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The age of imperialism, from the 1870s to the 1910s, saw the rise of a popular educational sphere in Sweden as well as in the rest of Europe. This sphere was characterised by an incomparable institutional growth and continuity. In earlier research, the growth of popular education has often been explained as a consequence of class-politics and the formation of a civil society. In this article I argue that another explanatory factor needs to be inserted in the overall historical narrative in Sweden, namely the material pre-conditions of the organisations that rose to stability and especially the economic grants offered by the industrial state. In fact, this study shows how the growth of the sphere and state grants to institutions such as folk high schools and lecture-societies went hand in hand. Furthermore it is shown how the share of public funding from the central bureaucracy as well as the local institutions of government successively became the dominant sources of income for folk high schools and lecture-societies. Thus, the article argues that the economic role of the state was a crucial factor for the rise of a continuous popular educational sphere.

In the aftermath of the two world wars, strong international networks and organisations manifested themselves with promotion of peace through education on their agenda. Danish pedagogical experiments and experimental schools were strongly influenced by these trends and played a role in subsequent school practices and policies. Drawing on the notions of “the transnational” and “trading spaces” as well as the theoretical concepts of transfer, translation, and transformation, this article addresses the following research question: How were international ideas, knowledge and practice of promoting peace through education transferred, translated, and transformed in Danish school experiments in interwar and post-war scenarios? In exploring this question, the article uses transnational and Danish archival sources as well as journals and reports linked to the Danish progressive education movement. Thus, the article contributes to our understanding of the entanglements of educational ideas and to how trends of internationalisation and globalisation work.

Enhancing the Infrastructure of Research on the Nordic Educational Past : The Nordic Journal of Educational History

This article examines the demographic and social profile of primary school teachers in Iceland over half a century, beginning with the introduction of mandatory elementary school attendance in 1908, with particular focus on changes between 1930 and 1960. During this period, Iceland developed from a rural to a predominantly urban society where most children attended classes in permanent school buildings, in contrast to the ambulatory schools most common at the outset. It is our hypothesis that these rapid social changes affected the composition of the teaching corpus in many ways, particularly as regards gender and class origin. Analysis shows that in the first half of the period, female teachers were more numerous in the capital of Reykjavík, and their social and educational status was higher than teachers outside the capital. Furthermore, female teachers in Reykjavík were less likely to marry and had longer teaching careers than their male colleagues. On the whole, the share of female teachers increased considerably between 1930 and 1960, by which time it had become easier for women to combine teaching with marriage.

Silvi-Cultural Encounters: The Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Higher Forestry Education in Ethiopia, 1986–2009The article discusses the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences’ support to higher forestry education in Ethiopia, which took place between 1986 and 2009 in the context of Swedish-Ethiopian development cooperation. Against a growing historical interest in transnational encounters within the field of education, it analyses how Swedish forestry experts designed educational programs and taught in new environments. The concept of “silvi-culture” is introduced to signify that the tensions that arose within this aid effort related both to the technicalities of forestry education and to diverging academic and social cultures. The article is structured around three kinds of “silvi-cultural encounters” that describe the development of the project both chronologically and thematically. These encounters are used to demonstrate how the forest as a concrete, physical place was of central importance to the Swedish experts, as well as to show how they were guided by preconceptions developed within the framework of a Swedish silvi-culture that was only partially compatible with the conditions in Ethiopia.

For many historians of education, the emergence of a modern education system after the mid-nineteenth century was a national and regional process, neatly and carefully closed off within the borders of the nation. However, these accounts have often disregarded the effects of the flows of cross-border ideas and technologies, such as international comparisons, lesson-drawing, policy diffusion and travel, as well as local adaptations and translations of education policy originating elsewhere. The purpose of this article is to shed light on the relations between Swedish education and the international scene when it comes to policy and practice formation. The field of study is the international World´s Fairs of 1862–1904. Looking at what Sweden displayed, and understanding how visitors perceived it, the article raises questions concerning how exhibitions like these worked as mediators of educational ideals. The focus will be on the dissemination of aesthetic ideals, and the article will show that the World’s Fairs were platforms for an aesthetic normativity that had governing effects locally as well as globally.

In this article, we argue that an understanding of the interwar years and the ascent of educational psychology contribute valuable knowledge about the inner workings of modern-day education with regard to the links between society and education in general and the boundary between normality and deviation in particular. The establishment of the educational psychologist’s office at Frederiksberg in Denmark, the introduction of IQ testing, and the related psychological files of students provide an image of a period of measurement in schools during which IQ testing was decisive in decisions to transfer students to the remedial school. The testing and filing were the foremost important technologies of the period. We draw on sources that allow us to view educational psychology and testing in their local, national, and political context. The sources applied are primarily obtained from Frederiksberg City Archive that contains archives from the Educational Psychology Office.

Published version. Source at http://ojs.ub.umu.se/index.php/njedh/article/view/60 Previous research on Norwegian educational reforms after 1814, the year when Norway became a constitutional state, has emphasized the conservatism of the elementary education acts of 1816 and 1827. Contrary to expectations for a constitutional state, these acts did not reflect a concern for fostering politically active citizens. Neither did they follow up the enlightenment idea of teaching secular knowledge to the common people. We raise a new question concerning post-1814 educational legislation in Norway: was there an increased emphasis on national uniformity after 1814? A close reading of the earlier 1739/41 acts and the 1827 act, including the Plan and Instruction from 1834, studies of the debates in the Norwegian Parliament 1815–1827 and the temporary 1816 act on elementary education, show that policy after 1814 emphasised national uniformity more than before. Despite continued local funding of elementary schooling, national policy and legislation promoted uniformity.