This paper considers the distinctive and peculiar place that Presbyterianism and Presbyterian Church schools occupy in New Zealand's education sector. It offers a critical evaluation of the relationship between the church schools and their Presbyterian heritage and the values to which they refer as they seek to define their special character. It…

The development of a considerable body of literature on British Sign Language (BSL) now permits analyzing and describing the sociolinguistic history of the language. An impressive amount of sociolinguistic information on BSL pertaining to the United Kingdom (UK) provides rich material for such analysis, but, until now, very little BSL research has…

This paper argues that Aboriginal children's engagement with education in the central Australian region of the Northern Territory in the mid-twentieth century can be understood as strategic engagements with formal western education systems and assimilation policies. It addresses a methodological problem stemming from a project that focuses on the…

Sociologist Max Weber identified Puritan constructions of virtuous time and the sin of sloth as having explanatory power for the origins of Puritan action and capitalist economies. This article expands upon Weber's thesis to examine how the sin of sloth was reinterpreted to encourage or prohibit psalm singing, singing schools, and later forms of…

A recent global reconnaissance of Christian higher education found a number of key themes that shaped current developments, such as the pressing challenges of secularization and nationalization but also the advantages of privatization and massification. This article provides an update to this older analysis by taking a birds-eye view of trends…

In recent years, many scholars have drawn a distinction between procedural and programmatic secularism. Procedural secularists seek to build communities wherein 'competing concepts of the good life' are afforded opportunities for expression. Programmatic secularists seek to limit the influence of religion within the public sphere. The 1870…

Three fundamental scientific works on the pedagogy of Comenius will be considered from new perspectives. These are the works of the East German comeniologist Franz Hofmann and the two West German comeniologists, Klaus Schaller and Andreas Lischewski. Germany has produced numerous scientific analyses of Comenius since 1945, but these three…

This paper explores the American Girl book series and its relation to the history of American education and the school's role in the creation of the ideal American girl. Focused on the Kirsten Larson series of American Girl books, this paper explores how the settler grammars that characterize Kirsten's encounters with an "Indian girl"…

This article is a reflection on the teaching of public theology in two very different contexts: in a Protestant seminary in the US (1985-2019) and an underground seminary in Nazi Germany (1935-1937). The author analyzes her teaching career over years of change, both institutional and social, that challenged pedagogical methods to remain relevant…

In the years either side of Federation in 1901, Australia's Irish Catholics balanced two often contradictory impulses: their determination to retain their cultural and religious links with Ireland in the face of an often unsympathetic Protestant majority, and the desire to become 'good' Australians in order to make 'a go' of their lives in the new…

A long tradition of both State and religious interest and support characterised provision for education on the island of Ireland from the 1700s. Following the partition of Ireland in the 1920s, the newly created political entities of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland forged separate and distinct education policy trajectories that largely…

Vocation, interpreted as the calling of every individual believer to serve God in ordinary life, has been an important feature of Protestantism. However, not only has the notion of vocation gradually disappeared from the late modern understanding of work and profession, the identification of vocation and work has also been criticized by…

John Greer first introduced the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity in 1979 into his programme of research designed to chart the religious trajectory of students attending Protestant and Catholic schools in Northern Ireland. The present study conducted in 2011 builds on earlier studies conducted in 1979, 1984, the early 1990s, and 1998.…

This article argues that crucial elements of the three most important theoretical models of twentieth-century education can be traced back to three Protestant denominations that were developed in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. First, rather than to look in depth at the Protestant Reformers' own educational ideas, the paper…

Thomas Stearns Eliot, who is believed to be one of the most important poets of his time in the English and American Poetry, as well as today, left many poems in most of which he criticized and even rejected the Western Puritanist society and the principles of Romanticism. In this brief study, one of T.S. Eliot's major poems, 'Gerontion' will be…