Education and State Formation Revisited

Abstract

The origins of national education systems have constituted one of the chief preoccupations of educational historiography during the last twenty years and, latterly, state formation has offered one of the major explanatory paradigms. Versions of this approach have been developed in a number of studies of educational development in Australia, Canada, Sweden, Prussia, Britain, and elsewhere (Miller, 1986; Curtis, 1988; Melton, 1988; Boh, 1989; Green, 1990; Davey and Miller, 1990). Most of these originated in research begun in the early and mid-1980s, some ten years ago. The 1993 conference plenary of the Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian History of Education Societies thus offered an appropriate time and place to re-assess current directions of research in this field.