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This article analyses the creation of the schools called ikastolas throughout the Basque Country from the 1960s onwards. The name ikastola refers to a unique school model whose major characteristic is to teach the majority of subjects in the Basque language, or euskera. It outlines the reasons why some of these schools took a co-operative organisational form and describes their major characteristics. The first part analyses the opportunities created under the Francoist regime for this kind of school, despite the repressive character of the dictatorship in other fields. The second part of the paper examines the important influence of the Mondragón co-operative movement, especially through its financial institution, in the creation of these educational co-operatives. The third and last part emphasises the role played by social mobilisation in defence of the Basque language in the creation of these schools and how this factor tied in with a co-operative governance system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the prohibition on punishment in the form of emotional, psychological and physical abuse under the Fascist school regulations, it was common - particularly in Italian rural classrooms - for the purpose of managing and disciplining students. Sticks, 'chickpeas' or 'donkey desks' represent just a few examples of the methods frequently used by teachers to control unruly pupils. These punishments are often recalled by teachers and students in several published and unpublished discourses. This essay, by viewing such memoirs retrospectively, aims to provide a new understanding of the disciplinary practices carried out during 1920-1940 within Fascist Italian schools located in two different rural areas and to investigate the ways in which teachers and pupils look back on this particular aspect of their past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using administrative sources in the history of education and childhood involves a range of methodological and ethical considerations. This article discusses these problems, as well as the role of archives and archival policies in preserving history and shaping our understanding of past childhoods. Using Finnish child welfare archives from the post-war period (1945–1970) as an example, the article shows how the institutional gaze of administrative archives, together with various screening practices, has limited the research possibilities. Nevertheless, administrative records do offer important perspectives on the lives of marginalised children and young people that cannot be reached through other sources. The article closes with a critical discussion on the tightening research ethical regulations, and argues for the historian’s right to access original sources. Researchers’ rights should be ensured in forthcoming archival practices and legislation, and contested research topics should not be avoided because of research ethical uneasiness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using examples from family letters sent to the Department of Education’s Elementary Correspondence School (ECS) in the western Canadian province of British Columbia in the early twentieth century, this article discusses three potential problems or traps associated with concepts of agency in the history of children and youth. Following a brief discussion of the emergence of agency in childhood studies, it focuses on three approaches to agency that it is argued limit our efforts to demonstrate the contributions of young people to historical change: contributory, binaried, and undifferentiated approaches to agency. Investigating the ECS family letters through these three approaches demonstrates their limits while also pointing the way towards more productive pathways. By focusing on more nuanced interpretive strategies, such as empathic inference, structural and relational analyses, and explicitly theorising around the key concept of age, young people emerge more clearly as actors in history, not merely subjects of history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]