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.

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.

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.

This article explores how childbirth shaped the information networks that London Missionary Society missionaries helped develop between Britain and the South Pacific from the late eighteenth century. As Evangelical missionaries experienced challenging births in the South Pacific, they sought new forms of cultural knowledge, which they recorded in their reports to the society. Part of these knowledge networks included books on medicine and midwifery that the missionaries ordered from Britain. From the 1820s, moreover, some missionaries came to collate early forms of ethnographical and anthropological research on Pacific peoples, which examined indigenous ways of birth and postnatal care.

Starting in the late nineteenth century, the teaching profession became increasingly feminized. This article examines the results of this process, exploring the working and living conditions of rural female primary school teachers with a focus on the experiences of loneliness, harassment, and violence that they suffered in early twentieth-century Sweden. By investigating the public debate on these issues 1900–1940, we found that two main threats to the well-being of female teachers were identified: isolation and the threat of male violence. Male politicians as well as female authors and teachers acknowledged that female teachers faced loneliness, anxiety, and possible threats from violent men. The consequences of these threats were both emotional and practical, but the debate focused to a large extent on practical solutions such as providing the teachers with telephones, guard dogs, or weapons.

Mīrzā Ḥasan Rushdīyeh (1860(?)–1944) was a lower-ranking Azeri-Iranian cleric, constitutionalist, and educational reformer who was a major pioneer of new (jadīd) primary schools in Iran. This article shows that in 1889 Rushdīyeh, through training he had received in Beirut, introduced new schools into Iran based on changed pedagogy and modern disciplines. It argues that although the schools drew fierce opposition from maktab custodians and certain Qajar courtiers, they gradually increased in authority until the Reza Shah state appropriated them, with some modifications, as normative schooling called the dabestān. In English and Persian scholarship, we lack a substantial history of Rushdīyeh’s new schools. Drawing on previously unexamined sources, including his Iran and Ottoman diaries, this article examines Rushdīyeh’s educational work in the broader intellectual and political history of the period.

Federal agents, church officials, and education reformers have long used schooling as a weapon to eliminate Indigenous people; at the same time, Indigenous individuals and communities have long repurposed schooling to protect tribal sovereignty, reconstitute their communities, and shape Indigenous futures. Joining scholarship that speaks to Indigenous perspectives on schooling, this paper offers seven touchpoints from Native nations since the 1830s in which Indigenous educators repurposed “schooling” as a technology to advance Indigenous interests. Together, these stories illustrate the broad diversity of Native educators’ multifaceted engagements with schooling and challenge settler colonialism's exclusive claim on schools. Though the outcomes of their efforts varied, these experiments with schooling represent Indigenous educators’ underappreciated innovations in the history of education in the United States.