Free schools were a flagship policy of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition (2010-15), aligned with the broader academisation programme, yet both consolidating and transcending New Labour's educational narrative between 1997 and 2010. Driven by political 'modernisers' such as Prime Minister David Cameron and his Education Secretary Michael…

As we re-imagine the role and value of the university, we need to pose new questions about knowledge and institutionality at a moment of intersecting crises. This essay presents a case study of a university in Western Canada, one shaped by the impacts of intensive extraction from human and more-than-human beings and now facing the challenge of…

This article offers a comprehensive thematic literature review on labour education, exploring the major contributions as well as some of the limits of this scholarship and future directions for researchers. Based on an analysis of 180 English-language publications from the 1960s until today, we find several general trends that we analyse as four…

In the 3 years prior to Harry Truman's establishment of the President's Commission on Higher Education in 1946, the Association of American Colleges (AAC), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and Harvard University all released reports on the relationship of general or liberal education to the political order. This historiographical…

The terminology of "Chinese characteristics" (zhongguo tese) is ubiquitous in China's political language, but its precise definition remains elusive. This study focuses specifically on the mobilising of the idea of Chinese characteristics of China's science evaluation programme: the China Discipline Evaluation (CDE). Implemented as an…

Over 2015-2016, high school students in Brazil occupied hundreds of schools across the country. Students fought to keep public schools open, funded, and functional, against outsourcing and privatisation, and in solidarity with teachers' trade unions and strikes. The 'primavera secundarista' ('student spring') was the most significant school…

This paper reflects an effort to consider the history of Albanian education within the context of the country's history. In it, the origin and evolution of Albanian education are described in connection with the country's social and political standing. It is divided into sections, each corresponding to a major historical period in the formation of…

This paper provides a critical analysis of Freire's Italian reception and argues that reinventing Freire requires us to historicise and to contextualise his legacy, which in Italy makes sense in consonance with the already existing Italian popular education tradition. Based on the case study of his 1989 honorary degree at the University of…

The war in Ukraine has opened a Pandora's Box of internationalization concerns that, heretofore, took a backseat to concerns with the effectiveness and sustainability of the field. In analyzing the impact of the war on international higher education, scholars offered various assessments of the conflict's effects, especially in the combatant…

Drawing on a historical case study, this article focuses on the ways in which the Greek Government (2015-2019), through involving the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), managed to modify the education conditionalities laid down by the third Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) negotiated with the 'Institutions' (the…

Initial teacher education (ITE) has changed dramatically over the past 50 years but some of the same issues persist in Canada and around the world. This article begins with an overview of how teacher education has evolved in Canada with a particular emphasis on the past 50 years. It recounts the gradual rise of professionalisation as teacher…

In India, the history of education has traversed a unique path in the last hundred years. The political influences guided the discipline, but at the same time, they were also contested and critiqued in equal measures. History of education as a discipline went through four distinct phases. The first phase coincided with the last stage of the…

Over the past 40 years, global tertiary expansion has been driven in part by the rise of the non-university sector. The growth of this sector, which includes vocational colleges, also contributes to increasingly diverse national higher education systems. Prior research has focused on inter-state variation in national systems, while very few…

This article analyses the transformation of Robert College, the first American college founded abroad, from 1923 to 1970. Based on a careful investigation of Robert College archives and personal accounts of the College staff, it contends that the school's missionary character acquired a new identity after the foundation of Republican Turkey.…

In the past two decades, the interdisciplinary push to denaturalise the concept of society has historicised the very object of social history. In this paper, I propose a way of studying the social history of education that eludes the presupposition of the social as a transcendental or pre-discursive object. My central claim is that it is possible…