After the First World War, the League of Nations, through its International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, attempted to reshape the teaching of history in its member states. The League's supporters realized that its long-term success depended in part on supportive public opinion and that this, in turn, had implications for education. Aware of the strength of national loyalties, the League sought not to abolish the teaching of national history but to suffuse it with the spirit of the “international mind.” To this end, the League promoted revision of history textbooks and curricula, retraining of teachers, and rethinking of teaching methods. National governments responded by including some study of the League in history curricula but ignored the League's broader plans. Nonetheless, the League's attempt to internationalize the teaching of history opened up a debate that continues today as schools seek to strike a balance between claims of national and global history.

Mainstream historiography often turns to Europe's era of empire building to explain the expansion of Western formal education in Africa. Popular accounts suggest that in Africa (1) colonial involvement in education was late and short lived, spanning the early decades of the twentieth century, (2) missionaries were largely responsible for early educational expansion, and (3) education expansion resulted from interdenominational rivalries among missionaries. However, these popular narratives inadequately account for Africans' own responses to colonial education. This study examines social and cultural shifts in northern Igboland in southeastern Nigeria between 1890 and 1930. It uses colonial archives and oral sources to demonstrate that beyond missionary rivalry, domestic contests converged with the fledgling colonial process to promote English education in northern Igboland. To accomplish this task, the article reviews methodological assumptions responsible for marginal attention to the agency of the colonized in the historiography of Western education in former colonies.

During the 1840s and 1850s, members of the Creek Nation rejected schools as a colonial tool and instead experimented with various forms of education to fit their own local and national needs. Diverse individuals and communities articulated educational visions for their nation in conversation with fellow citizens, national leaders, and U.S. educators. Rather than embrace education to assimilate into the American republic, Creeks turned to schools and English literacy as one strategy to shape their own society and defend it from further Euro-American colonial policies. By the end of the 1850s, they had established a fledgling national school system consisting of both neighborhood and mission schools. These institutions reflected and reinforced changes in race, class, gender, culture, and religion in the antebellum Creek Nation.

The National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958 was the first federal investment in low-interest student loans and became a precedent for expansion of student loans in the Higher Education Act of 1965. In its controversial loyalty provisions, the NDEA required loan recipients to affirm loyalty to the U.S. government. Between 1958 and 1962, thirty-two colleges and universities refused to participate or withdrew from the NDEA loan program, arguing that the loyalty provisions unfairly targeted students and violated principles of free inquiry. This essay argues that debate over the loyalty provisions fractured a partnership between progressives who favored general aid to education and conservatives who supported short-term investment for defense purposes. Although debates over the NDEA loyalty requirements seem specific to the Cold War, a close examination of the arguments illuminates their alignment with long-standing ideological conflicts over legitimacy of federal aid to higher education.

Focusing only on education exchanges between the United States and other countries, existing scholarship fails to illuminate how American-sponsored student migrations between other countries helped expand U.S. hegemony. This article attempts to rectify this limitation by looking at Taiwan's policies on overseas Chinese students (qiaosheng) in the 1950s. After the debacle of the Chinese Civil War and its retreat to Taiwan, the Kuomintang (KMT) sought to solicit overseas Chinese support and to counter Communist China's drive for “returning students.” The KMT-developed qiaosheng program faced difficulties until 1954, when the United States, seeing that Taiwan's project could serve its anti-Communist plan, started bankrolling the qiaosheng program, thereby enabling the KMT to lure more students away from Communist China. These findings suggest that overlooking U.S.-sponsored student migrations between nations outside the United States renders our analysis of international education exchanges and American imperialism incomplete.

For this first History of Education Quarterly Policy Forum, we invited participants in the special Plenary Session at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the History of Education Society (HES) in St Louis to publish their remarks on the historical significance of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) at fifty. Organized and introduced by HES vice-president and program chair Adam R. Nelson, the session consisted of presentations by three expert panelists from the fields of History and African American Studies, American Law and Politics, and Political Science and Public Policy: Crystal Sanders of Penn State University, Doug Reed of Georgetown University, and Susan Moffitt of Brawn University, respectively. What follows are the texts of Adam Nelson's introductory remarks—including his introduction of the three panelists—followed by the panelists' remarks.

I am honored to participate on this plenary and I want to extend my thanks to the conference planning committee for the invitation. I come to this gathering as a civil rights scholar who has an interest in black education in the South. I do not consider it hyperbole on this the fiftieth anniversary of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) to say that the legislation was the most important federal government action on black education since the second Morrill Act of 1890. Surely, some in this room would disagree with my assessment and make a strong case for the 1954 Brown decision. Indeed, the Supreme Court declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional was significant. The ruling, however, had a lot of bark but very little bite, and the recalcitrant South needed bite. We know the states of the former Confederacy needed a get-tough “if-then approach”—as in, if you don't do X, then you won't get Y.

The year 2015 is as far away in chronological time from 1965 as 1965 was from World War I. In other words, Lyndon Baines Johnson and ESEA are as remote and distant to our students as Archduke Ferdinand was to us in our school days. What seems to some of us like yesterday, or the start of a recent era, is in fact now a distant and remote time, seemingly unconnected from our present educational predicaments—at least in the eyes of our students. Or, to put it another way, ESEA is now fit for historical study.

Title I has a mixed legacy that poses a paradox. Part of that legacy has yielded tremendous accomplishments. Title I asserted a federal priority to help disadvantaged students and broke with long resistance to a significant federal role in elementary and secondary schooling. It has deepened and expanded government responsibility and management of schooling at all levels—federal, state, and local. Over time, it has helped sweep schools, regardless of their student population's poverty levels, into the broader national standards-accountability movement, most recently expressed in the Common Core. While resistance to some aspects of federal authority remains, and may have intensified, Title I has developed durable constituencies and appetites for federal funds. Improving the education of children who live in poverty remains politically salient. These are remarkable accomplishments. And these accomplishments are intimately intertwined with other policies, including the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which facilitated the passage of other legislation, such as Head Start and Title I. Title I's legacy is intertwined in other ways, beyond its connections with contemporaneous policies; and these dependencies will be the focus of my remarks today.