• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• 2013-2022close
• Danish close

[no abstract]

School in the shadow: Private education in Stockholm 1735. During the early eighteenth century, private education was a more significant sector of the educational market than was public education, regarding the number of students and teachers, the presence of female students and teachers, the social background of the students, and the introduction of a more diverse and modern curriculum. Hitherto, little has been known of the actual scope or general conditions of private education, which has been over-shadowed by studies of public education. The article maps private education through the Stockholm Church Consistory’s (Stockholms stads konsistorium) thorough inventory of private teachers in the capital of Sweden during 1734–36, providing information of both suppliers and consumers within the private sector of the educational market, as well as of the practice and functions of private education in early modern time.

A major issue in Swedish and international research has, indeed, been the overriding purpose of social studies, along with the recurring discussion on whether the teaching of social studies should be organised in the individual subjects or be subject-integrated. The main aim of this article is to analyse how social studies as a specific field of study is featured in government commissions of inquiry and steering documents in the period 1980-2014. The analysis is primarily based on American and Nordic history and social studies education theory, which has identified a number of concepts regarding the purpose and organization of the social studies subject; the humanistic approach; the progressively approach; the disciplinary oriented approach and the postmodern and interpretive approach. The article is based on an analysis of national evaluations and reviews of social studies as well as curricula and government commissioned inquiries. The analysis shows that social studies as a knowledge domain is characterized by progressivism in the national evaluations in the whole period. Although curricula nowadays have a disciplinary perspective on the purpose and organization of social studies, progressivism is still prevalent in evaluations. It is clear that the public authorities responsible for the most recent inspections embrace progressivism. Concurrent with the predominance of certain education philosophies–progressivism in 1980-2011 and the disciplinary perspective from 2011– there are also traces of other approaches in the curricula, for example, the humanistic as well as the postmodern perspectives.

In a Swedish context, Jewish women’s experiences and actions have gone unrecorded and unrecognised; most narratives of Swedish Jewish history offer only a partial account of their past. Marginalised or ignored, or absorbed into universalised categories of ‘Jews’, ‘women’ or ‘survivors’, the experiences and histories of Jewish women are in general not represented in previous Swedish research on the history of the Jewish minority, the Swedish Jewish response to the Nazi terror and the Holocaust or the history of the women’s movement in general. Previous research on the Swedish Jewish response and assistance for the Jewish refugees and survivors of Nazi persecution has mainly dealt with the Jewish community in Stockholm and its relief committee, where the women were absent from leadership positions. The purpose of this study is to explore if and how the Jewish women’s club in Stockholm initiated or was involved in relief activities for and with the persecuted Jews of Europe. Specifically, this is investigated in the context of how the club was established and manifested in public by examining what questions the club raised and what activities it organised in the 1930s and 1940s.