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Although John Dewey continues to be a source to which scholars look in order to address contemporary social and educational issues, others have suggested that Dewey may be too implicated in the project of modernity to be acceptable in educational theory and practice today. To what extent Dewey was modern, and what we make of the question of his modernity, depends on our reading of Dewey and on our understanding of modernity more generally. I will argue that a broad reading of both Dewey and modernity helps us avoid treating Dewey either as education's saviour or as inimical to our present purposes. First, I examine Dewey's own conception of modernity and then broaden its scope by bringing into view four aspects of Western modernity: economic modernization, the struggle for justice, individualism, and naturalism. Second, I show how Dewey can and has been read as representing one or more of these aspects, but also from the perspective of one or more of these aspects. This generates what I will call Dewey's four "faces": Dewey as engineer, Dewey as activist, Dewey as Romantic, and Dewey as naturalist. This mapping offers a way of making more sense of the diverse readings of Dewey that exist in the secondary literature. Finally, I make a case for Dewey's ongoing relevance because of his capacious view of the goods of modernity and his distinctively educational philosophy.

National socialist education policies put into practice between 1933-1945 in Germany, has been under the influence of romanticism, which is one of the important currents in the history of German thought that began in the middle of the 19th century. Such "being under the influence" does not refer to a passive situation, but it rather means intentional "exposure" by Nazi ideologues. The meeting of Romanticism with National Socialism led to the most dramatic scenes of the history. Educational institutions, where the victims of war were trained, bipartitely fulfilled the task assigned to them regarding to ideological instrumentalism: to destroy and to be destroyed. Putting an end to both their lives own and the lives of others due to this romantic exposure, primary, secondary and higher education students have been the objects of the great catastrophe in the first half of the twentieth century. It will be possible to see the effects of German romanticism, through getting to the bottom of the intellectual foundations of the period's tragic actions, such as burning books, redesigning the curriculum on the line of National Socialism, and preventing the dissemination of dissenting opinions by monopolizing the press. This historical research, which is conducted by examining sources like Arendt (1973), Fest (1973), Giles (1985), Bartoletti (2005), Herf (1998), Heidegger (2002), Hitler (1938), Huch (2005), Hühnerfeld (1961), Schirach (1967), Pöggeler (2002), Thomese (1923), Zimmerman (1990) aims to reveal in a scientific way that it is necessary to be careful against the extreme romantic elements in the practices of education.

Thinking and writing draw on those who have gone before, in a more than abstract way. In this article, I answer the call of one philosopher--Novalis, the early German Romantic--in the form of a séance, which is really a dialogue with the dead. I speak to him, as a Maori writer, about the abstract philosophical issues that Maori encounter and anticipate his responses and his thinking. I suspect Novalis would have taken delight in this sort of a-rational event, especially with his own tendency to focus on the supernatural and invisible realms. He revered the dead and darkness. He was an interdimensional communicator "par excellence," and my aim in this article is to speculate alongside him and, as a Maori writer, form some productive ideas in community with him.

The educational policies of 1860s Britain came into being as a result of the interplay between social, economic and political conditions, and the changing discourses of childhood and education that arose from them. While essentialised conceptualisations of 'the child' had existed since the early Enlightenment period, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that universalised notions of childhood gained popular acceptance. Economic pressures and the rise of utilitarianism, coupled with a discursive construction of the child as the future of the state, led to the instrumentalism of the Revised Code. Both this understanding and the Romantic view of the innocent child influenced measures that increased levels of educational compulsion, culminating in the 1870 Elementary Education Act. Despite these prevailing discourses, however, a significant minority, particularly among the labouring classes, still saw economic productivity, often alongside education, as an ordinary part of childhood.

This paper considers alternative ways of teaching Romantic poetry to post-sixteen English Literature pupils in England. It explores how practitioners can value tangents developed by pupils' independent thinking when pupils are given the freedom to develop their own ideas. It reflects on a lesson planned to respond to a tangent developed by the class in a previous session; that William Blake's "The Tyger", to a contemporary reader, explores the 21st century preoccupation of climate change. The lesson outlined in this report built upon these ideas further, valuing the pupils' tangential thinking. Approaches like these are particularly important now as the performativity agenda in schools, promoted by league tables as a measure of effectiveness, can result in some schools teaching to the test, at the exclusion of encouraging personal and creative responses to texts.

Sufism is the mode of religious life in Islam in which emphasis is placed on the activities of the inner self than external rituals and performances. The essence of Sufism lies in its internal transcendental experience. The aim of Sufis is to delve into the human soul and see through its darkness in order to reach the ultimate truth. Sufi poetry is abundant with images that present the human soul as a mystery that could be decrypted via contemplation, meditation, and inner vision. The target of Sufis is to reunite with the Universal Self that is the 'truer' self of every human (i.e. God). Likewise, Romanticism is founded on the doctrine that all creation began in harmonious unity. Romantic poets share Sufis' quest for truth and an illuminating path towards reaching the essence of the Divine. A renowned Romantic poet, John Keats, contrary to his fellow Romantics, never alluded to sharing any interest with the orient or the spirituality it incarnates. However, by attempting a Sufi reading of his poem 'Ode to a Nightingale', this research paper will attempt to highlight the underlying philosophy and uncover the spiritual implications hidden within Keats' ode and propound a solid connection between Sufi and Romantic ideologies.

Thomas Stearns Eliot, who is believed to be one of the most important poets of his time in the English and American Poetry, as well as today, left many poems in most of which he criticized and even rejected the Western Puritanist society and the principles of Romanticism. In this brief study, one of T.S. Eliot's major poems, 'Gerontion' will be presented with other critics' and this researcher's interpretations. The speaker of the poem is an old man in an old house whose thoughts drift while being read to by a boy, and these thoughts form the poem. He misses fighting in the war and laments his presence in the mundane and common-place house (Basu, 2017). Since it will be useful to know T.S. Eliot's philosophy of life and his background in order to understand and interpret his works better, his life story and background are also provided briefly in the first part of this study. In the final part, conclusions in connection with the society in which we live in were drawn from T.S. Eliot's 'Gerontion'.

Wordsworth stands as a supreme poet in nature. He is a devotee and worshiper of nature. His affection for nature is more evident than any other poet who writes about nature. Wordsworth has an original and full-fledged philosophy about nature. In his poetics works, there are three notable aspects of nature that are identifiable. One of the facts is that Wordsworth believes that nature is a living person. He believes that nature has a divine spirit and it is available in all objects of nature. This divine spirit is known as mystical pantheism and illustrated in The Prelude. Wordsworth also believes that there is joy in the company of nature. Nature has healing attributes and heals hearts struck by sorrow. Wordsworth also emphasizes the influence of nature on morality. He depicts nature as a great teacher because of the great morals taught to man. He believed that there is consciousness between man and nature. In his writings, there is an inclination towards nature. There is no writing that does not have significance to nature. His writings warns the readers about the neglect of nature, but the people do not take her writings seriously. The writings foresee a harsh environment that makes the life of man difficult. Many years after his writing, people face numerous environmental challenges that make life very difficult.

Romanticism is one of the important contemporary literal schools and has absorbed many poets and authors all across the world. Persian literature specifically the adolescents and children poem in Iran has been affected. Many Iranian poets have been among the pioneers of romanticism in the adolescents and children poem. The poems of these poets include delicate interpretations and concepts in the principles of romantic poem. They have used the specifications and principles of romanticism due to the conditions and outlook of the addressees (children and adolescents). The current essay scrutinizes the characteristics of romanticism in the adolescents and children poem. Romanticism considers identifications such as naturalism, rustic are tendencies, liberalism, nostalgic issues, individualism and tendency to traveling. It also tries to explore new interpretations.

Romanticism extended to different countries around the Europe in eighteenth and nineteenth century. This school not only includes European countries but also countries outside the continent like Iran. Similarly, Romanticism developed some of its features out of Iranian contemporary literature. Sohrab Sepehri, the contemporary Iranian poet, has always been at the center of Romanticism investigation in Iran. Regarding Morse Peckham's view of Romanticism, this could be inferred that Sepehri has made a voyage from the "static mechanism" to "dynamic organicims." Sepehri's change of view causing this journey was his acquaintance with the Far Eastern mysticism. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate this phase shifting by focusing on its effect on his poems.

Many educators look to naturalism as a tool to create a new learning environment because they believe that it can produce an innovative and revolutionary method in the educational world. In this paper, I examine an Eastern, Ibn Tufail, and Western, Jean Jacque Rousseau, romantic naturalist philosophy. I find a remarkable similarity between their fictional characters. Both Tufail's Hayy Bin Yaqzan and Rousseau's Emile aim to answer social, moral, metaphysical and educational questions. In this paper, I investigate these romantic naturalist philosophies to determine how these two philosophers use nature to develop learning theory, create an attractive environment, satisfy spiritual needs, and solve moral issues. Consequently, I closely examine their work to understand their romantic naturalist philosophy, which can be used to improve our own educational methods.

Currently, the place of play in schooling and education is controversial. Even in pre-school, where play is most likely to be found, its status is often precarious. This article notes that in many ancient religious traditions, play is sometimes viewed as sinful, whereas work, its antithesis, is seen as virtuous. The German educationist, Friedrich Froebel, departed radically from these evaluations and devised a system of educative play based on toys and games to be used in his institution for the education of young children, the kindergarten. Nevertheless, while at the same time as being a prominent advocate of the notion that play was a worthwhile and necessary part of an early childhood curriculum, Froebel thought it subordinate in value to what it was intended to lead to, work of a manual nature. The reading of Froebel and the Froebel Movement presented here situates his conceptions of play and work within the intellectual context of German Romanticism and Idealist philosophy. The main contours of thought on play and work are traced in the writings of Kant, Schiller, Hegel and Marx, through a consideration of work as both emancipatory and alienating. This theme is pursued in the thought of leading English Romantics and various figures within the Marxist tradition, including some attached to Soviet ideology. It is argued that the Froebel revisionists, like Schrader Breymann and many Froebelians inspired by G. Stanley Hall and John Dewey, tended to abandon the view of work embraced by Froebel and focused more on play, aided by the interests and findings of the developing field of psychology and the lengthening of compulsory schooling.

German Romantic Art Songs or German "Lieder" constitute a consistent part of every aspiring classical singer's repertoire around the world. This study investigates a contemporary Australian audiences' appreciation of the genre; it asks further what role the various Romantic characteristics play in German "Lieder" genre, gauges respondents' awareness of stylistic characteristics of "Lieder" and explores the importance of the "German-ness" of "Lieder". A survey conducted at the prestigious annual competition National Liederfest elicited surprisingly passionate responses which suggest new ways of teaching "Lieder" in Australia.

Modern children's literature in China has largely been dominated by narratives of the nation and nationalism. The present article sets out to question the dominance of that nationalist stance as the country transitioned into the modern era in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By examining poetic children's literature, the author unravels distinct non-nationalist intellectual sentiments in competition with the mainstream nationalist discourse that point to an imaginative envisioning of modernity. The article starts with a discussion of children's poems and school songs imbued with a strong patriotic zeal in the late Qing and early Republican periods, and then moves on to the May Fourth period when lyricism and romanticism drew the attention of children's literature advocates. Romantic-minded translators and writers, such as Bing Xin, embraced love as a humanist cosmopolitan vision while others, such as Zhou Zuoren and Liu Bannong, turned to local literary heritage, giving rise to a form of children's songs with strong local consciousness. The article concludes by addressing the relevance of the insights derived from the historical case studies for contemporary children's literature in China and beyond. It highlights the possibilities of envisaging modernity in non-nationalist terms and stresses the importance of cultivating in children alternative sentiments in the age of rising nationalism, both past and present.

"Disenchantment" has been a popular trope in the social sciences since Max Weber's appropriation of the term nearly a century ago. In recent years, however, scholars have come to argue that, in contrast to the standard modernization story of unabated rationalization, organizations have long been subject to countervailing forces. In this essay, David Diehl uses modern reinterpretations of the "disenchantment" thesis to suggest that the structure of contemporary schooling is the product of ongoing cultural efforts to re-enchant public life by infusing rational bureaucracy with Romantic impulses in order to combat alienation and social fragmentation. Moreover, Diehl argues that the changing relationship between rationality and Romanticism has taken a unique form in the contemporary period and that recognizing this helps us to better understand the paradoxical modern push for schools to achieve seemingly incompatible goals such as diversity and standardization, community and accountability, and creativity and efficiency.

This article considers the extent to which medieval "mappaemundi" are an important precedent for literary cartographies in fiction for children. It connects the notion of embeddedness to Peta Mitchell's (2011) suggestion that "mappaemundi" refused to entertain the later, post-Enlightenment cartographic distinction between subject and environment, positing instead the "absorption" of the medieval subject into the religious medieval world space. The article documents some of the visual conventions that maps in children's literature have appropriated from "mappaemundi." In doing so, it articulates the contradictions inherent both to ecological rhetoric and cartographic space and the visual lexicon of maps included with children's books, which contribute to a rhetoric of ecomimesis. The article argues that maps in children's literature are invested in a rhetoric of ecomimesis, that we are, as Timothy Morton (2009) has it, "embedded" in Nature, and that this embeddedness conceit threatens to forestall critique in that it reproduces the related oppositions of culture/Nature, subject/object and subject/environment even as it appears to collapse their respective terms. In the process, it considers maps in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (2007/1719), the Alderley Edge books of Alan Garner, Arthur Ransome's "Swallows and Amazons" (2012/1930), and Rosemary Sutcliff's "Outcast" (1998/1955).

Metaphor is a critical tool for thought. Lying at the heart of every systematic body of knowledge are three root metaphors--mechanism, organism, and mind. Historically, schools of philosophy--realism, naturalism, and idealism--have grown up around these metaphors. The root metaphors and their corresponding philosophies provide the paradigms underlying different exemplars of education. To illustrate how metaphors, paradigms, and exemplars all shape educational thought, the works of three educators--Hunter, Piaget, and Bruner--have been selected.

This case study examined a Romanticism unit within a Year 9 English class in Sydney, Australia. It considered whether popular culture could build connections between students' lives and Romanticism, and whether the process of remixing "high" Romantic poetry with "low" popular culture could foster student engagement. Thematic analysis of interview, survey, observation, and artifact data revealed three key findings. Firstly, through exploring popular culture texts, students believed Romantic concepts related to their world but not to them. Secondly, the extent to which students understood Romanticism through popular culture was influenced by personal, textual, and educational factors. Thirdly, students felt that the collaborative remixing process promoted freedom of expression. While many teachers are concerned that popular culture will displace canonical literature, this study found that this is not the case: incorporating popular culture is not an "either/or" approach, but it is an enriching, complementary practice.

The unique contributions of romanticism and romantic science have been generally ignored or undervalued in history and philosophy of science studies and science education. Although more recent research in history of science has come to delineate the value of both topics for the development of modern science, their merit for the educational field has not been explored. Romanticism was not only an obvious historical period, but a particular state of mind with its own extraordinary emotional sensitivity towards nature. It is especially the latter which we hope to revisit and reclaim for science education. After discussing several key historical contributions, we describe nine characteristics of "Romantic Science" in order to focus on six ideas/possibilities that we believe hold much value for transforming current science education: (1) the emotional sensitivity toward nature, (2) the centrality of sense experience, (3) the importance of "holistic experience", (4) the importance of the notions of mystery and wonder, (5) the power of science to transform people's outlook on the natural world, and (6) the importance of the relationship between science and philosophy. It is argued that in view of a pragmatist/utilitarian conception of school science prevalent today the aforementioned ideas (especially the notion of wonder and the poetic/non-analytical mode of knowledge), can provide food for thought for both science teachers and researchers seeking to work out an aesthetic conception, one that complements current approaches such as inquiry science and conceptual change.

Rather than focussing on the relationship between science and literature, this article attempts to read scientific writing as literature. It explores a somewhat neglected element of the story of the emergence of geology in the late eighteenth century--James Hutton's unpublished accounts of the tours of Scotland that he undertook in the years 1785-1788 in search of empirical evidence for his theory of the earth. Attention to Hutton's use of literary techniques and conventions highlights the ways these texts dramatise the journey of scientific discovery and allow Hutton's readers to imagine that they were virtual participants in the geological quest, conducted by a savant whose self-fashioning made him a reliable guide through Scotland's geomorphology and the landscapes of deep time.

In different ways and in different contexts it has been and still is argued that music education should be prioritized because of its positive impact on pupils in terms of general development as good citizens and in terms of skills in other disciplines. In this article, the authors discuss whether this tendency is best interpreted as an example of technical or ritual rationality. Rather than presenting a univocal argument for one of the interpretations, they explore what arises when the two interpretations meet each other in a dialogue. The ways in which music education is legitimized is closely related to the values that are assigned to music and musical experiences. An important focus of this article is the different valuations of music that different ways of interpreting the legitimization of music education imply.

So far the research on historical environment-related education has focused on scientific rather than "humanistic" (including Romantic and religious) educational approaches and ideologies. In the field of non-formal education implemented by associations these have, however, been common. We used content analysis to study two membership magazines of a prominent Finnish animal welfare organization, Helsinki Humane Society, before the Second World War. Our results show that the educational ideology of Helsinki Humane Society was based on romanticist and humane ideas. They emphasized especially the development of a human being's total personality and a kindness-to-animals ethic as a solution to social problems. In the early 1900s, humane education seems to have been an effective way of advancing the animal welfare cause, but its importance declined by the 1930s. We believe that today's environmental and sustainability educators could benefit from a better understanding of how historical animal welfare organizations were able to combine romantic and humane ideas with environmental goals.

This commentary addresses the holistic-spiritualistic movement in art and its education. In many respects it may be for naught, but questions should be raised in a time of ecological terrorism and climate breakdown of a dying Earth. Belief as opposed to knowledge is always a question of ideology--that is, the "imaginary relationship" of individuals to their perceived "real" conditions of existence--for ultimately, it comes down to a "trust" in some big Other. According to the author, belief can only be put to doubt.

Central in the analyses of women's and gender studies within the history of education has been Rousseau's (Emil oder Uber die Erziehung, 12th edn. Ferdinand Schoningh, Paderborn 1762) educational novel Emile, especially Book 5, which deals with the education of Sophie, Emilie's future spouse. Given the lasting interest in the person of Rousseau and his work, it is astonishing that there is a work by him, that has not been a focus of analysis in studies on the history of education, namely, Rousseau's "Lettres elementaires sur la botanique". Linnaeus had early on espoused a classification bases on the sexuality of the plants. Their sexualizing plants was in keeping with the zeitgeist of the Enlightenment, which had also put the new order of human sexual relations on the agenda. The following article focusses on the question what importance Rousseau's letters on botany can be accorded in this controversy over the sexuality of the plants and the relations between the sexes.

Notwithstanding the general accepted understanding that Rousseau is the master of modern education reflecting the progress by enlightenment this articles suggests that Rousseau's "Emile" is--as most of Rousseau's other writings are, too--testimony to a brilliant and passionate writer expressing thoughts about his concern how to deal with passions--passion being one of the most disputed concepts in late seventeenth and in eighteenth century. The reading of "Emile" has therefore take into account polemic as a literary trope in Rousseau's style of writing.

This article takes as its starting point the commonplace that Rousseau's "Emile" enabled his contemporaries to discover not only childhood but physical education. Focused on what the pedestal erected for Jean-Jacques somewhat overshadows, a brief historiographic overview and a survey of some major writings on education before Rousseau (by the Abbot Fleury, John Locke, Jean-Pierre de Crousaz and Charles Rollin) will show that the ideas defended by the writer were not innovative in the slightest. But also, and this seems far more important, that these ideas took place in a particular context : the mid-eighteenth century dispute between pedagogues and physicians over the body of the child, which resulted as much from the medicalization of pedagogy as from the educationalization of medicine, at a time when the boundaries between disciplines had not yet been defined. In the context of the ascension to power of physicians, reinforced by the first statistics on child mortality, as will be suggested in conclusion, Rousseau's advocacy for corporal education gave the initiative back to the pedagogues.

The Republican education, its concepts, theories, and form of discourse belong to the shared European heritage of the pre-modern Age. The pedagogy of humanism and its effects on the early Modern Age are represented by Republicanism. Even if Republicanism found a political continuation in liberalism and democratism of the Modern Age, the same cannot be said of pedagogic continuity without some reservations. In pedagogy of the Modern Age an alternative to Republicanism prevails that builds onto a body of concepts, discourse, and theory; it goes back to an old theological tradition. Rousseau chooses this alternative exclusively for his concepts of education. He is neither the inventor nor the one who builds up this language in contrast to pedagogical Republicanism. Nonetheless, the pedagogical canonization of Rousseau as one of the co-founders of pedagogical Modernity, marks the specific development that this theological language of pedagogy undergoes at the turn of the nineteenth century. Originally it is closely linked to specific theological, dogmatic lines of thought, namely, to the respective Piety movements within the two Christian denominations of Western Europe. Yet at the turn of the nineteenth century, this theological language of pedagogy increasingly loses that exclusive link to this particular context and becomes thus freely available to any form of pedagogy, which puts at its centre the child's soul, absolute inwardness, and introspection as both holy and also threatened by a basically decadent social environment and outward world.

The style of Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows" arises from an alternative vision and choice of values characteristic of romance. Romance seeks fulfillment beyond the consequences of everyday relationships and the constrictions of ordinary life. Causal relationships give way to lists of independent items, unmotivated outcomes, and fulfilled wishes. Typical syntax in "The Wind in the Willows" includes compound listing of elements: instead of subordinating the parts to each other, both sentence style and larger organization deemphasize causality, giving an additive and coordinate nature to the work. Grahame's style is an appropriate vehicle for a "new life" that is inherently rather than conditionally worthwhile. Characters acknowledge each other as ends. Such a style is a natural outcome of the worldview of romance.

One of the mantras of progressive education is that genuine learning ought to be exciting and pleasurable, rather than joyless and painful. To a significant extent, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is associated with this mantra. In a theme of "Emile" that is often neglected in the educational literature, however, Rousseau stated that "to suffer is the first thing [Emile] ought to learn and the thing he will most need to know." Through a discussion of Rousseau's argument for the importance of an education in suffering, Avi Mintz contends that the reception of Rousseau by progressives suggests a detrimental misstep in the history of educational thought, a misstep that we should recognize and correct today. We ought to revive the progressive tradition of distinguishing the valuable educational pains from the harmful ones, even if we disagree with the particular types of pain that Rousseau identified as educationally valuable.

This essay offers an extensive rehabilitation and reappraisal of the concept of childhood innocence as a means of testing the boundaries of some prevailing constructions of childhood. It excavates in detail some of the lost histories of innocence in order to show that these are more diverse and more complex than established and pejorative assessments of them conventionally suggest. Recovering, in particular, the forgotten pedigree of the Romantic account of the innocence of childhood underlines its depth and furnishes an enriched understanding of its critical role in the coming of mass education--both as a catalyst of social change and as an alternative measure of the child-centeredness of the institutions of public education. Now largely and residually confined to the inheritance of nursery education, the concept of childhood innocence, and the wider Romantic project of which it is an element, can help question the assumptions underpinning modern, competence-centred philosophies of childhood.

"When I have fears that I may cease to be", by John Keats, portrays the poet's fear of dying young and being unable to fulfill his ideal as a writer and loses his beloved. Based on the use of sensuous imagery, it is clear that visual image dominates the use of imagery and there are two major thought groups: 1) Keats expresses his fear of dying young (lines 1-12); he fears that he will not fulfill himself as a writer (lines 1-8) and that he will lose his beloved (lines 9-12); 2) Keats resolves his fears by asserting the unimportance of love and fame in the concluding two and a half lines.

In this response to Peter Medway's paper, "English and Enlightenment' (Changing English 17:1, 2010), I take issue with little of what he so lucidly writes, except his implicit and occasionally explicit denunciation of Romanticism as the proper basis of English pedagogy. I am concerned in this paper to emphasise the positive aspects of Romanticism in giving a vivid flavour to experience--surely the foundation of any humane values--whilst simultaneously attempting to reposition Romanticism in the direction of Critical Pedagogy. In this venture, I draw especially on William Blake, the subject of a previous exploration in this journal (Stevens, "Changing English" 7:1, 2000), and Paulo Freire.

In this essay, Robert Davis argues that much of the moral anxiety currently surrounding children in Europe and North America emerges at ages and stages curiously familiar from traditional Western constructions of childhood. The symbolism of infancy has proven enduringly effective over the last two centuries in associating the earliest years of children's lives with a peculiar prestige and aura. Infancy is then vouchsafed within this symbolism as a state in which all of society's hopes and ideals for the young might somehow be enthusiastically invested, regardless of the complications that can be anticipated in the later, more ambivalent years of childhood and adolescence. According to Davis, the understanding of the concept of infancy associated with the rise of popular education can trace its pedigree to a genuine shift in sensibility that occurred in the middle of the eighteenth century. After exploring the essentially Romantic positions of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Frobel and their relevance to the pattern of reform of early childhood education in the United Kingdom and the United States, Davis also assesses the influence of figures such as Stanley Hall and John Dewey in determining the rationale for modern early childhood education. A central contention of Davis's essay is that the assumptions evident in the theory and practice of Pestalozzi and his followers crystallize a series of tensions in the understanding of infancy and infant education that have haunted early childhood education from the origins of popular schooling in the late eighteenth century down to the policy dilemmas of the present day.