For two centuries, academics and their universities have competed for prominence and vied to demonstrate that their institutions are at the center of the scholarly world. Scientific advances in particular fields, reciprocal academic visits and conferences, impressive physical architecture, and publishing in shared venues and a "lingua…

August Heißmeyer was a high-ranking SS officer, a member of Heinrich Himmler's inner circle, husband to Reich women's leader Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, and the driving force behind the pan-European expansion of Nazi elite schools during the Third Reich. In light of Heißmeyer's official pardon by Württemberg state president Dr Gebhard Müller in 1951,…

For Ukraine, the beginning of Nazi occupation meant a change from one totalitarian regime to another. In Soviet times and during occupation alike, all spheres of public life, including the education system, were permeated with politics and ideology. There could be no talk about democratic principles in education. Schools were supposed to raise the…

This article pursues the question of what the significance was of the discursive construction of heroism for the National Socialist indoctrination of children in the context of communication processes at school. In particular, it is about ideological-educational intentions pursued in the context of teaching early readers as well as about topical…

In this historical study, the author offers a reading of Dewey's "Democracy and Education" in the context of the two other books Dewey published the year before, German "Philosophy and Politics" and his coauthored "Schools of To-morrow." Having published three books in two years, "Democracy and Education"…

A tiny section on the agenda of the National Assembly of the Weimar Republic from February to July, 1919 was entitled "Religious instruction and the public elementary school," part of the preparation for the new Constitution of the German Reich, the so-called Weimar Constitution [Weimarer Reichsverfassung; abbr. WRV], of August 11th,…

This article compares the discourses, practices and politics of film education in France and Germany, and outlines their historical development. The discourses on film education in the two countries are fundamentally different: whereas German film education is anchored in the global politics of media education and around notions of…

In this article, I endeavor to explore the historical dimensions of "Bildung" by first focusing on the German linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt and his theory of "Bildung." The article then addresses the transformation of Humboldt's neo-humanistic ideal into a governmentrun institutionalized "Bildung"…

Worldwide, education promises a better future for aspiring generations. However, our current educational landscape has been shaped by neoliberal thinking, and is thus often oriented toward economic objectives. In Germany "Bildung" is a notion coined by philosophers representing a broad liberal and critical education, and the cultural and…

Recent studies on primers from the time of the Third Reich in Germany show surprisingly little evidence of ideologisation. In comparison with other textbooks, national socialist contents were found to be present to a very limited degree. Rather than presenting the ideology, the books encouraged identification of the children with the presented…

At the end of the nineteenth century Aime Bogaerts, a Socialist primary school teacher at a Ghent municipal school and from 1901 on the chief editor of the Socialist newspaper "Vooruit", began a new educational initiative: "the children of the popular classes from Ghent" ("De Gentsche Volkskinderen"). Children from…

In the 1920s, French scholars and bureaucrats created the Cite Universitaire in Paris. The institution housed university students from around the world. The Cite founders formulated a model for the Cite that reflected ideological concerns in interwar Europe with a focus on pacifism, international education and cultural internationalism. The…

This volume assembles essays addressing the recurring question of the "subject," understood both as human person and school subject, thereby elaborating the subjective and disciplinary character of curriculum studies. After examining scholarship on the "subject," Pinar critiques its absence in the new sociology of curriculum,…

The paper analyses and compares developments in history teaching in Germany, England, and the Netherlands in the 19th and 20th centuries. The development of history teaching in the three countries shows striking similarities. National politics have always used history education for purposes which did not necessarily tally with distanced critical…

The book is entitled History Wars in the Classroom: Global Perspectives and examines how ten separate countries have experienced debates and disputes over the contested nature of the subject, for example the "Black Armband" and "Whitewash" factions in Australia who adopt opposingly celebratory or denigratory views of Australian…