This article traces the evolution of the statutory Youth Service in rural Westmorland (now part of Cumbria), from its establishment in 1939 to the early post-war years. It focuses on how the county's Youth Service innovated and developed new ways of working with young country people in their spare time, and the challenges of introducing…

Robert Baden-Powell's role in initiating the Scout movement is well covered in historiography. This article addresses a little-researched question concerning his associations with contemporary educationalists as a means of promoting social reform through education. In combining social network analysis with the study of hitherto underutilised…

English painter Barbara Bodichon received a dynamic home education, consisting of engaging lessons, reading sessions, family discussions, sketching excursions, and trips at home and abroad. As an adult, Bodichon led a nomadic life, living between Algeria and England and travelling across Europe and America. Seeking to unpack travelling and travel…

Using examples from family letters sent to the Department of Education's Elementary Correspondence School (ECS) in the western Canadian province of British Columbia in the early twentieth century, this article discusses three potential problems or traps associated with concepts of agency in the history of children and youth. Following a brief…

Broadening horizons beyond nations, transnational histories trace global flows connecting people and places. Historians have studied the New Education Fellowship (NEF) as a global network. Focused within the nation, research on New Zealand's involvement with NEF has emphasised how its activities before the Second World War impacted on the Labour…

In August 1922 a young woman was writing a letter to her comrade and colleague in a New York garment shop. The sender was Rose Pesotta, writing from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where she had just completed a summer school for women workers. Short as it is, the letter brings together a cluster of themes, ideas, and practices that were…

The origins of modern schooling in early nineteenth-century Africa have been poorly researched. Moreover, histories of education in Africa have focused largely on the education of boys. Little attention has been paid to girls' schooling or to the missionary women who sought to construct a new feminine Christian identity for African girls. In the…

In 1896, John Dewey opened the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago. While much is known about this legendary school and its founder, the teachers whose daily work brought the school to life remain mostly anonymous. This essay attempts to remedy this historical invisibility by investigating four of the Laboratory School teachers--Anna…

Henri Lefebvre suggested that social researchers engage in "the concrete analysis of rhythms" in order to reveal the "pedagogy of appropriation (the appropriation of the body, as of spatial practice)". Lefebvre's spatial analysis has influenced educational researchers, while the idea of "pedagogy" has travelled beyond…

British Somaliland, a protectorate from which Christian missionaries were excluded, opened its first government-run school in 1938. The intention of the new director of education, Randall Ellison, was to use written Somali in preference to Arabic. This drew intense criticism from local religious leaders, and had to be abandoned. Accused of being a…

Searching for evidence written about or by women regarding past lives and experiences has raised challenges about what counts as an archive. Archives provide a form of connection between past and present and are a form of memory storing, memory-recording and memory-making. Records such as letters, diaries, and journals that may have been…

In this article the author shares a partial biography of Elizabeth Evans, who became a domestic science teacher in Britain during the First World War. This story begins with a small collection of artefacts--professional letters and personal photographs--which infuse our understanding of teaching and learning and Elizabeth's everyday life nearly a…

Attempts to write the history of female education are hampered by the relative informality of teaching provision for women in early modern England. Since most women were excluded from male centres of learning--the grammar schools, universities and Inns of Court--historians are deprived of institutional records, which so well elucidate the…