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This paper is derived from a larger study that explored how the rationality of freedom became inscribed in educational practices that shaped and reshaped limits that constitute the responsible parent. Here, I draw on part of the study to diagnose how romantic discourse on childhood, which rewrote religious and secular discourse in the eighteenth century, was refashioned in the nineteenth century to rewrite the responsible parent. In this historical inquiry, I follow Foucault’s lead and analyse thoughts of freedom not as a value that we cannot live without or an illusion that hides the truth of our oppression but as a political tool for producing the ‘other’ as a means of inciting the autonomous parent to recognise the self as an ethical subject responsible for educating the child. What this exposes is how the writing and rewriting of the responsible parent in terms of educating the child within liberal government is reliant on fabricating ‘otherness’ as a threat to freedom.

This paper discusses the history of outdoor education at a university in the South West England, starting in 1840.

This research uses secondary sources of data; original unpublished work from the university archive is used alongside published works on the university founders and first principals, as well as sources on the developments of outdoor education in the UK.

Both founding principals were driven by their strong values of social justice and their own experiences of poverty and inequality, to establish a means for everyone to access high-quality education regardless of background or means. They saw education as key to providing a pathway out of poverty and towards opportunity and achievement for all. Kay-Shuttleworth, founder of St John's, wrote that “the best book is Nature, with an intelligent interpreter”, whilst Derwent Coleridge, St Mark's first principal, had a profound love of nature and reverence for his father's poetic circle. His father, the famous English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor–Coleridge, made the first recorded use of the verb “mountaineering”. Coleridge was using a new word for a new activity; the ascending of mountains for pleasure, rather than for economic or military purposes.

The Romantic influence on outdoor education, the early appreciation of nature and the outdoors for physical and psychological well-being and the drive for social justice have not been told in any case study before.

The purpose of this paper is to consider why Richard Dawes (1793-1867) academic, college business manager and Church of England priest developed a curriculum in a nineteenth century English village school with which he sought to modify differences in social class and achieved outstanding results in student engagement and educational attainment.

The approach is documentary. It uses books and internet scans of original documents. It locates Dawes's work in the social movements of early nineteenth century Britain and associates Dawes's activities with those of Kay-Shuttleworth who was administrator of the British government's first move to provide education for poor children.

Dawes emphasised tolerance and secular teaching within a school system devoted to instilling Church of England doctrine. He based classroom teaching on things familiar to children and integrated subject content. He used science to encourage parents of “that class immediately above that of labourers” to send their children to his school to overcome class differences. For his system to be widely adopted he needed science teachers trained in his practical teaching methods. Initial government support for science in elementary schools was eroded by Church of England opposition to state intervention in education.

Dawes's pedagogic achievements are well known in the history of science education; his secular teaching in a church school and his valiant attempt to use science as an instrument of social change, perhaps less so.

This chapter traces the early beginnings of schools and schooling in Aotearoa New Zealand. We have drawn on archival evidence to identify shifting tensions between Māori and missionary, between Church and State and between local and national priorities. Despite its relative size, the history of New Zealand’s schools highlights their complex and competing origins. This educational landscape has been marked by emerging concerns and unresolved tensions regarding entry standards, academic and professional training, recruitment, and the knowledge, skills and dispositions a teacher ought to possess. There has been little consensus about how teachers should be prepared and where this training ought to occur. The absence of any uniform understanding or agreement about the effective professional training and preparation of teachers has induced a level of bureaucratization as competing interests sought to control the work of teachers.

Probably the criticisms now most frequently heard about the House of Commons revolve around its loss of control over the Government. Debates, it is argued, are largely lifeless, for the matters under discussion have already been thoroughly thrashed out in private party meetings. Furthermore, the Parliamentary timetable and limitation of debate are largely at the mercy of the Government of the day.

New South Wales has a highly centralised State Education Department which has its headquarters in the state capital. The “ears and eyes” of the Department are the inspectors, who are selected from within the system on the basis of ability in scholarship, teaching and leadership. During a period of induction the inspector learns to appreciate the departmental viewpoint on efficiency as applied to teaching and administration and the significance of departmental policies. The “district” inspectors, responsible for a particular geographical area, are the most numerous. The functions of these inspectors include administration as the local representative of the central office and supervision, advice and appraisal of schools and teachers. Appraisal is the major task, as the general improvement of schools and the promotion of teachers are dependent upon the reports written by inspectors.