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This paper focuses on the “Junkyard” (chatzar grutaot) - a unique educational environment and practice developed in kindergartens on the Israeli kibbutz in the 1940s and 1950s, and still in wide use today in kibbutz kindergartens. The Junkyard, consisting of artefacts of the adult world that are no longer in use, is an ever-changing set-up in which children’s free play is encouraged, with minimal rules for use of time, space, objects, and social relations. Anchored in the writings of its two founding educators, as well as in writings of and interviews with its advocates and instructors over the years, this paper shows how the Junkyard drew on widespread ideas about early childhood development and education, at the same time as it responded to local conditions and concerns. The paper argues that a unique conjunction of factors - material and structural, educational and pedagogical, ideological and cultural - facilitated the process by which the Junkyard was inserted relatively smoothly into the kibbutz educational landscape, in lasting ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1930s the Spanish Civil War captured the international imagination to an extraordinary degree. As in other countries British men and women were moved to intervene directly and the memory of the war, and of British participation in it, has held an enduring appeal in the UK. The Civil War was also notable for its use of the visual as a weapon of propaganda, and the Spanish Republican Government deployed visual imagery to great effect as an instrument through which it exhibited its progressive educational and welfare reforms to an international audience. This article focuses on the visual and textual representations of displaced children in Republican educational colonies in Spain that are preserved in British archive collections. Taking as its starting point a series of photographs of children in colonies gathered together as part of the International Brigade Memorial Archive in London, the paper will consider the construction, use, and circulation of these images and associated texts by British and American political and humanitarian networks and their subsequent collection and preservation in British archival institutions. The paper will assess the effectiveness of the images and texts as pedagogical and political agents and explore how their meaning shifted as they travelled through a range of performative spaces on a journey from their construction as artefacts designed initially to record and communicate the Spanish Republic’s progressive educational project, to commemorative objects in the archive. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Through the example of the establishment, functioning, and closing of bilingual schools during the Soviet occupation of Hungary, this paper aims to introduce this segment of public education in Central-Eastern Europe. In the period between 1945 and 1989, the learning of Russian as a compulsory subject was introduced, teaching other languages was restricted, and Hungarian-Russian bilingual schools were launched. The features of their establishment can be connected to political and professional power relations in different sub-periods within the structures of closed language policy. The objective in both states was the education of committed political elite. The first school was established by direct political control and closed because of the 1956 revolution. The second school was established in 1974, through professional and political compromises. The third school opened at the end of the period, as part of a top-down development project involving 14 schools. A number of European target languages (still including Russian) were introduced, which can be regarded as the opening up of language education policy. Relying on sources, documents, and personal recollections, the study aims to reveal the dynamics of the interrelations between controlled language education, University and the changes in Hungarian economic, social, domestic, and foreign policy in the given periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to reconstruct the pedagogy of Leonor Serrano, a Spanish school inspector working and developing her theories between 1914 and 1939. We use an interrogative-analytical methodology based on content analysis of her texts to reconstruct her educational theory. The theoretical deductive elements are uncovered in the analysis of the answers Leonor Serrano gives to the “basic questions of education”, issues that provide the bases for the scientific field of the theory of education to define a specific pedagogy and are identified through a process of historical-educational review. The study outcome is an explanatory narrative. The paper ends with a discussion of the method and the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War the republican authorities started organising what came to be known as “children’s colonies”. These children’s colonies became both home and school for all the children who were evacuated from Madrid. The purpose of this article is to study in depth the transformation of many of these children’s colonies into educational communities. The teachers accompanying the children often shared the republican ideals ofactive citizenshipand strove to make conscious citizens out of these children. The educational model chosen for achieving this aim was the community model, based on the transformation of every children’s colony into a self-sufficient community of teachers and students, along the lines of similar experiences organised by the international New Education movement in the 1920s and ’30s. The article discusses the iconic experiences of children’s colonies during the Spanish Civil War and the ways in which their different concepts of “community” were represented. By studying the photographic collection put together from different public and private archives alongside the written information preserved in unpublished diaries we are able to develop a methodological model for analysing the construction and/or destruction of the community ideal in these educational experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The high rate of child mortality registered during the early months of the Civil War led the Republican authorities to initiate several operations to evacuate youngsters with the purpose of protecting and saving the children of Spain. At the beginning, the children were evacuated to zones in the interior of the country far removed from the front lines. However, the rapid advance of the Nationalist Army caused the Government of the Republic to organise evacuations to other countries. The Soviet Union was one of many countries that offered to help the Republic. Between 1937 and 1938, minors numbering 2895 were taken under the protection ofNarkomprosin different collective Homes for Children (Dietsky Dom). This article discusses some of the educational practices carried out in the schools of these Homes, by analysing different documents produced by the children, both in this period (interscholastic and personal correspondence, school compositions, newspaper murals) as well as in their adult lives (autobiographies and memoirs). Through the analysis of these educative practices, the article will try to explain how the Soviet as well as the Spanish authorities wished to make these children into ideal communists, convinced that the future of Spain was in their hands. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Until around 10 years ago, the conventional wisdom in educational historiography held that the start of the Civil War (1936–1939), marking as it did the placing of education at the service of the war effort, involved a rupture, in both the Republican government and the “rebel” or Franco camp, with the preceding years as to the educational politics and the pedagogical discourses. However, in the last few years a number of works have been published which, without denying the changes that undoubtedly occurred, emphasise the continuities in the discourses. This article sets out to elucidate and clarify just what there was of rupture and or continuity in educational politics and politico-pedagogical discourses during the years of the Civil War. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]