Education in Conflict: Postwar School Buildings of Cyprus

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 68-76
Author(s):  
Sevil Aydınlık ◽  
Hıfsiye Pulhan

The terms cyprus, conflict, crisis and war have been almost inextricably intertwined throughout the history of this Mediterranean island. The education system played an important role socially and school buildings played an important role visually first in the dissemination of nationalism when the ethno-nationalist movements within the turkish and greek-cypriot communities increased dramatically under British colonial rule (1878-1960), and later in the dissemination of internationalism in the mid-twentieth century. Despite the increased conflict and nationalism, which was reflected by neo-greek architectural elements, the striking impact of the international style turned school buildings into representations of the communities' attitudes towards modernism. By the mid-1940s these attitudes towards modernism also served as a latent way for communities' identity struggles and for the sovereignty of each community to exist. After world war ii the style embodied by many school buildings conveyed science-based modern thought; modernization attempts for political, economic and social reforms; and the strong commitment of the first modernist cypriot architects to the spirit of the time and the philosophy of the modern. Under this scope, postwar school buildings in cyprus are identified as unique artifacts transformed from an ‘ethnicity-based' image into an ‘environment-based' form that is more associated with the modernization, decolonization and nation-building processes from which local nuances of mainstream modernism emerged. At this point the modernization process of the state, identity struggles of the communities and architects' modernist attempts could be interpreted as providing a fertile ground for new social and architectural experiments, and could answer questions about how postwar school architecture managed to avoid reference to historical, ethnic and religious identities when there was an intentional exacerbation of hostility between the two ethnic communities and about school buildings predominantly followed principles of the international style even though both the greek and turkish-cypriot education systems were instrumental in strengthening local nationalisms and even ethnic tensions.

2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-66
Author(s):  
Diane M. Watters

The transformation in Catholic schooling after the Education (Scotland) Act, 1918, is widely recognised. But research on the building of Catholic schools, beginning with the early decades of the nineteenth century, has not yet been done to a level that can support the claim that the ‘greatest impact’ on building was the transfer of voluntary Catholic primaries to the education authorities. By contrast with the history of Catholic education, there has been no thematic study of Scotland's historic school architecture. The aim here is to address that gap, and provide a foundation for further study, by tracing the early development of Catholic school buildings down to the Education (Scotland) Act, 1872. Educational historians have maintained the narrative that, before 1872, many school buildings were ‘little more than hovels’, and the date of 1918 has been identified as the watershed for improvement. That view is challenged.


Author(s):  
Dale Allen Gyure

The literature of school architecture tends to break in two different directions. On one hand, practical advice guides written by architects and educators date back to the middle third of the 19th century; they were supplemented by a continuous stream of articles relating to design issues in educators’ and architects’ professional journals. By the early 20th century, they developed into extensively illustrated records of contemporary school buildings and design standards. These design guides continue to be published today, often with brief historical analyses included, in recognition of the specialty field that school architecture has become. The other trend for school architecture literature is toward historical analysis. This path has been less vigorously pursued, however, and architectural histories of schools, their spaces, and equipment appeared infrequently until the 1990s. Today, the importance of school buildings, and the many functional, inspirational, and symbolic roles they play, is widely accepted. Scholars have favored post–World War II schools over counterparts from other times, and, in general, the 20th century has been more popular with historians than previous periods. The consistent narrative in these works has involved the impact of evolving ideas about educational theory and practice on architectural spaces. As more histories are published, the field is broadening beyond its long-standing emphasis on American and English topics and the dominance of English-language publications. This collection of sources, which looks only at primary and secondary education, unfortunately reflects that Anglo-American orientation.


Author(s):  
Daniel Töpper ◽  
Fanny Isensee

The history of school buildings is commonly written as a history of architecture, focusing on outstanding architects and buildings. However, the connection between pedagogical-administrative prescriptions and educational architecture has been studied less, particularly in the nineteenth century. This article highlights the often-overlooked agency of school technicians and proposes to interpret the nineteenth-century history of building schools as a history of implementing pedagogical-administrative objectives. The design of schools followed the inner differentiation of school curricula, at the same time being affected by the growth of school sizes prompted by school management structures and their efficiency aims. We will show how in larger cities the initial one-classroom schools developed into multiple-classroom buildings, taking on their final form in “grand school buildings”. The organizational developments tried and tested here would later become the national standard, with rural schools following with a certain delay. In order to grasp the emergence of the phenomena of these “grand school buildings” we combine the Prussian and US-American cases in their transatlantic connection  in order to comprehend the transnational dimension of school building norms. Being closely connected through mutual observation, the US and Prussian contexts established two decisive aspects: in the Prussian case, the division into separate classrooms as functional units of school construction was implemented, while in the United States additional school rooms such as the assembly hall and specific subject-related rooms were introduced. “Grand school buildings” initiated the interest of the architectural profession, leading to negotiations between school technicians and architects.


Author(s):  
C. Claire Thomson

This chapter traces the early history of state-sponsored informational filmmaking in Denmark, emphasising its organisation as a ‘cooperative’ of organisations and government agencies. After an account of the establishment and early development of the agency Dansk Kulturfilm in the 1930s, the chapter considers two of its earliest productions, both process films documenting the manufacture of bricks and meat products. The broader context of documentary in Denmark is fleshed out with an account of the production and reception of Poul Henningsen’s seminal film Danmark (1935), and the international context is accounted for with an overview of the development of state-supported filmmaking in the UK, Italy and Germany. Developments in the funding and output of Dansk Kulturfilm up to World War II are outlined, followed by an account of the impact of the German Occupation of Denmark on domestic informational film. The establishment of the Danish Government Film Committee or Ministeriernes Filmudvalg kick-started aprofessionalisation of state-sponsored filmmaking, and two wartime public information films are briefly analysed as examples of its early output. The chapter concludes with an account of the relations between the Danish Resistance and an emerging generation of documentarists.


Author(s):  
Charles S. Maier ◽  
Charles S. Maier

The author, one of the most prominent contemporary scholars of European history, published this, his first book, in 1975. Based on extensive archival research, the book examines how European societies progressed from a moment of social vulnerability to one of political and economic stabilization. Arguing that a common trajectory calls for a multi country analysis, the book provides a comparative history of three European nations—France, Germany, and Italy—and argues that they did not simply return to a prewar status quo, but achieved a new balance of state authority and interest group representation. While most previous accounts presented the decade as a prelude to the Depression and dictatorships, the author suggests that the stabilization of the 1920s, vulnerable as it was, foreshadowed the more enduring political stability achieved after World War II. The immense and ambitious scope of this book, its ability to follow diverse histories in detail, and its effort to explain stabilization—and not just revolution or breakdown—have made it a classic of European history.


Author(s):  
Erika Lorraine Milam

After World War II, the question of how to define a universal human nature took on new urgency. This book charts the rise and precipitous fall in Cold War America of a theory that attributed man's evolutionary success to his unique capacity for murder. The book reveals how the scientists who advanced this “killer ape” theory capitalized on an expanding postwar market in intellectual paperbacks and widespread faith in the power of science to solve humanity's problems, even to answer the most fundamental questions of human identity. The killer ape theory spread quickly from colloquial science publications to late-night television, classrooms, political debates, and Hollywood films. Behind the scenes, however, scientists were sharply divided, their disagreements centering squarely on questions of race and gender. Then, in the 1970s, the theory unraveled altogether when primatologists discovered that chimpanzees also kill members of their own species. While the discovery brought an end to definitions of human exceptionalism delineated by violence, the book shows how some evolutionists began to argue for a shared chimpanzee–human history of aggression even as other scientists discredited such theories as sloppy popularizations. A wide-ranging account of a compelling episode in American science, the book argues that the legacy of the killer ape persists today in the conviction that science can resolve the essential dilemmas of human nature.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-41
Author(s):  
Maftuna Sanoqulova ◽  

This article consists of the politics which connected with oil in Saudi Arabia after the World war II , the relations of economical cooperations on this matter and the place of oil in the history of world economics


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 62-75
Author(s):  
Yulia V. Lobacheva

This article aims to consider how Serbian scholars/historians approach to the study of Serbian women in the history of the independent Serbian state and the Serbian society in 1878–1918 at the current stage of the research (from the beginning of 1990th until 2017). This paper will give an overview of some of the main areas of historical studies considering Serbian women’s “being and life”. For example the historiography on history of “women’s question” including women’s movement and/or feminism will be considered as well as biographical research, the study of women’s position through the lens of the modernization process in Serbia in the 19th and 20th Century, Serbian women’s issues in gender studies and through the history of everyday and private life and family, the analysis of the perception of Serbian woman by outside observers including the study of the image of Serbian woman created/constructed by “others”.


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