Across much of the world there is now a standard secondary school curriculum based on a traditional array of subjects. This is the first work to tell the story of its invention, from the sixteenth century until the present day. The book concludes with a sketch of an alternative: a curriculum based on a well-argued set of fundamental aims.

Because school history often relies on reading and writing and has its own discipline-specific challenges, it is important to understand the language demands of this content area, the typical writing requirements, and the language expectations of historical discourse. History uses language is specialized ways, so it can be challenging for students to construct responses to historical events. It is only through a focus on these specialized ways of presenting and constructing historical content that students will see how language is used to construe particular contexts. This book provides the results of a qualitative study that investigated the language resources that 8th and 11th grade students drew on to write an exposition and considered the role of writing in school history. The study combined a functional linguistic analysis of student writing with educational considerations in the underresearched content area of history. Data set consisted of writing done by students who were English language learners and other culturally and linguistically diverse students from two school districts in California. The book is an investigation of expository school history writing and teachers’ expectations for this type of writing. School history writing refers to the kind of historical writing expected of students at the pre-college levels.

The ‘knowledge turn’ in curriculum studies has drawn attention to the central role that knowledge of the disciplines plays in education, and to the need for new thinking about how we understand knowledge and knowledge-building. Knowing History in Schools explores these issues in the context of teaching and learning history through a dialogue between the eminent sociologist of curriculum Michael Young, and leading figures in history education research and practice from a range of traditions and contexts. With a focus on Young’s ‘powerful knowledge’ theorisation of the curriculum, and on his more recent articulations of the ‘powers’ of knowledge, this dialogue explores the many complexities posed for history education by the challenge of building children’s historical knowledge and understanding. The book builds towards a clarification of how we can best conceptualise knowledge-building in history education. Crucially, it aims to help history education students, history teachers, teacher educators and history curriculum designers navigate the challenges that knowledge-building processes pose for learning history in schools.

Jurgen Herbst traces the debates, discussions, pronouncements and reports through which Americans have sought to clarify their conceptions of the goals and purposes of education beyond the common school. The Once and Future School argues that to make sense of the current trials of secondary educational system and to maintain any sense of direction and vision for its future, we need a clear understanding of its path in the past and of its setting in a multi-national world. From their beginnings in colonial America to the present day, Jurgen Herbst traces the debates, discussions, pronouncements and reports through which Americans have sought to hammer out and clarify their conceptions of the goals and purposes of education beyond the common school.

This book offers a remarkable range of research that emphasises the need to analyse the shaping of curricula under historical, social and political variables. Teachers’ life stories, the Cold War as a contextual element that framed curricular transformations in the US and Europe, and the study of trends in education policy at transnational level are issues addressed throughout. The book presents new lines of work, offering multidisciplinary perspectives and provides an overview of how to move forwards. The book brings together the work of international specialists on Curriculum History and presents research that offers new perspectives and methodologies from which to approach the study of the History of Education and Educational Policy. It offers new debates which rethink the historical study of the curriculum and offers a strong interdisciplinary approach, with contributions across Education, History and the Social Sciences. This book will be of great interest for academics and researchers in the fields of education and curriculum studies. It will also appeal to educational professionals, teachers and policy makers.

Decolonizing the History Curriculum in Malaysia and Singapore is a unique study in the history of education because it examines decolonization in terms of how it changed the subject of history in the school curriculum of two colonized countries – Malaysia and Singapore. Blackburn and Wu’s book analyzes the transition of the subject of history from colonial education to postcolonial education, from the history syllabus upholding the colonial order to the period after independence when the history syllabus became a tool for nation-building. Malaysia and Singapore are excellent case studies of this process because they once shared a common imperial curriculum in the English language schools that was gradually ‘decolonized’ to form the basis of the early history syllabuses of the new nation-states (they were briefly one nation-state in the early to mid-1960s). The colonial English language history syllabus was ‘decolonized’ into a national curriculum that was translated for the Chinese, Malay, and Tamil schools of Malaysia and Singapore. By analyzing the causes and consequences of the dramatic changes made to the teaching of history in the schools of Malaya and Singapore as Britain ended her empire in Southeast Asia, Blackburn and Wu offer fascinating insights into educational reform, the effects of decolonization on curricula, and the history of Malaysian and Singaporean education.

The growth of the American high school that occurred in the twentieth century is among the most remarkable educational, social, and cultural phenomena of the twentieth century. The history of education, however, has often reduced the institution to its educational function alone, thus missing its significantly broader importance. As a corrective, this collection of essays serves four ends: as an introduction to the history of the high school; as a reevaluation of the power of narratives that privilege the perspective of school leaders and the curriculum; as a glimpse into the worlds created by students and their communities; and, most critically, as a means of sparking conversations about where we might look next for stories worth telling.

Historians in recent years have paid considerable attention to sport and leisure in the past, and historians of education are no exception. The chapters in this book showcase the breadth and depth of scholarship in this area, bringing new perspectives to bear on the history of physical education in several different European countries. Ranging from schoolgirl cricket in early postwar England to the varying approaches to physical education in the nineteenth-century Netherlands, the contributions all emphasise the importance of physical education to wider conceptions of education for citizenship. A number of chapters tackle issues in gender history, while others focus on the effects – often unintended – of policy-makers and the conflicts that could arise from the imposition of new physical education curricula. Covering England, Scotland, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Greece, this book features the work of both established and emerging scholars, and is an important contribution to the historiography of both education and sport. This book was originally published as a special issue of History of Education.