Everyone in France takes for granted the existence of compulsory school attendance ("école obligatoire") while home education remains very exceptional. Yet school attendance is not, and has never been, legally compulsory in France. How can one explain the fact that the right to home educate is little known and practiced? This article…

The first comparative study of the spread of mass education around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this unique new book uses a bottom-up focus and demonstrates, to an extent not appreciated hitherto, the gulf between the intentions of the government and the reality on the ground. This book is divided into four…

The transformations that have taken place in the French "ecole maternelle" (nursery school) over the last 30 years may be characterised by a dual dynamic, internal and external, of scholarisation. Firstly, the analysis of its changing position with regard to primary school and within early childhood education and care shows a relative…

The history of education in France, with its inherited link between the Republic and the religion of knowledge, produces a specific form of educational functioning, consubstantial to a tradition of selection and a symptomatic lack of what elsewhere is called a curriculum. While the recent introduction of the "common grounding of knowledge and…

Reviews the educational reform movement in France during the late nineteenth century which produced one of the most tightly organized, centrally controlled, and pedagogically effective models of elementary education in the world, with emphasis on the role of the Catholic clergy and attempts of the republican regime to uproot clerical influence in…

Virtually every country in Europe discovered in the late 1970s that a section of its population had serious difficulties in using written language. Examined from an historical angle, this phenomenon can be seen as part of a complicated set of factors. Urban France can be said to have been fully literate by the late eighteenth century, especially…

Analyzes establishment of compulsory moral and civic instruction in France at the turn of the century using the recently developed research techniques of social history. Maintains that the application of social history techniques will provide new insights into historical and educational research. Includes an extensive bibliography of primary and…

In France, technology is a compulsory school discipline at the junior high school level (ages 11-15). Technology studies were initiated at the beginning of the 1960s when school attendance until the age of 16 became mandatory and when it was decided to delay vocational training because of the irreversible drive towards technical modernity, a…

Volume 2 begins with discussion of Hopkins Grammar School history, Greek language issues, and Justin S. Morrill's legislative career. Miscellaneous topics cover Indian Territory, backward children in public schools, U.S. engineering education, Christian Brothers schools founder St. Jean Baptiste de La Salle, public library development, Delft's…