Introduction

This double special issue represents an ambitious venture that we undertook, with the help of 29 authors and numerous expert reviewers, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of History of Education. It will be a major intervention in the history of education and related fields for many years to come. It is not the first anniversary special issue of the journal: in 2012, ‘Forty Years of History of Education’ were marked by a series of articles reviewing the contents of the journal since its inception in 1972.¹ The articles in that special issue, put together by the then editors David Crook and Deirdre Raftery, presented a useful summary of the development of historical writing in the journal, which at this time largely retained a focus on the British context in education. In the final article in that special issue, Roy Lowe – examining the historiography of higher education as reflected in History of Education – argued that ‘it is simply not the case that, because of Britain’s particular national history, a journal which lays claim to international recognition can retain credibility if it continues to draw on a pabulum of introspective, detailed analyses of its own nation’s institutions’. He went on to assert that ‘If the journal is to remain of significance … it must be used to promote and advertise work which has broad, even worldwide implications’.² In the past 11 years, the journal has broadened its scope to feature work on a wide range of national contexts, and this double special issue reflects that development, while aiming to push the journal, and the discipline of history of education, still further into new directions – not only across the world but also in relation to other areas of historical scholarship.

The history of education is sometimes perceived from the outside as lacking in rigour and innovation and as having little to contribute to wider historiography. Peter Mandler, in his 2013 Royal Historical Society Presidential Address, reported that for many historians pursuing the history of education was judged to amount to career suicide and that there is a ‘widespread sense in our discipline that the history of education is a dull or marginal or a dead-end subject’.³ Indeed, many historians have not altered their opinion in the intervening decade. How do we reconcile this rather harsh view with an alternative perspective, that the field is currently flourishing in dynamic interplay with a rich historiography that often addresses pressing contemporary issues, as evidenced for example by much work in this very journal? We conceived this double special issue as a bold declaration, by and for scholars both inside and outside the field, that the history of education is a vibrant and relevant specialism, which has much to contribute to wider historiographical and contemporary debates. Our aim was to present readers with innovative present and future ways to understand the history of education and to help forge innovative research agendas.

The double special issue was designed to address multiple developments in the history of education. The two sections, of unequal size, reflect our aims of addressing the global potential of the field and the historiographical opportunities that it can open up when pursued with ambition and innovation. In the Regional Trends section, articles consider how the history of education has developed in different and particular ways in various regions of the world; the Intersections section is thematic in approach, showcasing the dynamic interplay between the history of education and other historical sub-fields. The articles were intended to be review articles, assessing the current state of the field and outlining forward-looking agendas for future research, in and beyond the history of education. We hope that they will be of interest not only to scholars working on the history of a particular region of the world, but also more widely to historians who are unfamiliar with the specific context, and to historians working in related sub-fields that are normally considered to be outside the history of education. The geographical treatment of the historiography of education is intended to compare and contrast present practices, but also to set an agenda for the next decade or more of research. Our ambitious aim was not only to provide readers with a comprehensive historiographical survey of each particular country or region, but also to put into conversation various works (in multiple languages) that do not often get discussed together. This section was also designed to give readers access to areas of historiography normally inaccessible due to language barriers or other boundaries. We asked the authors of these articles to consider the following questions: how has the history of education evolved as a discipline, and are there national or regional particularities? What are the current issues with which historians of education are most heavily engaged? How does the field connect with other areas of educational and/or historical research? Which aspects of, and approaches to, the history of education are likely to be important in the next decade or so, and why?

For the Intersections section, we asked authors to reflect on the relationship of the history of education to other areas of historical and educational research. This section provides analytical frameworks for the themes addressed in the Regional Trends section, and also invites cross-pollination between different sub-fields. We are interested in how understandings of the history of education have evolved in dialogue with other specific subject areas, and – especially – how they might do so in the future. These sub-fields include the history of childhood and youth, the history of emotions, the history of science, the history of medicine and the history of empire. We asked authors to consider the following questions: how has the history of education intersected with the other area of scholarship with which you are familiar? What are the current issues with which historians are most heavily engaged? How have internationalisation and globalisation influenced research agendas in your area? What can historians of education and other historians learn from each other? Which aspects of, and approaches to, the history of education in your specific context are likely to be important in the next decade or so, and why?

All the essays, both regional and intersectional, demonstrate a number of shared preoccupations that characterise recent scholarship, not just in history but across the humanities. Most notable among these is a concern to move beyond a Euro - or western-centric perspective when writing the history of education. One approach highlighted in many contributions towards ‘provincialising’ the West is to focus attention on histories of education (and connected social and cultural phenomena) emerging from non-western, non-elite contexts, in particular from indigenous and colonised communities in the global south. As Roland Wittje puts it, ‘we have to engage with histories of teaching and learning in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Australia and Oceania beyond a premodern/modern or precolonial/colonial binary’.⁴ The regional essays that focus on these areas (or parts of them) each try to move beyond these binaries in different ways. For Helen Proctor and Remy Low, writing the essay on Oceania, for example, even the choice of name for the region was important here. Wanting to de-centre Australia, ‘the region’s wealthiest and largest nation’, which has often been ‘overweighted’ in regional histories of education, they preferred the term ‘Oceania’ to ‘Australasia’ due to its ‘wider geographical reach and anticolonial genealogy’.⁵

There is a particular focus in the intersectional essays on the urgent need to engage with indigenous histories of education and the implications this has for history as a discipline, especially the sources with which historians work. In the essay on history of education in the Middle East, for example, Hilary Falb Kalisman highlights the value of alternative text-based sources such as diaries, textbooks, fiction and newspapers for accessing experiences and accounts of education beyond the national archive; and this is echoed by Kang Zhao and Jingjie Wang, writing on China.⁶ Another promising avenue is to gather new oral histories from those living in marginalised communities. Laura Newman draws attention, for example, to the work of ‘Historians of childhood such as Mona Gleason [who] have often used oral testimony alongside published documentary evidence (including medical texts) to explore both how “adult experts understood the bodies of children and how adults remember their bodies in childhood”’.⁷ Many of the essays also recommend taking advantage of other recent ‘turns’ in historical scholarship, particularly the ‘material’ and ‘pictorial’, to try and access the voices and experiences of people who have been excluded from traditional scholarship. Claudia Soares, in her essay examining intersections between histories of emotion and histories of education, highlights recent work on ‘the design, decoration, and material culture of educational settings … enabling us to consider the importance of educational sites on the sensory and affective experiences of learners’.⁸ Rebecca Swartz makes a similar call for historians of empire to make use of non-traditional source material, including objects and visual sources, to ‘allow … a new non-textual entry point into experiences of education in the past’. Such material has the potential, she writes – citing the work of Spencer Segalla – to complicate the familiar narrative of a ‘Manichaean struggle between a monolithic imperial project and a unified colonised victim’.⁹

In a similar way, Desmond Odugu’s essay urges scholars to write histories of education in Africa beyond a simple focus on a colonial matrix. Like other contributors, he recommends drawing on a range of non-traditional sources, including oral testimony, to explore other African educational histories, especially those which have developed in indigenous communities. By pursuing a decolonial approach, he argues, it should be possible to recover ‘pluriversal domains’ of experience and produce a multicentred narrative characterised by ‘interfluent complexity’.¹⁰ With research focused on colonised indigenous communities, there is a risk, which Funké Aladejebi and Crystal Gail Fraser highlight in their essay on North America, of producing what has been termed ‘damage-centered’ research, which, because it concentrates on the painful impacts and legacies of colonisation, still centres the colonial narrative and risks perpetuating a narrative of ongoing brokenness.¹¹ ‘Much more’, Odugu argues, ‘has been going on and continues to go on educationally in Africa than was seeded through missionary and colonial encounters, and these warrant some attention, however the plot of colonial encounters twists.'¹²

Instead, the emphasis should be, as Low and Proctor make clear, on the ‘recovery of local languages and knowledges’ and ‘the proliferation of more stories of how education has been done in times and places not often considered’ in traditional history of education research.¹³ This agenda is important, not only for those working on histories of education in parts of the world formerly colonised by European empires, but also in Europe itself. Johannes Westberg stresses recent work being done to explore histories of education among the Sámi people in the Nordic region; and Susannah Wright and Tom Woodin highlight the growing ‘alertness’ of historians of education working on the UK and Ireland ‘to the range and intricacy of overlapping inequalities over time’.¹⁴

An approach recommended by many of the essays in the double special issue for expanding the range of sources drawn upon by historians is to focus specifically on the ‘lived experience’ of education. This can involve paying greater attention to people’s senses and emotions, as in the essay by Soares, and to their bodies and physical health, as Newman argues for. Such approaches are also helpful in broadening our understanding of what education is and how other sub-fields of history view education within their scholarship. In the words of Falb Kalisman, it helps to ‘de-parochialise the study of education’ at the same time as historians are seeking to ‘provincialise’ the West.¹⁵ As Mary Hatfield and Tuğçe Kayaal explain, ‘Historians of childhood have framed education, and the records created by schools, as a way to gain access to children’s experiences … and the broader culture of ideas informing pedagogical and institutional treatment of “the child”’, rather than as an object of study in its own right.¹⁶ Oral histories also target people’s lived experiences of education, with Odugu calling those who provide their testimony ‘living libraries’. Such testimony, he argues, provides ‘a powerful lens for reading any colonial-era archives’, through which other educational landscapes become visible.¹⁷

For historians of empire, while education is one of many significant structures and systems through which imperial power was exercised, experienced and resisted, as Rebecca Swartz points out, there was an important sense in which ‘nineteenth-century colonialism itself was seen as “an essentially pedagogic enterprise”’.¹⁸ Historians of health and medicine, Newman argues, have recently focused attention on ‘diseased and healthy bodies … as tools of knowledge generation, instruction and coercion’ and have highlighted the importance of the school not only as a space of academic instruction but also of public health education, captured in the idea of ‘the school as clinic’.¹⁹ Public health historians likewise argue for a history of education beyond schools, placing emphasis, in particular, on the workplace as an educational space.

The essays here build on work in recent decades by history of education scholars who focus on global entanglements and transnational linkages that connect individuals, groups, ideas and objects in different parts of the world. This is sometimes pictured as the rejection or replacement of the national by the transnational or global, but it is more about trying to contextualise more accurately the national (and colonial) in relation to events taking place at other scales. For Hatfield and Kayaal, in their essay looking at the intersection between histories of childhood and education, transnational history seeks ‘to marry the specificity of the schoolroom or educational institution with the emerging transnational and global networks that defined the modern era’.²⁰ In a similar way, Wittje, in his examination of the intersections between history of education and history of science, frames the move towards a transnational approach as a much-needed attempt to ‘to provincialise Europe in our perspective of history of science and technology education’.²¹ Such a view allows us, Swartz suggests, to take seriously ‘the multidirectional transfer of ideas between coloniser and colonised’ that complicate our understandings of power and agency within imperial contexts, while still recognising the oppressions and indignity of colonialism.²² As Odugu reminds us, acknowledging the ‘complexity’ of empire must not become ‘code’ for excusing its worst features.²³

As much as the essays here stress the need to acknowledge educational spaces, practices and experiences that have been erased or ignored by traditional Eurocentric histories, there is also a strong push to recognise the role of colonised peoples in constructing ‘western’ knowledge. As Achille Mbembe reminds us, ‘The western archive is singularly complex. It is neither monolithic nor the exclusive property of the West. Africa and its diaspora decisively contributed to its making and should legitimately make foundational claims on it. Decolonising knowledge is therefore not simply about de-westernisation’ but also about redistributing credit for and ownership of that knowledge.²⁴ In their essay on Oceania, Low and Proctor ask how this region, ‘far from being the remote place that the gaps in history of education scholarship might suggest, or the vacant recipient of colonial educational impositions – was crucial to the formation of Northern and Western European systems of scientific knowledge as well as “modern” ideas concerning educability and pedagogy’.²⁵ These are questions which the transnational turn can help to address. As Low and Proctor continue, ‘The histories of education globally, especially European (and Euro-American) ones, are incomplete without an account of its entanglement with the histories of Oceania. No history or history of education is strictly circumscribable within the bounds of a geographical or cultural region.’²⁶

The essay on Central and Eastern Europe reminds us of the still powerful connection between national identity and the history of education in countries that used to be part of the USSR’s sphere of influence, and which are dealing with their own complex legacies of empire. Justyna Gulczyńska, Magdolna Rébay and Dana Kasperowa particularly highlight the importance for governments in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland of taking ownership of aspects of ‘western’ knowledge as part of an anti-colonial struggle.²⁷ Parimala Rao makes a similar point in the essay on India when she calls into question the idea that ‘modern education is foreign and was imposed by the British’. Rather, she argues, ‘It was the Indians who established modern educational institutions in opposition to the colonial education policy’.²⁸ Likewise, in their essay on Latin America, Marcelo Caruso and Pablo Toro-Blanco state that the embracing of ‘western’ knowledge, in particular in science subjects, was ‘clearly related … to the disintegration of the Spanish colonial world and the coming of liberal republics’.²⁹

In other parts of the world, governments sought to integrate indigenous knowledge systems within the western paradigm. Falb Kalisman, for example, tells us that the Palestinian historian and educationalist, Abdul Latif Tibawi, ‘fought to expand western standards to encompass the study of Islamic societies, and to assert the value of Islamic education as measured by those standards’.³⁰ The case is made for the idea of multiple modernities, questioning the notion that ‘western’ modernity is the only valid form. Attention is paid, for example, to Islamic societies that sought to ‘problematise the equation of secularism with modernity’ and to integrate aspects of western science and technology within an Islamic framework.³¹ Falb Kalisman shows how ‘techniques and research from Europe and the United States’ were ‘up-for-grabs to the inhabitants of Syria and Lebanon, available to be used for their own purposes, to be contested, and protested’.³² Similarly, in the essay looking at Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, Ting-Hong Wong makes the important point that modern scientific knowledge and technologies were also transferred within the networks of non-western empires, focusing in particular on Japan.³³

Even within this broad selection of 17 articles, and particularly in the Intersections part of the double special issue, there are absences and oversights that we hope may be addressed in future contributions to History of Education: these essays are a starting point rather than simply an attempt to summarise the ‘state of the field’. There are some obvious geographical lacunae: Japan, with its strong tradition of research in the history of education, is one obvious example, and it may well be objected that ‘Africa’ is far too large to cover in a single essay, despite the rich discussion in Odugu’s contribution. Moreover, there are many intersections between the history of education and other sub-fields that have scant coverage: we might point in particular to the long-standing relationship between economic history and the history of education,³⁴ but also to public history, the history of educational policy and the relationship between history of education and other areas of educational research. We welcome further contributions on these themes and others. We hope that this double special issue will inaugurate new collaborations, between scholars in different parts of the world and those working on diverse areas of historical inquiry, and that it will set the scene for fresh and exciting research in the coming years.

Notes

¹ ‘Forty Years of History of Education’, History of Education 40, no. 1, special issue ed. David Crook and Deirdre Raftery.

² Roy Lowe, ‘The Changing Role of the Academic Journal: The Coverage of Higher Education in History of Education as a Case Study 1972–2011’, History of Education 40, no. 1 (2012): 114.

³ Peter Mandler, ‘Educating the Nation I: Schools’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 24 (2014): 5.

⁴ Roland Wittje, ‘Relocating Education in the History of Science and Technology’, History of Education 52, no. 2–3 (2023): 475.

⁵ Remy Low and Helen Proctor, ‘Oceania and the History of Education’, History of Education 52, no. 2–3 (2023): 202.

⁶ Hilary Falb Kalisman, ‘The Historiography of Education in the Modern Middle East’, History of Education 52, no. 2–3 (2023): 212–13; Kang Zhao and Jingjie Wang, ‘The Academic Discipline of History of Education in China’, History of Education 52, no. 2–3 (2023): 285-6.

⁷ Laura Newman, ‘Bodies of Knowledge: Historians, Health and Education’, History of Education 52, no. 2–3 (2023): 487.

⁸ Claudia Soares, ‘Emotions, Senses, Experience and the History of Education’, History of Education 52, no. 2–3 (2023): 527.

⁹ Rebecca Swartz, ‘Histories of Empire and Histories of Education’, History of Education 52, no. 2–3 (2023): 454, 443.

¹⁰ Desmond Odugu, ‘Education in Africa: A Critical Historiographic Review’, History of Education 52, no. 2–3 (2023): 240, 241.

¹¹ Funké Aladejebi and Crystal Gail Fraser, ‘Lessons in Relationality: Reconsidering the History of Education in North America’, History of Education 52, no. 2–3 (2023): 177.

¹² Odugu, ‘Education in Africa’, 239.

¹³ Low and Proctor, ‘Oceania and the History of Education’, 216, 218.

¹⁴ Johannes Westberg, ‘Bright Nordic Lights: A Revitalised Interdisciplinary History of Education in the Massified Higher Education of the Nordics’, History of Education 52, no. 2–3 (2023): 342, 347; Susannah Wright and Tom Woodin, ‘The History of Education in Britain and Ireland: Changing Perspectives and Continuing Themes’, History of Education 52, no. 2–3 (2023): 440.

¹⁵ Kalisman, ‘The Historiography of Education in the Modern Middle East’, 314.

¹⁶ Mary Hatfield and Tuğçe Kayaal, ‘Educating Children: Future Directions for the History of Childhood and Education’, History of Education 52, no. 2–3 (2023): 496.

¹⁷ Odugu, ‘Education in Africa’, 239-40.

¹⁸ Swartz, ‘Histories of Empire and Histories of Education’, 456.

¹⁹ Newman, ‘Bodies of Knowledge’, 479, 493.

²⁰ Hatfield and Kayaal, ‘Educating Children’, 500.

²¹ Wittje, ‘Relocating Education in the History of Science and Technology’, 475.

²² Swartz, ‘Histories of Empire and Histories of Education’, 448-9.

²³ Odugu, ‘Education in Africa’, 239.

²⁴ Achille Mbembe, ‘Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive’, 24, 2015, https://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/Achille%20Mbembe%20-%20Decolonizing%20Knowledge%20and%20the%20Question%20of%20the%20Archive.pdf (accessed March 20, 2023).

²⁵ Low and Proctor, ‘Oceania and the History of Education’, 202.

²⁶ Ibid., 209.

²⁷ Justyna Gulczyńska, Magdolna Rébay and Dana Kasperowa, ‘History of Education in Central and Eastern Europe: Past, Present and Future’, History of Education 52, no. 2–3 (2023): 355-98.

²⁸ Parimala V. Rao, ‘The Historiography of Indian Education: 1920–2020: The Socio-Political Influences on the Growth of the Discipline’, History of Education 52, no. 2–3 (2023): 308.

²⁹ Marcelo Caruso and Pablo Toro-Blanco, ‘The Beneficial Tyranny of Politics: Emergence, Institutionalisation and Newer Issues of the History of Education in Latin America’, History of Education 52, no. 2–3 (2023): 185.

³⁰ Kalisman, ‘The Historiography of Education in the Modern Middle East’, 313.

³¹ Ibid, 325.

³² Ibid, 326.

³³ Ting-Hong Wong, ‘Different Postcolonial Conditions, Different Education Histories: The Cases of Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong’, History of Education 52, no. 2–3 (2023): 246-69.

³⁴ On this intersection, see Michael Sanderson, ‘Educational and Economic History: The Good Neighbours’, History of Education 36, no. 4–5 (2007): 429–45.