In the past two decades, the interdisciplinary push to denaturalise the concept of society has historicised the very object of social history. In this paper, I propose a way of studying the social history of education that eludes the presupposition of the social as a transcendental or pre-discursive object. My central claim is that it is possible…

Adult literacy and literacy education have long been a global agenda. China's literacy education has been developing amid the backdrop of international commitments and goals of adult literacy. Since the founding of new China in 1949, adult literacy policy in China has been continuously evolved within the changing political, economic and social…

This article advances an explanation for the dynamics of agencies and institutions responsible for the formation of skills in nineteenth-century western India. It shows that multiple agencies - artisanal apprenticeship, indigenous schools, new "bazar" schools, modern vernacular and English schools, and institutes for technical,…

This study provides new evidence on the advance of literacy in Spain during the period 1860-1930. A novel dataset, built with historical information from the Spanish population censuses (over 8000 municipalities), enables this process to be described in detail from the end of the "Ancien Régime" to the Second Republic. The study thus…

More than ever, "the space of history of education" is defined by its specialised communities as much as by the people who participate in the educational process, including those who have been historically left out of it. It is these people (along with the historian) who build "the history of the present time" and the archives…

This paper explores relations between literacy education, ideology and politics, based on an analysis of educational reforms during Soviet and US military occupation in North and South Korea. Following the end of the Second World War, anti-illiteracy campaigns in the two Koreas became important means of political socialisation for Koreans amid the…

Imparting education by Christian missionaries to the locals of a non-literate society was not an end in itself, rather it was a means to an end. Evangelizing needed to go hand-in-hand with church planting and institutionalisation of the church establishment. To fulfil this mission, it was necessary to deploy locals but first equip them with the…

This article's purpose is to address a hitherto unexplored topic in the history of education: the story of the "Cátedras Ambulantes," officially referred to as "Misiones Pedagógicas" during the final years of the Franco dictatorship and the beginning of the transition to democracy (1966-1977). The study is based on a…

The present article aims to analyse academic production about the history of school architecture in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, concerning the development of research trajectories and dialogue between the areas of architecture and education, sources, analysis methodology and periodisation. The latter was based on research developed in…

The focus of this article is to highlight adult education in Saudi Arabia. It also investigates the roles of early official and volunteering initiatives that established the adult education and literacy system in Saudi Arabia. In addition, a brief overview of the development of adult agencies such as Night Literacy Schools and Adult Education…

Modern notions of literacy can be informed by past successes in the field of literacy. One of the most successful national literacy campaigns occurred in Nicaragua in 1980 and was called "Cruzada Nacional de Alfabetización" (CNA). The fight against illiteracy to provide a space for marginalized voices in Nicaragua is a story worth…

This paper offers a review of history of education statistics in Spain, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, describing their traditional means of operation based on censuses, flat tables, and macro-statistical data, which usually display a purely quantitative analysis. Only in recent decades have statistical analyses appeared, supported by…

Field of education is associated with herculean task and innate responsibility of escorting societies forward. Across space and time, it has been an unambiguous synthesis that education should precede any progress or change. It helps humans to understand themselves and better their interaction with rest of the society. Hence the field of education…

This article presents a description of the major campaigns of adult literacy in the revolutionary period in Portugal, between the years 1974 and 1977. The campaigns aimed to address the problem of extremely low levels of formal education and high levels of adult illiteracy, and were organized by different movements, from the military to political…

The article analyzes the constituent steps and measures of the Soviet campaign to eradicate illiteracy among adults in the 1920s-30s. A comparison of educational and ideological aspects of this campaign demonstrates how closely they were interrelated and how they facilitated the creation of new patterns of cultural behavior. The author shows that…