In this fascinating collection, some of the foremost historians of education--including Barbara Beatty, Larry Cuban, Linda Eisenmann, Yoon K. Pak, John L. Rury, and Jonathan Zimmerman--debunk commonly held myths about American schooling. Each short, readable chapter focuses on one myth, explaining what the "real" history is and how it…

The fate of art's education looks like a cynical and rather hopeless process. Those who belong to the field pledged their loyalty to the discipline by dint of how they regard art as being inherently pedagogical -- what is here called art's education. Decades of engagement in art's "education" leaves one travelling over spaces that…

Aiming to challenge the notion that the ballet lexicon is ahistorical, this study focuses on the ballet classroom. Training plays a vital role in how ballets are performed, and past choreography needs a different approach from that of contemporary ballets. Previous studies of classroom movement, while acknowledging different Schools, have not…

In international philosophy of music education, there are some philosophers who are important points of reference. One of them is the German Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). While his philosophy is complex, an oversimplified understanding of his ideas turned him into the "bad guy" of international music education philosophy, being in favor for…

Drawing on a set of studies conducted over 3 decades, this article provides a reflection on what has been learned by centering equity questions in research on educational reform. These studies reveal the need to explore educators' belief systems, emotions, and agency in relation to reform. They also underscore the co-constructed nature of reform…

Standards for Professional Learning are forward-looking by nature because they drive continuous improvement in educator practice. But taking a brief look at the history of the standards is important for understanding their impact on the field and their role in today's professional learning. As the field has shifted philosophy from staff…

This article, delivered as one of two keynote lectures at the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) in Milan in September 2022, offers an example of an autosociobiographical approach to the history of education, in which the life story of the author is entangled with the collective movement of a generation of…

The political, social, and institutional environments in which contemporary universities operate have changed rather dramatically over the past two decades in ways that threaten the resilience of the academic core, both in its ability to map knowledge comprehensively and also to maintain a balance between the branches of the humanities, social…

In this study on educational change in Pennsylvania from 1790 to 1838, I reexamine the history of how the state established its common school system, the predecessor to the state's public school system. In doing so, I identify a series of three leaders, argue that poverty was the primary catalyst for educational reform, and explain the nature of…

This essay opens with a question about what science teaching would look like in a world where categorical seams of human diversity were not probabilistic determinants of science learning. After revisiting Hewson and Hewson's description of an "appropriate conception of science teaching," I detail the ways in which the field of science…

National governments rely on human rights and human capital rationales to justify why they seek to improve education through reform. Human rights discourse emphasizes a legal and moral right to education, whereas human capital discourse stresses the instrumental role of education in enhancing individual and national economic productivity. In…

The educational historian Brian Simon is well known for his portrayal of the social and political conflicts surrounding adult working-class education in 19th and early 20th-century England. However, the third and fourth volumes of his classic history of education in Britain, covering the period from 1920 to 1940 and 1940 to 1990 respectively,…

This article traces the transnational circulation of socialist reforms in the field of sex education through the work of Monika Krause, a citizen of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) who migrated to Cuba and became the "Cuban Queen of Condoms." For Krause, the overarching goal of sex education was to "teach tenderness" to…

In this essay, we explore the concept of path dependence through the example of the long-standing issue of racialized exclusionary school discipline. We argue that historians of education can reduce policy makers' tendency to continue down existing policy paths (especially unhelpful ones), a phenomenon known as "path dependence." We use…

Prescriptive discourse, which favors certain variants over others, like "different from" vs. "different than," has usually been characterized in terms of correctness in spelling, punctuation, word meaning, or grammar. Yet usage guides in the 20th century have added numerous entries that focus more on style considerations than…