Studia Educationis Historica – serie

During the institutionalization of mass schooling in the 19th century, teaching large groups of children became both a necessity and a matter of regulation. For officials and inspectors the systematization of classroom interactions was important for effective results. However, while systematization could bring about the constant attention of children and their uninterrupted work, interactions themselves were difficult to control. Rationalized models of classroom organization provided alternatives for managing large groups before age grading became the dominant pattern of organizing interactions. The contributions in this volume explore diverse paths of transition towards modern classroom organization in different countries, allowing transnational perspectives and comparisons.

The research on educational history has traditionally focused on its institutional, political and pedagogical aspects, more or less habitually analyzing schooling as a top-down, adult-controlled phenomenon. Even if change has been visible during the last decades, there still remain important topics that are rarely discussed in the field. These topics include practices related to day-to-day school life that are not part of the formal curriculum or classroom routine, but which nevertheless allow pupils to become actively involved in their own schooling. This book provides historical case studies on such extracurricular and informal schooling processes. It argues that the awareness of such topics is essential to our understanding of school settings – in both past and present.

New polities emerged during the processes of decolonization. The break with the colonial past was not only political, but also more general. While conventional wisdom defines education as a field of action reproducing society in time, decolo-nization placed broader and more radical demands on the field: to produce a new society. For this purpose, new forms of education and schooling were required, although the importance of inherited institutions and practices in education were still significant. This collection of chapters offers scholarly insights into this problem by covering different processes of decolonization and the challenges of education in the last two hundred years.

Large scale assessment influences national and international educational policy debates and reforms. Assessment data is increasingly used as a government instrument. However, within the contemporary realm of the current global testing regime both the cultural and the historical conditions of assessment are often neglected. This volume is therefore devoted to the reconstruction of "assessment cultures" (interpretation patterns, discourses, instruments, practices) and their involved groups of actors. The contributions cover examples of Western European, Eurasian, East Asian, Latin, and North American as well as international settings and refer to epochs ranging from the early modern period up to the current context.

This present work brings to light the educational project developed by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC) during the period of the armed liberation struggle against the Portuguese colonial regime in Guinea Bissau (1963-1974). The work goes further to explore the practices of education in the period after independence until 1978. It includes an extended analysis of reports and printed material produced by the PAIGC, and expands its sources to oral testimonies, exploring the individual and collective experiences on education under the colonial regime, that finally led the Party militants to develop their concept, practices and materials for the militant education project. An invaluable contribution to the history of education in Guinea Bissau in specific and African and World history of education in general, the present work leads the reader through the paths of education during e colonialism, and the challenges to the process of decolonize education during and after the armed conflict for independence and liberation.

During the struggles for independence in the global south, education became an important motor of emancipation. The postcolonial countries put the development of a democratic and de-racialized educational system on the agenda of urgent problems to be solved. In the course of this development, many cooperative education projects were undertaken between established socialist countries, including the Soviet Union, East Germany and Cuba, and African countries, Southern and Northern Asian countries, countries of the Middle East, and Latin American countries.Socialist Educational Cooperation and the Global South brings together a variety of topics, perspectives, and research approaches in this heterogeneous field, integrating for the first time a very broad interdisciplinary discourse and offering new insights into this important component of socialist globalization.

The book explores the ideologization, political instrumentalization and sovietization of educational sciences in Eastern and Central Europe following World War II, with a particular focus on the 1950s. Amid the revolutionary transformation of communist society and under Moscow's influence, educational sciences were positioned as instruments for shaping the "New Soviet Man". However, this process of subordinating science to political-ideological objectives was not uniform across the Eastern Bloc. The authors examine the tensions between continuity and rupture in the emerging "new order of science," navigating the interplay between national traditions and the Soviet model of "best practices." The book employs a transnational comparative approach, drawing on methodologies for analysing scientific transfer and policy of borrowing-lending. Through discursive and content analysis of primary sources it provides a nuanced understanding of how educational sciences were reshaped under Soviet influence.