Higher Education in Modern Europe

This chapter explores the history of higher education in Europe by considering three intersected dimensions: the global, national, and local spaces or geography of higher education; the contours of the higher education system regarding access, participation, and institutional differentiation; and the cultural, political, social, and economic rationales driving its expansion. Four historical periods are considered: the emergence of the medieval universities and their spread in the feudal order; the demands posed to universities by nation-states and the Enlightenment during the early modern period; the impact of the political and industrial revolutions; and the crisis of mass higher education since 1918. Overall, articulation among the rationales, shapes, and spaces of higher education has changed periodically across history.

National Education Systems

With British colonization from the late eighteenth century came attempts to school indigenous and nonindigenous populations in ways familiar to colonizers. This was so in Australia and New Zealand. Writing histories that respect the indigenous experience of education has been a challenge. Mainstream historiography concentrated on the growth of schools and school systems as they provided for the colonizing populations from Britain. Colonial and postcolonial struggles among private interests, churches, and the state over schooling were the common subjects of research. Beginning in the 1970s revisionist historians have often written in terms of social history. Relationships between schooling and different social classes, indigenous students, teachers, and girls and women students often inform more recent writing. Traditional biographies of educators, histories of schools and school systems, and curriculum and pedagogy have not been neglected, but the influence of recent international historiography has impacted research into the history of education in Australia and New Zealand.

Precolonial Indigenous Education in the Western Hemisphere and Pacific

Before widespread colonization began in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere and Pacific were agriculturalists and land and seaside managers who hunted and fished; they were brilliant scientists; they were artists and musicians; they were politicians; they were historians and geographers; they were adaptive economic players; and, importantly, they were exceptionally diverse. Much of the scholarship examining these achievements has been political and anthropological, not educational. How can this be? By following different forms of evidence down an array of disciplinary paths, scholars can consider epistemological questions orienting how peoples past and present have made sense of their worlds and their learning. And by examining the residual evidence of learning through the processes of place-making at the junctures of geography, oral tradition, and architecture, as well as agronomy and crop creation and various forms of knowledge construction, porous histories of indigenous education take shape.

The History of School Teachers and Administrators

This chapter is an overarching historical narrative of the development of the occupations of teaching and school administration, focusing on the history of educators who have worked as elementary and secondary public school teachers and local school administrators. The emphasis is on the historical development of Anglo and Anglo American education, with notations of patterns of change in a more global context. The chapter discusses the nature of research on the history of educators, and then introduces three themes that mark the history of teachers and school administrators: the creation of state systems of education, the troubled history of professionalization of education, and the historical relationship of public school educators to the state.

Race and Ethnicity in Education History

This chapter examines race and ethnicity in educational history in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, and Brazil. Differentiation and segregation based on race, religion, gender, ability, and socioeconomic class, were common features in designing school systems to promote a nation’s efforts toward citizenship. In the United States and elsewhere, efforts to inculcate norms of democratic citizenship were equally fraught with means to deculturalize minority, immigrant, and indigenous populations. As such, this chapter focuses primarily on racialized minority populations and limitations of access to public schooling centered on democratic citizenship. It surveys educational policies and practices from the colonial era through the mid-twentieth century, examining the role of religion, immigration, language, countries of origin, and race. It also discusses how schooling systems have prepared future citizenry for diversity.

Education and Migration in History

Although the historiography of migrant education is, in many ways, problematic—especially the lack of historical literature for many regions of the world—general patterns do arise. As nation-states and their educational systems began to emerge and develop in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the schooling of migrant children often focused on assimilating them into the national culture. In the decades following the Second World War, the heavy-handed acculturation began to give way to more multicultural notions of schooling, although, in practice, multicultural education often simplified cultural differences and continued, albeit in different ways, to demand a sort of conformity to the new national, multicultural norms, thus undermining a true acceptance of all migrant populations.

Higher Education in Asia

This chapter examines national systems of higher education in Asia. Asia’s long history, together with its extraordinary diversity, presents dual challenges to the historian. While its past still haunts its present, its many religious influences and ethnicities, as well as an array of more current developments, also present challenges. Two common themes are the attempt to balance local traditions while incorporating knowledge from outside, largely the West, and the differential development of individual Asian higher education systems. The latter is now bringing change to earlier core-periphery distinctions. The global knowledge system is now much more multipolar, with the rise of China as the most obvious example. Nonetheless, while highly developed educational systems such as in Singapore compete vigorously internationally, middle-income states such as Thailand and Malaysia harbor ambitions that are not always fulfilled, and very poor systems still struggle with basic issues of finance, governance, access, and equity.

National Education Systems

Crafting educational systems suitable for the African context remains a challenge today, as it was for colonial administrators and educators. Despite changes from the era of missionary education to today’s secular nation-states, there are significant continuities that require the attention of researchers and policymakers. The promise of education as a bridge to modernity for rural populations through welfare policies of the postwar era has been threatened by the emphasis on market-based policies and “cost recovery” programs in economically weak states since the 1980s. A key limitation to creative policy development is to be found in the presentism of much policy development. The current challenge is for researchers and policymakers to explore the history of education in Africa in a search for approaches that promote equity through education.

National Education Systems

This chapter focuses on the rise of national education systems in Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It draws on five countries by way of example: Japan, China, Iran, India, and Malaysia. The chapter examines, in turn, the particular circumstances in each country that propelled it toward the establishment of national education, as well as the myriad actors, on both the national and the local level, who had a hand in implementing educational reform. It emphasizes the universal concerns and challenges faced by each country, in particular how to incorporate foreign models of education with indigenous, including local religious, values and methods in its quest for modernization, self-determination, and the creation of a citizenry with a common ethos. Finally, the chapter points out that countries that were colonized had a somewhat different trajectory of educational reform than countries that were not.

Consensus and Revisionism in Educational History

Historical interpretation is subject to change, a process often described as revisionism. This chapter distinguishes between a basic form of revisionism that changes or erases the past with no respect for evidence and a “historical revisionism” that has developed over the past century to build on, revise, or challenge previous accounts of the past. Historical revisionism is discussed with reference to changing historiographical approaches. It has become central to research in the history of education, for example in the United States and Britain. A broad consensus has been established in the history of education to explore the relationship between education and social change, although this has itself led to fresh debates over the nature of this relationship. These general historiographical developments in the history of education have played themselves out in different nations and regions, albeit at their own pace and at different times.