By the time political independence was achieved in the 1920s in Ireland, its national education system over the previous century had been underpinned by imperial ideology and values. In the early 1920s, curriculum planning was influenced by the post-revolutionary and post-war context and, unsurprisingly, placed an emphasis on building nationhood…

This article employs the method of prosopography to reach a deeper understanding of a group of 53 trailblazing Chinese students who were the first to enrol in American law schools between 1878 and 1911, during the waning years of the Qing era. Most of them contributed greatly to the subsequent development of China's legal and diplomatic…

During the Second World War, Nordic countries witnessed a large-scale displacement of the population as around 70,000 Finnish children were evacuated to other Nordic countries. While up to 15,000 of them did not return to Finland, the majority travelled back, carrying multiple ruptures in their close relationships: first from their biological…

Indian students in Britain before the Second World War were a sizeable social group who exerted noticeable influence on Indian nationalism and on British institutions and society. The politics of race and empire were mediated through British schools and universities in this period with consequences for Indian students, and their peers. This…

After the Sputnik shock of 1957, the United States initiated education reform, based in part on the hope that technology could facilitate efficient school learning. This development was largely driven by the confrontation between the eastern and western Blocs: on both sides of the Iron Curtain, reformists promoted educational technology for the…

This paper, largely based on new, previously unused documents from US archives, considers the consultancy group financed by the Ford Foundation in 1960 to support the school reforms the Italian Minister of Education Giuseppe Medici was promoting. The group was headed by James Bryant Conant, and its evaluations were based on principles of…