Children with disabilities or specialized healthcare needs were legally excluded from U.S. public education for decades, but in the last 45 years, they have gained tremendous ground in receiving comparable educational opportunities as their non-disabled peers. The purpose of this article is to provide a historical review of the educational laws…

Albert Shanker (1928-1997) is known mainly for his successful struggle to obtain collective bargaining for teachers, his leadership of teacher unions, and his championship of education reform. Shanker built large and powerful city, state, and national unions of teachers and other public employees that still stand as models both for union democracy…

At the close of the Civil War the United States was forced to grapple with the tremendous challenge of what to do with the millions of newly freed men, women, and children who, for more than three centuries, had been denied basic human rights, including learning how to read and write. During Reconstruction, several educational institutions were…

The history of calligraphy and its insertion into the "cursus studiorum" of Italian schools is rebuilt, starting from the end of the 18th century. The history of teaching calligraphy was connected in fact not only with the development of writing styles and instruments but--particularly in the Italian context--it was burdened with other…

Forest kindergartens are a new idea in the United States but have been around in Germany, Norway, and other European countries for decades. Forest "kindergartens" are preschools for children ages 3-6 and focus on being outdoors and learning through interacting with nature. Instead of building with blocks or doing puzzles at a table…

William H. Kilpatrick is worldwide known as "Mr. Project Method." But the origin of his celebrated paper of 1918 has never been explored. The discovery of a hitherto unknown letter reveals that Kilpatrick was an educational entrepreneur who, without regard for language and tradition, adopted the term "project" and used it in a provocative new way…

"Ameryka-Echo" was one of the most popular Polish-language weeklies, published in the United States between 1889 and 1972. Its founder and owner, Antoni A. Paryski, consciously sought to transplant ideas of Polish Positivism to the Polish-American immigrant communities in the United States. Reading was a central concept of…

This article surveys the history of compulsory education for soldiers' career advancement in the British army. It begins with an examination of the organizational context before analyzing the rationale, syllabus, teaching and assessment of soldier education. It concludes that for members of the army education organization their self-perception as…

The question of how Whig policies affected the early development of common schools has received little examination in either political or educational histories. There is evidence, however, that Whig party politics did influence early educational reformers. This paper considers the influence of Whig party politics on the emergence of state systems…

This article charts the development of education in the lower Arabian Gulf from its traditional beginnings in the nineteenth century to the provision of more formal schooling and eventually a ministry of education following Britain's withdrawal from the region in 1971. In order to provide a better understanding of the complexities and relative…

This research examines "lesson study" as a traditional model of creating professional knowledge in schools. "Lesson study," typically defined as teachers' classroom based collaborative research, has a long history in Japan as a shared professional culture with potential for enhancing learning, enriching classroom activities and…

This paper compares the founding of the elementary school systems of Ireland and Ontario in the nineteenth century. The systems shared a common set of textbooks that had originated in Ireland. Using examples from a number of these books, which were part of a series that had been specially prepared for the Irish national school system, founded in…

Summarizes 40 years of Organisation Mondiale pour l'Education Prescolaire (O.M.E.P.) activities. (Author)

Briefly recaps the history of higher education in America and the creation of the College Board, and offers a pictorial essay with key dates from the founding of the College Board to the turn of the century. (EV)

Historically, American Indian education in the United States was inextricably linked to Euro-American colonialism. By the late nineteenth century, many Euro-Americans thought Native Americans were a "vanishing race," and schools for Indians incorporated this belief into their design. In the United States, the large number and variety of…