Understanding innovation and change towards a more humanistic education, the key lies in people, personalities and relationships. To counter ingrained assumptions about the need for uniformity, reg...

This weighty volume of 36 chapters in 600 pages presents an ambitious range of scholarship, introduced by its editors with a compact but thought-provoking historiographical overview, rationalising ...

This chapter introduces a focus on the arts. It considers the influences on Alec Clegg's progressive philosophy, and his distinctive application of this in his role as Chief Education Officer. The chapter reviews for Clegg's ultimate interest in effective and enjoyable learning, acknowledging the controversies aroused by 'progressivism' in education. It discusses the progressive role of art in the curriculum, against a wider background of progressivism and the arts in society. Though many factors were at work in place and time, much of the credit for change in the West Riding was due to Clegg's idealism, leadership qualities and administrative skill. Progressive principles, such as child-centredness, curriculum reform and concern for the school environment, ran through his administration, guiding its development and innovations. Clegg's gift of communicating progressive pedagogy was reflected in his art of using language.

Visual images played an increasing role in professional discourse and in popular and political debate about progressive education over a century or more. In the early 1900s photography was adopted by some progressive texts to convey new ideas illustrated by practice. This paper highlights an iconic example: John and Evelyn Dewey's celebrated Schools of To-Morrow (1915), with reference to a small selection of its photographic illustrations. Consideration is given to how images were constructed, their status as historical evidence and issues of interpretation. Comparison is made with other illustrated works, preceding and following Schools of To-Morrow, by advocates of child- or student-centred pedagogies. The article urges critical reflection on visual representation in arguments for and against progressivism in more recent times. Insights drawn from earlier examples should be borne in mind by historians seeking to evaluate the role of pictorial sources in discourses of pedagogical reform.

This article aims to reflect on space, time and education in two distinct but related ways: space and time as components of pedagogy, focusing on drama in the curriculum, where space and time frame language and gesture in a complex mode of communication; and as dimensions of historiographical analysis of the evolution of educational policies and practices. Considering progressive innovations of teaching through drama in Britain and Japan, we explore relationships across space and time, drawing on documentary and mainly published evidence. For primary sources we draw on the writing of individuals such as Shoyo Tsubouchi and Kuniyoshi Obara in Japan, Harriet Finlay-Johnson and Henry Caldwell Cook in Britain. We identify a number of progressive schools, their enterprise and experiments, and consider the role of national and international forums. Sources include professional journals in English and Japanese languages, the New Education Fellowship, its conferences and its journal New Era as vehicles for exchange. Taking a critical approach to historiography, the article refers to more recent pedagogical discourse and historical scholarship by Takeo Fujikura, Manami Yoda, Gavin Bolton, Mary Bowmaker and Helen Nicholson. It concludes by considering lessons for education history, and legacies for drama in education, reflecting on current challenges for school drama in light of its past.

Operation Pied Piper is a curious title for this book. It was a code name invented by British civil servants whose education in independent schools had endowed them with literary interests. But as ...

Author Anthony Ryle introduces his wartime adolescent diaries with a modest account of his father’s occupation as necessary context. A physician at Guy’s Hospital, London, John Ryle was from 1935 R...

edited by Sjaak Braster, Ian Grosvenor and Maria del Mar del Pozo Andres, Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2011, 330 pp., £27.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-90-5201-760-0 What is the ‘culture of the classroo...

"The making and shaping of the Victorian teacher: a comparative new cultural history." History of Education, 42(5), pp. 677–678