The wonderful thing about the history of education as a field of study is the permeability of its boundaries, its intellectual squishiness, the expansiveness of its definitions of education and history-doing, and its capacity to tie scholarly pursuit and social imperatives so closely together. As historians, we have, I believe, been uncommonly sensitive to issues of compelling political and ethical importance in education, a sensitivity which shows in the ways in which we have engaged our work. Consider the content of presidential addresses to the History of Education Society (HES) over the last decade, a wonderful thing to do by the way, since presidential addresses are an evocative and creative genre in our craft. Dazzlingly diverse in focus and content, those addresses have almost unvaryingly constructed ways to enlarge the reach of our field in ways that join it to the cause of social justice, civic reconstruction, school reform, a free press, and new modes of both conceiving and informing public policy. They constitute essays in social criticism as well as historical exploration.

An innovative minority of elementary schoolteachers in the big cities of Imperial Germany embraced the principles of progressive education early in the twentieth century, many years before those reforms were widely introduced in urban public schools under the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. From the 1890s on, proposals for the reform of the socially stratified educational system and the traditional pedagogy were widely discussed in the meetings and newspapers of the German Teachers’ Association. Progressive educational reform became an organized movement from 1908 on, with the founding of the League for School Reform and the creation of an office within the German Teachers’ Association for the promotion of modern pedagogy. The avant-garde of this movement—teachers in the big cities who were predominantly left-wing liberals and Protestants—were a small part of the elementary school teaching profession, but they exercised an influence in their professional society out of proportion to their numbers. In 1912, representatives at the national congress of the German Teachers’ Association adopted a resolution supporting the neue Pädagogik, as progressive education was called at that time. Why did some public elementary schoolteachers take up the political fight for democratic school reforms and become exponents of the “new pedagogy”? Where did the educational theories for the Arbeitsschule, as Germany's child-centered and active-learning school was called, come from? An investigation of these questions can deepen our knowledge of the origins of the progressive education movement in Germany and enhance our appreciation of John Dewey's contemporaries in the movement on the European continent. This research also adds a new dimension to recent historical interpretations of Imperial Germany in the years before the First World War as “a society of reform movements,” a society in which bourgeois professionals and civil servants who were politically critical of the traditional norms and institutions of the established order took the initiative to create organizations devoted to reform.

Due to the complex, contingent relationship among schooled knowledges, cultural hegemony, and oppositionally constructed ethnic identities in Ireland, attempts to bridge the divide between Catholics and Protestants through integrated schooling have largely failed. Scholarly analysis of this failure has been overwhelming dominated by historian Donald Akenson, whose books provide a comprehensive macro-level outline of the structure and context of Irish education from the late eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Akenson's pioneering research has provided a foundation for scholars with micro-level approaches to “fill in the gaps with material gathered from individual national school classrooms.”