India currently has a population of 1.38 billion people. It's the most populous democracy in the world, the US a distant second. As such, India is home to more schools (1.5 million), students (250 million), and teachers (9.7 million), as well as more postsecondary faculty (1.5 million) and institutions (55,000) than just about anywhere in the world. The sheer numbers are staggering, and the historical research possibilities appear endless.Footnote 1
Despite these figures, History of Education Quarterly has published exactly one research article on India since the journal's founding. That sole article, “An Examination of Some Forces Affecting English Educational Policies in India: 1780–1850,” appeared more than fifty years ago. Its lead author, Nancy L. Adams, was a graduate student in comparative education at the time, and her study focused on how the East India Company approached education in India through its charters. From Adams's research, we learn of the political, religious, and commercial forces that pressed the company to “do something for the natives.” The pressure at first resulted in commitments to protect missionaries involved with religious education from potential violent attack. Later, the company's charter evolved to introduce commitments to not only “moral improvement” but also “useful knowledge.” Adams's history takes readers up to the start of official English education policy in India with the rise of formal funding and appropriation structures. Although a promising start, this represents the only known publication from the author on Indian education.Footnote 2
The lack of research on India in HEQ has left our readers with a substantial blind spot. Historians interested in the topic have turned to other sources like Paedagogica Historica, History of Education (UK), and the History of Education Review. But even there, scholars find slim pickings. Each of these journals has published less—in some cases far less—than two dozen histories squarely about Indian education. Paedagogica Historica has focused on Indian revolts against British rule, women's schooling and identity, intellectual transfer and exchange, language and writing education, and caste, class, and colonialism. History of Education (UK) has highlighted Indian education and missionary work, the role of governmental and non-governmental organizations, formal and non-formal education, and the politics of war and colonial empire-building. And History of Education Review has directed its attention to Indian education and social service culture, knowledge exchanges, and femininity and morality.Footnote 3
Articles published by these three journals on Indian education provide a foundation for further historical research. But they represent a small fraction of their overall back catalogues. Paedagogica Historica, History of Education (UK), and History of Education Review have each been in operation for decades. Collectively, HEQ and these three peer journals have printed more than two hundred volumes, thousands of articles, and hundreds of thousands of pages of historical research. Between them, a mere forty articles have focused on India. Arguably, we have much more to learn from this significant share of the world's students, educators, and administrators about their experience with constancy and change.Footnote 4
No journal, of course, can serve all fields and subfields equally well. Specialization has its merits. For researchers wanting to learn about history of education in the world's second largest democracy, HEQ has been the indispensable journal. Since its first volume, HEQ has helped define the contours, questions, and debates at the heart of understanding education history in the US and, to a lesser extent, abroad. It has created a space for thinking through some of the thorniest problems for generations of historians interested in formal and non-formal education. And it has provided a platform for making substantive and methodological advances to the field.
At the same time, what about India? If demography, globalization, and climate science tell us anything, it's that India merits far more attention, generally, than it has received to date. For those of us with the privilege to study and learn about the past, India should occupy a prominent place in our “urgent but understudied” folders. While most of us will never have the opportunity to travel to India or sift through its archives, we have much to gain from those who can and do. At the very least, developing a historical perspective on India elevates our understanding of what it means to think globally about equity and inclusion.Footnote 5
With this special issue, HEQ turns its attention to the Asia-Pacific region. Parimala V. Rao kicks things off with a provocative reflection on “Miseducation in India.” HEQ's editorial team is delighted to introduce readers to Dr. Rao, one the journal's newest editorial board members, who uses her essay to examine the factors contributing to “ignorance” about India's educational past.
As if responding to Rao's timely call for more research, two feature articles in this issue focus on India, and specifically on India's engagement with ideas from abroad. In “Montessori Education in India,” Mira Debs skillfully tells a story of knowledge exchange and transfer, tracing the means by which the seeds of what was originally an Italian approach to educating young people took root in new soil. Similarly, Mimi Hanaoka's “Syed Ross Masood and Japan” explores the way that an Indian official—Hyderabad's director of public instruction—made sense of what he learned on a fact-finding journey that took him four thousand miles from home. Following Masood's travels, we can see how the ideas of mass education and modernity transcended borders in the early twentieth century, reminding us of the J. Robert Oppenheimer quip that “the best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person.”Footnote 6 Each of these works helps us better understand India by way of the people and ideas that coursed across its territory, often from different parts of the globe.
Two other articles in this issue pick up on the theme of international connectedness in the broader Asia-Pacific region. In “Missionary Foebelians,” Yukiyo Nishida tracks the evolution of imported ideas about curriculum and instruction, specifically looking at how an American missionary in Japan, Annie L. Howe, framed European theory. Howe's sustained efforts at interpreting German educational values for Japanese audiences spanned four decades, offering insight into the social and cultural reception of ideas. And in “The Mainstreaming of Italian,” authors John Hajek, Renata Aliani, and Yvette Slaughter chart the introduction of Italian language classes as a means of cultural preservation in Australia. Despite having a relatively small Italian immigrant population, Australia has the world's largest number of students studying the language. How did that come to pass? And what does it mean? In answering those questions, the authors touch on many of the same themes found elsewhere in the issue.
The articles in this special issue on the Asia-Pacific region offer a formidable contribution to research—one that chips away at known unknowns in our field. Taken together, they also stand as a welcome invitation. The contributors invite us on a journey across a massive triangle, with India, Japan, and Australia at its vertices. They invite us to recast our understanding of education history by focusing on a region with an outsized portion of the world's population. And they invite us to reimagine ourselves as members of the global education community with a shared past and an interconnected future.
