Originally published in 1921, this book details the major developments in English education between 1789 and 1918.

This book examines school acts in the long nineteenth century, traditionally considered as milestones or landmarks in the process of achieving universal education. Guided by a strong interest in social, cultural, and economic history, the case studies featured in the book rethink the actual value, the impact, and the ostensible purpose of school acts. The thirteen national case studies focus on the manner in which school acts were embedded in their particular historical contexts, offering a comprehensive and multidisciplinary overview of school acts and the role they played in the rise of mass schooling. Drawing together research from countries across the West, the editors and contributors analyse why these acts were passed, as well as their content and impact. This seminal collection will appeal to students and scholars of school acts and the history of mass schooling. Chapter 9 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

The City and Education in Four Nations is a response to a long-standing need for the placing of urban educational study in broader comparative contexts, both historical and international. This volume offers an account of the historical educational experiences of four major English-speaking countries, opening up new research agendas in a variety of fields. An international team of contributors has been assembled, combining historical and educational expertise, and the work should interest scholars in a number of disciplines, including urban history, urban and comparative education, social and public policy, social and cultural history and the history of education.

This book compares the formal education of the majority of girls in Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth century. Previous books about ‘Britain’ invariably focus on England, and such ‘British’ studies tend not to include Ireland despite its incorporation into the Union in 1801. The Schooling of Girls in Britain and Ireland, 1800-1900 presents a comparative synthesis of the schooling of working and middle-class girls in the Victorian period, with the emphasis on the interaction of gender, social class, religion and nationality across the UK. It reveals similarities as well as differences between both the social classes and the constituent parts of the Union, including strikingly similar concerns about whether working-class girls could fulfill their domestic responsibilities. What they had in common with middle-class girls was that they were to be educated for the good of others. This study shows how middle-class women used educational reform to carve a public role for themselves on the basis of a domesticated life for their lower class ‘sisters’, confirming that Victorian feminism was both empowering and constraining by reinforcing conventional gender stereotypes.

The lack of serious study on how dangerous schools as institutions can be is a little surprising given that the matter was put squarely on the research agenda in persuasive fashion by Waller back in 1932. The lack of response to the possibilities opened up means that a vibrant research agenda still awaits construction. This book will stimulate debate on the matter from the historical perspective. It consists of fifteen chapters drawing on historical case studies from the United States, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, and Australia written by international scholars in the field. These chapters are helpfully grouped into three sections. The first section focuses on certain dangers to which pupils were exposed in the past and on certain dangerous practices which they promoted. The second section examines dangers to which teachers were exposed in the past along with dangerous practices which they themselves promoted. In the final and third section, the chapters explore the dangers to which teachers and students were exposed in the past at the university level. Throughout the book, the emphases range from dangers emanating from the institutions themselves and the patterns of relationships that developed in them, to what occurred due to particular ideologies and practices connected with sport, sex, religion, and science. Schools as Dangerous Places delivers a historical perspective of schools in a manner that is most unusual. This unique study helps us examine education through a very different lens.

A pioneering socio-historical analysis of change and development in secondary education in England, France, and Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.