For over forty years, presidents of the Summer School Association of Queen’s University wrote annually to teachers across Canada, encouraging them to attend summer courses for credit toward a bachelor of arts. In the 1920s, presidents’ messages associated attendance with societal progress and the professionalization of teaching. In the 1930s, such messages linked attendance with personal growth and career development. In the 1940s and 1950s, they linked attendance with having an enjoyable summer vacation. This article analyzes how and why these messages evolved and argues that the underlying structure of the messages remained consistent: they were means through which Queen’s Summer School Association presidents marked symbolic boundaries between more and less professional teachers. This article contributes to our understanding of the social history of teacher education by interpreting a unique primary data source to explore the participation of teachers themselves in the construction of symbolic boundaries marking professional status.

The University of British Columbia (UBC) opened Canada’s first International House (I-House) in 1959 after a decade of activism from students and faculty. Students had demanded an I-House to help them find housing, and to ensure that “brotherhood may prevail,” as the I-House motto promised. The I-House campaign received support from community groups that raised the funds to build the UBC I-House. UBC’s administration wanted I-House as a social center that could coordinate fledgling international student services and resisted the residential I-House model. Ultimately, UBC’s administrators won out and the residential component was never built. This paper examines the conflict about building a residence to house international and domestic students together, chronicling the competing visions of international student policy and services that were circulating at one of Canada’s largest universities in the early days of the Cold War.

In the United States and Europe, para-university institutions have often been viewed as postsecondary institutions that satisfy some needs not addressed by universities. Such para-universities might be technical institutes or research centers affiliated with a parent university and/or a nation-state. In stateless nations, however, para-universities have acquired certain characteristics that, compared with nation-states, distinguish them in their rationale and development. In the Basque Country of Spain, the Basque Studies Society—an institution not born from, or linked to, any parent university—sought to unite the promotion of science and indigenous culture with a demand for educational and political autonomy. The Basque case reveals instructive contrasts that separate para-university practice from that of its European and American counterparts. This article analyzes para-university practice and activities during the first two decades of the Basque Studies Society (1918-1936). With its emphasis upon political autonomy as well as the absence of an established nation-state and the lack of a university that served as a base, this case study challenges traditional conceptions of the para-university in its essence and praxis.

The 1971 passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution was a significant step in advancing voting rights that offered a new route for young people to participate in public life. While met with enthusiasm in many quarters, the question of where a substantial segment of the youth vote—college students—would cast their ballots was a concern even before the amendment’s ratification. After ratification, it became a serious point of conflict, with opponents to college-town voting arguing that students should be forced to vote where their parents lived. In numerous towns these arguments turned to efforts to deny or complicate registration and voting, intimidate students, or gerrymander to reduce students’ influence. At times, these efforts were explicitly aimed at Black students. This article examines these efforts to prevent students from voting in their college towns in the 1970s, demonstrating that they could serve the strategy of disenfranchising the newly franchised.

From a Nordic and British perspective, the history of education is a vibrant field of knowledge production. It invites scholars from the humanities and social sciences to investigate the continuities and changes in education over time, as well as Bildung, nurturing, learning, and teaching. By underlining the breadth of the history of education and using Nordic and British examples, I argue that the field is not shrinking but growing. A broader definition of the field expands the field’s scope beyond historical studies of formal schooling. It also enhances the field’s significance and reveals how it has a meaningful role in research policy, and practice.

This article examines two venues where historians of education have in the past addressed serious, publicly significant questions: commissions of inquiry and courtrooms where education rights and educational injustices are litigated. The article argues that these two examples demonstrate historians’ particular skills and abilities as evidence-gatherers, clear communicators, strong generalists, and experts in making sense of change over time. The article also suggests that these particular skills and abilities can be the basis for historians’ continued contributions to answering questions of public significance.

In recent years, justices on the US Supreme Court have made explicit historical arguments about US schools in order to promote a broader role for religion in US public schools. For example, in Espinoza v. Montana (2020), Chief Justice Roberts cited the late historian Carl F. Kaestle to buttress his arguments, but did so in a way that misrepresented Kaestle’s nuanced account. This article compares the justices’ historical arguments to the best evidence from the historical record. The essay argues that historians of education—whatever their political beliefs—can and should guide policy by providing reliable, accurate historical information.

There are two different ways to seek relevance in the history of education field. One involves closely aligning with contemporary debates to offer a “ready-to-use” historical perspective to education system stakeholders. The other entails diverging from conventional problem frameworks to tackle commonly overlooked or unexplored questions. This requires drawing new perspectives, ideas and knowledge from other research fields.

Low and stagnant teacher pay has been a perennial issue in the United States public school system since the early decades of the nineteenth century. Women teachers, then as now, confronted the issue head-on by organizing together. For example, women primary school teachers in Boston, Massachusetts successfully petitioned for more pay in 1835, but an emerging policy to pay women less ensured that such victories would be few and far between. Nevertheless, we can draw two critical lessons from these women teachers and their petition. First, a broader understanding of historical context and gendered narratives about labor is necessary to confront the teacher pay crisis today. Second, sharing teachers’ stories from the past now can help shape policy debates on teacher pay, turning a crisis into a new vision for the teaching profession.

This essay considers the usefulness of history of education, first, through the history of Australian university-based teacher education and then through the history of how, in the postwar period of schooling expansion, the provision of public schooling was transformed discursively from a policy solution into a policy problem—with opposing viewpoints from “left” and “right” projected through the print media. With a particular focus on “conservative” critique, two contrasting snapshots are presented of public writing from the 1970s-1980s to illustrate how, by this period, the focus of public debate about education policy in Australia was no longer on the principles and logistics of widening access, but on questioning the trustworthiness of the schools themselves—what and how they were teaching the nation’s children. The essay concludes by proposing that history itself is constantly invoked in debates about schooling by people who are trying to explain what needs to be changed or preserved.

In this essay, we explore the concept of path dependence through the example of the long-standing issue of racialized exclusionary school discipline. We argue that historians of education can reduce policy makers’ tendency to continue down existing policy paths (especially unhelpful ones), a phenomenon known as path dependence. We use racialized school discipline as a case in point. We also argue, however, that path dependence as an analytical tool can be “too much of a good thing” because it discounts the viability of ever-present options to change course. The real challenge lies in creating processes of path alteration that impose costs on policymakers for readopting policies shown to have such deleterious effects.

In 2023, Claudia Goldin received the Nobel Prize for her groundbreaking research in economics. In this article, I use Goldin’s research to reflect on the role of history of education in academic research. I argue that Goldin’s remarkable achievement underscores the need for historians of education to reach a wider disciplinary audience in the humanities and social sciences. Goldin’s success lies not in isolating her focus to a subfield, but in connecting historical research to wider concerns in the discipline of economics. Goldin’s research thus reminds us of the skills required of historians of education: to understand the research interest and terminology of other research fields, and to use historical methods to address the key problems that those research fields explore. That is, we need to learn how to apply historical methods to what are essentially nonhistorical problems.