Teaching About Western Europe

A textbook on education in Western Europe, this book is designed for students of both education and European studies. It compares and contrasts education ideals and practice and cultural aspirations in different countries and generations and then goes on to consider how Western Europe will react to future challenge and change - both from within and beyond its own confines.

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance of early ideas about schooling for understanding contemporary society. She presents the competing perspectives on issues such as the identity and motivations of school reformers, the broad societal changes that made educational reform seem imperative toward the end of the eighteenth century all over the West, the connections between educational change and economic development, the role of schools in the evolution of class relations, the impact of reform on family strategies in the context of early industrialization. The work concludes by assessing historical data on the social impact of school reform and addressing the social meaning of schooling in the past and in the present.

A textbook on education in Western Europe, this book is designed for students of both education and European studies. It compares and contrasts education ideals and practice and cultural aspirations in different countries and generations and then goes on to consider how Western Europe will react to future challenge and change - both from within and beyond its own confines

This book examines the right to education for migrant children in Europe between 1949 and 1992. Using West Germany as a case study to explore European trends, the book analyzes how the Council of Europe and European Community’s ideological goals were implemented for specific national groups. The book starts with education for displaced persons and exiles in the 1950s, then compares schooling for Italian, Greek, and Turkish labor migrants, then circles back to asylum seekers and returning ethnic Germans. For each group, the state entries involved tried to balance equal education opportunities with the right to personhood, an effort which became particularly convoluted due to implicit biases. When the European Union was founded in 1993, children’s access to education depended on a complicated mix of legal status and perception of cultural compatibility. Despite claims that all children should have equal opportunities, children’s access was limited by citizenship and ethnic identity.