In recent years, the history of knowledge has consolidated into a vital field that examines how knowledge is produced, mediated, circulated, and contested. Rooted in the history of science, cultural history, book history, intellectual history, and the history of ideas, it has become a significant area of study since the mid-2010s. Yet despite the important role of education as an arena for the circulation of knowledge—and for deciding and legitimising what is considered worth knowing—the history of education did not initially play a prominent role in shaping the field. This is changing as an increasing number of educational historians engage with the history of knowledge. The two fields have developed in parallel. This creates significant opportunities for synthesis.

The five-day school week with Saturdays off was introduced in Swedish schools in 1968. The decision was preceded by a debate in which the student voice was unusually present, not least through a nationwide vote among students in 1959. The vote was widely covered in the media, with several newspaper articles, radio, and TV programs. In this chapter, I will discuss how students were given a voice during the debate over the five-day week, between the years 1958 and 1968, from when the issue was first raised to when it was finally introduced in 1968. I will discuss three ways in which students’ voices were heard: the referendum, the Student parliament and a government inquiry. These examples represent three fundamentally different ways in which the student voice reached the public sphere: direct democracy, representative democracy, and polling.

The 1891 International Gymnastics Festival, Sweden’s first international sports event and five years before the first modern Olympic Games, was hugely controversial. Many people argued that hosting the festival threatened the survival of Sweden’s own “Ling gymnastics” and even Swedish culture itself. These critics feared that hosting the competition, which would be shaped by outside influence, in turn would disadvantage Ling gymnastics and reduce confidence in a system that Swedes had believed to be the best in the world. The episode illustrates the complications arising from the emergence of international athletic competition and the underlying tension between nationalist and internationalist considerations.

The History of Education as History of Knowledge brings together international scholars to explore how the emerging field of the history of knowledge can enrich the well-established history of education. While recent research in the history of knowledge has examined actors, practices, and institutions of knowledge, this volume is the first to focus systematically on sources and methodologies within the context of education.

Covering the modern period, the chapters investigate a wide range of case studies—from kindergartens and teachers’ associations to philosophical societies and transnational transfers of solidified knowledge. Together they demonstrate how shifting perspectives on sources and methods allow historians to examine knowledge in its plural forms: produced, mediated, contested, and circulated within and beyond educational institutions.

Emphasising how knowledge is bound up with power relations, this book shows how hierarchies of gender, class, race, and ethnicity have shaped what counts as educational knowledge and how it is transmitted. In addition to empirical studies, contributors critically reflect on methodological approaches drawn from intellectual history, sociology of knowledge, praxeology, discourse analysis, and science and technology studies.

This book will appeal to scholars, students, and teachers in educational history, the history of knowledge, and related fields and will serve as an orientation for early-career researchers.

This article explores the history of digital testing technology. Using an organisation that pioneered the use of international large-scale assessments - the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) - I discuss the role of computers, punched cards, answer cards and scanning machines as an example of transnational collaboration in the social sciences. In doing so, I particularly look into temporal and spatial dimensions of collaboration. The temporal dimension had to do with ideals of speed and durability, whereas the spatial dimension had to do with questions of where data processing should occur and how data could travel across boundaries. The analysis goes beyond simplistic assumptions where digital technology is seen merely as a tool that facilitates data processing. Instead, I stress the complexity of using computers and emphasize the materiality of digital technology, essential for understanding how data moved around in an era before the World Wide Web.

This book covers the construction of international education research community in the 1950s-1990s, and the growth of its ‘disembedded’ laboratory i.e. networks, spaces, materiality, travelling, translations. The book follows a sociology of science theoretical framework in order to examine the research-archive of the Swedish internationally renowned educational scholar Torsten Husén (1916-2009). The archive reveals the shifting and heterogenous transnational networks that contribute to the development of social science research beyond fixed time and space dimensions, and that extends social science beyond individual ideas, researchers, environments, institutions and universities. These are practices that create, mobilise, sustain and challenge relations between actors in innovations, knowledge creation and various social activities. In other words, the archive represents the socio-material manifestation not only of the intellectual trajectory of a key education actor but the growing organisation of a whole scientific field at the time. 

Purpose

The overall aim of this article is to discuss the conditions and character of collective protest in schools. When do pupils as a collective gain the ability to express critical views on the policies of schools, and what is that criticism about? Using Sweden as an example, I discuss this question by studying the collective organisation of pupils from the 1920s to the 1980s.

Design/methodology/approach

The article discusses and compares two phases of pupils' collective organisation in Sweden: one dominated by pupil councils, one by national organisations. The article discusses how pupil councils at individual schools arose in the wake of the 1928 grammar school charter, and illustrates its influence using a case study of a grammar school in Stockholm. Furthermore, the article investigates how national organisations, first formed in 1952, expressed their concerns about national school policies.

Findings

The first phase (ca. 1928-1951) was dominated by the idea of discipline, and the main task of pupil councils was to help teachers in maintaining discipline. The second phase (ca. 1952-1989) was instead characterised by a heightened focus on protests and democracy. From then on, the main idea was that pupil councils and national pupil organisations should change the school, making it more suited to the needs of the pupils.

Originality/value

There is much research on university students and student uprisings. However, much of the previous research on the student voice is related to the upheavals of the long 1968. By concentrating its efforts on a limited time period when protest was more obvious, previous research has arguably not been able to discuss transformations over time.

The creation of international large-scale assessments in the 1960s and 1970s was inevitably a product of the movement of data. Large amounts of information about school performance circled the globe: first collected in individual schools, then aggregated at the national level, then sent to an international centre, and finally returned for further national analysis and dissemination. While the movement of data was a prerequisite for international testing, there was an inherent risk in how the work was organised. The concepts of data friction and precarious knowledge are used to describe how the pace of information transfer was slowed or how information was in danger of being lost as it circled the globe. The movement of data brought with it the double possibility of creating and destroying knowledge.

This chapter traces the history of the relation between pedagogy and the humanities from a long time-perspective, spanning the 1860s to the 1960s. Focusing on boundary drawing processes, we distinguish two major shifts in which pedagogy established itself as a distinct discipline. The first consisted of a separation from philosophy, the second of a separation from psychology. Through and along this process, pedagogy became increasingly separated from the humanities and ended up in the new social science faculty in the 1960s. As pedagogy also got a central role in the new professional teacher education outside of the universities, its position as a non-humanistic discipline became manifest.

Within the field of history of education, there is a growing interest in the movement of influential actors and texts that have crossed national borders. One of the main driving forces for influence, knowledge, and innovation is comparison, a tool used within the governing of education in diverse ways and with different intensities, over time, to shape education systems. This article looks beyond dichotomies such as the national versus the European or the global, in order to focus on those governing spaces and practices that lie in between bounded, predetermined, and preconceived entities and education organisations. Our locus of enquiry is education actors and their practices as they use comparison to make governing happen. The article examines the case of Swedish education (its policy actors, governing elites, and education practitioners) to examine this relation between comparison, governing, and the transnational.