This article focuses on American educator Dr. Beryl Parker's field studies in Turkiye (1932-1934) and her 1934 Report on Primary Education in Turkiye. While scholarship often traces Parker's work to John Dewey's 1924 report, this article reconstructs her work as a hybrid negotiation of American progressive vision and Turkish realities - rural poverty, centralised bureaucracy and ideological nation-building. The study examines Parker's critique of extravagant school buildings, the essence of the teacher, and her National Education Laboratories spirit. Considering Parker's work at Ankara College and her contemporaneous press, I assert that the educational transfer is more than theoretical. It is a field practice of localisation. This article aims to help reposition Parker in the Turkish educational historiography as a pragmatic pedagogical mediator.
The establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918 brought questions about the character of the new state to the fore. Leading intellectuals posed these questions explicitly, but they also emerged in everyday communication, including discussions about university students. In particular contexts, various actors associated students with the future of the state itself, seeing them as a future intelligentsia expected to occupy important positions. This article shows that such representations were not necessarily confined to rhetorical or symbolic expression. They could enter debates over practical concerns of student institutions and thereby become relevant to financial decision-making and institutional planning. Drawing on Serge Moscovici's theory of social representations, the article traces this process through three cases involving Prague student dormitories in the 1920s: a debate over food, a sculpture and the construction of a new dormitory for poor students whose ambitious plans ultimately made it unaffordable to many of its intended residents.
At independence, the task of educating India's masses was tied to the imagination of the young country as a democracy. It was also key to fostering the changes in agricultural practices necessary to feed a hungry nation. This article surveys adult education more broadly, and then narrows in on two experiments on the use of radio and then television for adult education. With some aid from UNESCO, these new forms of media also promised a novel pedagogy for India's population. Programmes for the new India delivered what their social scientist designers understood to be "new knowledge" through entertaining programmes. The article charts the amazement of the social scientists - Indian and western - conducting this experiment, as their expectations about India's passive, stagnant and homogenous population were upended. It includes a discussion of what these experiments reveal about India's approach to international aid, and to Indian socialism.
