Lollards in the English Reformation

A Progressive Education? argues that concepts of both childhood and adolescence were transformed in English and Welsh primary and secondary modern schools between 1918 and 1979, and that, by putting childhood at the centre of the history of education, we can challenge the stories we tell about how and why schooling itself changed. A ‘progressive’ or ‘child-centred’ education began to emerge theoretically in the United States and Western Europe from the late nineteenth century, claiming to rewrite curriculums to suit children and young people’s needs, wants and abilities. Existing work suggests that progressivism both rose and retreated in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, when a right-wing backlash against permissive teaching and the deschooling movement led to the imposition of central state control over education. However, the child-centred pedagogies that became mainstream in English and Welsh schools after 1945 rested on a fundamentally different vision of childhood. Unlike utopian deschoolers, post-war child-centred educationalists assumed that the achievements of mass democracy and the welfare state must be carefully preserved. Children needed to be socialised by adult educators to ensure that they acquired the necessary physical, intellectual, social and emotional maturity to become full citizens. Teachers, far from enthusiastically advocating child-centred methods, perceived them as a profound challenge to their authority in the classroom, and implemented them partially and reluctantly. Child-centred education, in alliance with developmental psychology, thus promoted a much more restrictive and pessimistic image of childhood and youth as it came to dominate mainstream schooling after the Second World War.

The introduction sets out the ways in which the volume uses an engagement with the inspiring international reverberations of the Russian Revolution across the Black Atlantic world to understand the contested articulations of left politics and different struggles against racism and colonialism. The first section situates the volume in relation to the historiography of the Russian Revolution while outlining some of the key ways in which black radicals drew inspiration from these events. The second section positions the volume in relation to recent literatures on black internationalism, drawing attention to how the chapters in this volume take forward these debates. The final section draws attention to the implications of the book for key contemporary debates on the intersection of race and class, on the emergence of politicised forms of anti-racism, in particular those arising out of a revolutionary struggle, and on racialised forms of internationalism and agency. We conclude by positioning the introduction in relation to recent political events, including the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement.

This book examines the importance of rules for many of the world’s great moral traditions. Ethical systems characterised by detailed rules – Islamic sharia and Christian casuistry are notable examples – have often been dismissed as empty formalism or as the instrument of social control. This book demonstrates, on the contrary, that rules often enable, rather than hinder, personal ethical life. Here anthropologists and historians explore cases of rule-oriented ethics and their dynamics across a wide range of historical and contemporary moral traditions. Examples of pre-modern Hindu ethics, codes of civility from early modern England and medieval Christian casuistry demonstrate how rules can form an essential element of what Michel Foucault called ‘the care of the self’. Studies of Roman exemplary ethics, early modern Christian theology and the calculation of sin and merit in contemporary Muslim Palestine highlight the challenges posed by the coexistence of moral rules with other moral forms, not least those of virtue ethics. Finally, explorations of medieval and modern Islamic sharia, Christian moral theology and Jewish halakhah all highlight how such traditions develop complex meta-rules – rules about rules – for managing the tensions and dilemmas that the use of rules can entail. Together, these case studies and the theoretical framework proposed in the book’s Introduction offer a more nuanced, cross-cultural appreciation of the role of rules in moral life than those currently prevalent in both the anthropology of ethics and the history of morality.