The Waldorf schools, founded by Rudolf Steiner, are today among the most successful alternative schools that have emerged in the context of the "Reformpädagogik" (progressive education movement). Despite the increasing number of schools being founded as well as critical comments occurring from time to time in the public, the interest in…

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…

The New Education movement was a remarkable coalition of national reform movements that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. As a heterogeneous movement that was united only in its opposition to the schooling system at the time, its structure and boundaries in the UK have remained a matter of academic debate. This article implements the…

In May 1941, two progressive educationalists, Jozef Emiel Verheyen and Leo Roels, published a new pedagogical journal, "VlaamschePaedagogiek" (Flemish Pedagogy, 1941-1944). The journal aimed to contribute to the development and proliferation of a pedagogy that rooted in the Flemish soil and national character. Verheyen and Roels were…

Teachers' implementation of and attitudes to school reforms and overriding pedagogical ideals have long been a topic of debate and research. In this article, we centre on teachers' descriptions of how progressive teaching was conducted as well as on the teachers' reasons for implementing such teaching in the 1940s. This study is based on written…

This study examines the purpose and practice of "adjustment rooms" established in special education classes in Los Angeles public schools in the early twentieth century. The establishment and practices associated with adjustment rooms are a local example of broader international trends related to the classification and streaming of…

This article brings the Italian activist and thinker Antonio Gramsci's theory of organic intellectualism and the Canadian historian Ian McKay's theory of liberal state-formation to bear on the "Indian Question" -- or how best to yoke Indigenous children and young people to the modern Canadian state. From the mid-nineteenth to the…

Between 1902 and 1913 two acclaimed educational reformers wrote several series of children's primers in the Netherlands. Jan Ligthart and Hindericus Scheepstra collaborated closely with the painter Cornelis Jetses who provided the illustrations. The series would become classics in both text and image. In this article the symbolic educational…

In 1943, a report sent to the executive board of the New Education Fellowship (NEF) informed the board that, during a trip to South America in 1942, Carleton Washburne had formed sections in Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Paraguay, and Brazil on the NEF's behalf. In some publications, Washburne mentions that it was a study trip commissioned by the US…

In the framework of European educational convergence, university teaching must respond to the new challenges posed by the European System of Transfer Credits (ECTS) while encouraging improvement and innovation in didactical aspects of formation. In Spain, the field of the History of Education has assumed an active role in the advancement of…

This study investigates the "educational borrowing" of Pestalozzi's and Fellenberg's reforms by James Bonwick, an Australian schoolmaster and inspector in the 1840s and 1850s. The article initially examines Pestalozzi's and Fellenberg's teaching methods and philosophies. Adopting a biographical approach, it then explores the…

This article considers the theoretical argument of anthropologist Tim Ingold, that the denial and subsequent encasement of bare feet in footwear was a critical characteristic of the development of modern societies, in exploring three aspects of feet, footwork, and footwear in the history of the modern school. First, the material conditions of feet…

At the 1900 Paris World's Fair, Frances Benjamin Johnston, one of America's first women photographers, played a key role in publicising in Europe American progressivism and emancipation in education. Through displaying photographs taken in the Washington DC public schools, she revealed to the international audience how American progressive…

This article explores visions of war and peace in the education system during the Spanish transition to democracy. During those years, the Spanish state was faced with the challenge of leaving its authoritarian political past behind and forging a democratic civic culture. As the concepts of war and peace are inextricably linked to those of state…

Although progressive education was an international phenomenon, historical interpretations of it may be affected on the national level by academic and institutional contingencies. An analysis of how US and English historians of education interpret progressive education reforms in their respective countries identified a strain of condescension…