Schools and education policy
“It has become commonplace to remark that historians of education have become less interested in schools and schooling, and more interested in a wider range of educational institutions, not to mention education that takes place beyond formal organizations. Gary McCulloch has explored in detail the many different directions that historians of education have taken since taking heed of Lawrence Cremin’s exhortation in 1965 to ‘project [their] concerns beyond the schools to a host of other institutions that educate: families, churches, libraries, museums, publishers, benevolent societies, youth groups, agricultural fairs, radio networks, military organizations, and research institutes’. More than half a century later, readers will find in this review examples of articles on almost all these institutions. By contrast, studies of individual schools are comparatively rare in the periodical literature for 2016, although some are mentioned in other sections of this review. Two articles in the Australian journal History of Education Review are exceptions: Neville Douglas Buch and Beryl Roberts present a quantitative study of pupils from a Brisbane school in the early twentieth century, while Tony James Brady considers the education of warders’ children at the St Helena Penal Establishment in Queensland in the late nineteenth. In the History of Education Researcher John Black presents an account of a single English secondary modern school, based on a range of sources including his own recollections of life as a pupil and a school inspector’s report from 1959. Other historians look at school systems and the wider roles that they played. In another Australian study published in the History of Education Review, Carole Hooper relates the issues of selection and curriculum content in a case study of mid-nineteenth-century Victoria. …”
Alice Kirke, Review of periodical literature on the history of education published in 2016, History of Education, 2017, 46:6, 826-853, DOI: 10.1080/0046760X.2017.1382580
REFERENCES
Gary McCulloch and Tom Woodin, ‘Towards a Social History of Learners and Learning’, Oxford Review of Education, 36 (2010): 133-40.
Gary McCulloch, The Struggle for the History of Education (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), esp. 16,71 and chapters 7-8; Lawrence Cremin, The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley (New York: Teachers College, 1965), 48.
Neville Douglas Buch and Beryl Roberts, ‘No Regrets in the Evening of Life: Access, Equity and Exclusivity at Junction Park State School in the Early Twentieth Century’, History of Education Review, 45 (2016): 69-87.
Tony James Brady, ‘“Raw, free”, and “almost rude”: Educating Warders’ Children on St Helena Penal Establishment’, History of Education Review, 45 (2016): 103-14;
John Black, A Micro-History of Nelson Haden County Secondary Modern Boys School, Trowbridge, Wiltshire, Focusing on the HMI Inspection of October 1959’, History of Education Researcher, 97 (2016): 43-51.
Carole Hooper, ‘Access and Exclusivity in Nineteenth Century Victorian Schools’, History of Education Review, 45 (2016): 16-27.
Images: Yellowed blank page of an old open book. Paper texture, Photo 183870202 © Akintevsam | Dreamstime.com; Torn piece of scroll uncovering history underneath, Photo 85300384 © Charlieaja | Dreamstime.com; Close-up of the Tombstone of French existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre and of the Feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir at the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris, Photo 141956785 © Aduranti | Dreamstime.com; Book cover, No Regrets in the Evening of Life: The History of Junction Park State School (1888-2013). Boolarong Press, 2015 (pp. 459) — examples of uncovering school history, which the public and governments willfully ignore.
Neville Buch
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