The transition to the use of paper in public elementary schools in Mexico was not easy. At the end of the nineteenth century, the use of slates had been questioned due to the health risk they represented since students often erased their writing with saliva and the material with which the slates were made did not always meet the necessary…

The history of the Hilfsschule (special school) is contested and multifaceted. For the German context, most research to date has focused on institutions or professional pioneers in special education. This paper, through a "New Historicism" perspective, asks how a group of pupils, described as "retarded", could become a new…

Through the method of tracing-and-mapping, this paper traces the history of how menstruation has been conceptualized in English education policies since 1928, as well as how such conceptualizations have positioned young people. It explains how education policy in England has conceptualized menstruation as a (cis girls') biological process; a…

This article examines the changing architectural environments of deaf education in the nineteenth century, taking the national institutes in Paris and Bordeaux as its main focus. Founded in the late eighteenth century and initially housed in government-expropriated properties, both schools underwent comprehensive renovation and reconstruction…

The term "toilet" conveys different meanings; it may be seen as an isolated place or a public service, a secluded and dirty area or a symbol of civilisation and progress. In the film "The Phantom of Liberty" (1974), Luis Buñuel presented a formally dressed social group gathering over a meal in toilets around a table, with the…

By the end of the nineteenth century, social hygiene was a topic of great importance for states experiencing fears of national degeneration. The health of children was of particular concern, as it was thought to reflect the future health of the nation. Although this prompted nation-states like France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United…

By tracing roughly 200 years of the formation of American school subjects, this paper complicates some of the self-evidence for calls to adapt school subjects according to complex health concerns, more recently amplified by COVID-19. To do so, the paper diagrams a counter-memory of three key amalgams of health related to the makings of school…

Around 1900, interest in adolescence as a separate and crucial phase in human development increased among psychologists, educators and youth workers in the western world. This paper reviews the relation between adolescence and sexuality in the early twentieth century from a Dutch perspective. In the 1920s pedagogues started to study adolescence.…

The pandemics and epidemics experienced in Turkey after the second quarter of the twentieth century had a profound impact on society and education. The "General Hygiene Law", which came into force in 1930 in an attempt to fight against increasing epidemic diseases, was a service provided by the state to improve health conditions in the…

The public dimension of the body became paramount in the first half of the 20th century, when the image of the modern man, with his virile stereotypes, became a cliché, in strict connection with nation building first and totalitarian ideologies later. Yet, different cultural and educational trends advocated for life reform and liberation of the…

This article starts from "histoire croisée" to develop a genuinely relational analysis of performances of health education in the context of open-air schools. It interrogates, through places, people, and things conceived of as being performatively entangled, the notion of an internationalisation of school hygiene. These places, people,…

This article examines the ambiguous perception of rural space as a natural space in the debates on rural school reform in Austria from the 1920s up to the 1960s. Throughout the period investigated, the quality of rural space always was an important topic in these debates. In the pedagogic discourse, rural space was perceived as more natural or…

This article discusses the connections between health, illness and education from a historical perspective, aiming at providing clues for understanding these relationships that, as demonstrated in recent global events, cannot be analyzed separately. Over the centuries, societies have always found different ways of educating their new generations…

From its beginning in 1885, the Hull House was beacon for social progress and urban reform. Founders Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr recruited talented, passionate partners from diverse fields to address issues from street sanitation to education in Chicago's immigrant communities. Among residents' many projects, their involvement in the…

While the architecture, educational ideas and material culture of nineteenth century school buildings have been properly investigated, we know less about the actual processes involved in designing and building schools. These processes are explored in this chapter, allowing the influence of local decision-makers, school designers, builders and…