioneering comprehensive scheme, this paper aims to re-examine education reforms and interventions by central government c.1918-1950. This is undertaken in a bid to reveal the significance of such reforms for the way in which comprehensive secondary education was able to evolve at the local level.…

This article explores the leading ideas of the Ukrainian educators and the reform of school education in the era of the Ukrainian revolution (1917-1921), in the context of the values of both Europe and the wider world. Under Soviet rule (1921-1991), this period was obscured by a false narrative, but with the proclamation of Ukraine's independence…

The present epilogue, concluding a special issue on the development of our field in lesser-known geographical contexts, takes the opportunity to air some of the author's personal views. After all, with the publication of this issue, his years as editor of Paedagogica Historica are over. In a sense, therefore, the reflections brought here are…

This article foregrounds the value of using "critical policy historiography" as an analytical/methodological tool in undertaking policy formulation research, highlighting the importance of taking a long-term historical perspective. Using school-funding policies in South Africa as a case study, it argues that while there was wide…

Reviewing the historiography of education provides insights into both the past and present of this growing area of research across the UK and Ireland. In the nineteenth century research reveals a close association with national identities. These were often Whig histories that celebrated the present and emphasised the progressive nature of…