This volume represents the first major effort to write an overview of the history of education in the South West Pacific. The region contains countries as disparate as Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Samoa, but there are connections between the histories of schooling in these nations. Most of the school systems, institutions and educational practices discussed in this volume arose as a result of mainly European or 'western' economic, missionary and imperial activity in this part of the Pacific world. However, indigenous peoples also educated their communities before and after the introduction and adaptation of western forms of schooling. This volume demonstrates the diverse educational experiences and histories of the countries of Oceania.

By the mid-twentieth century, the public comprehensive high school was often regarded as the most democratic form of secondary education. Fifty years later it was under challenge. New educational markets emphasized school diversity and parental choice rather than social equity through common schooling. The comprehensives faced many criticisms, including the decline of their educational standards. This book traces the history of this decline, attending to the relationships between government education policies and their diverse regional manifestations.

This book traces the decline of the public comprehensive high school. New educational markets emphasized school diversity and parental choice rather than social equity through common schooling, and they were criticized for declining standards. The book also considers government education policies and their regional manifestations.

This book explores the fascinating and complex interactions between the ways that culture and education operate within and across societies. In some cases, education is imagined as an integrated part of general cultural phenomena; in others, educational interventions become the means for transforming the cultural circumstances of different populations. The contributors to this volume show how certain educational practices produce new cultural and professional knowledge; discuss the impacts of initially foreign educational ideas and institutions on established cultural institutions in very different societies; and explore the impacts of modernity and modern educational ideas on more traditional gendered and religious practices and communities. The book also provided striking examples of when these impacts were not benign. Increasingly powerful twentieth-century governments attempted to use education and schools to produce new, reformed citizens suitable for their newly created colonial, national, socialist, and fascist states. The expectation was that cultural and social transformation might be engineered, in major part, through schooling. This book was originally published as a special issue of Paedagogica Historica.

Following the socialist revolution, a colossal shift in everyday realities began in the 1920s and '30s in the former Russian empire. Faced with the Siberian North, a vast territory considered culturally and technologically backward by the revolutionary government, the Soviets confidently undertook the project of reshaping the ordinary lives of the indigenous peoples in order to fold them into the Soviet state. In "Agitating Images," Craig Campbell draws a rich and unsettling cultural portrait of the encounter between indigenous Siberians and Russian communists and reveals how photographs from this period complicate our understanding of this history.

"Agitating Images" provides a glimpse into the first moments of cultural engineering in remote areas of Soviet Siberia. The territories were perceived by outsiders to be on the margins of civilization, replete with shamanic rituals and inhabited by exiles, criminals, and "primitive" indigenous peoples. The Soviets hoped to permanently transform the mythologized landscape by establishing socialist utopian developments designed to incorporate minority cultures into the communist state. This book delves deep into photographic archives from these Soviet programs, but rather than using the photographs to complement an official history, Campbell presents them as anti-illustrations, or intrusions, that confound simple narratives of Soviet bureaucracy and power. Meant to agitate, these images offer critiques that cannot be explained in text alone and, in turn, put into question the nature of photographs as historical artifacts.

An innovative approach to challenging historical interpretation, "Agitating Images" demonstrates how photographs go against accepted premises of Soviet Siberia. All photographs, Campbell argues, communicate in unique ways that present new and even contrary possibilities to the text they illustrate. Ultimately, "Agitating Images" dissects our very understanding of the production of historical knowledge.