Journal articles on the topic 'Victorian Teachers' Union History'

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to trace the restructure of the Victorian Education Department in Australia during the years 1980-1992. It examines how the restructuring of the department resulted in a generational reorganization of secondary schooling. This reorganization culminated in the closure of secondary technical schools that today continues to have enduring effects on access and equity to different types of secondary schooling. Design/methodology/approach – The history is based on documentary and archival research and draws on publications from the State government of Victoria, Education Department/Ministry of Education Annual Reports and Ministerial Statements and Reviews, Teacher Union Archives, Parliamentary Debates and unpublished theses and published works. Findings – As an outcome the restructuring of the Victorian Education Department, schools and the reorganization of secondary schooling, a dual system of secondary schools was abolished. The introduction of a secondary colleges occurred through a process of rationalization of schools and what secondary schooling would entail. Originality/value – This study traces how, over a decade, eight ministers of education set about to reform education by dismantling and undoing the historical development of Victoria’s distinctive secondary schools system.

For some time, there has been reason for imagining that we live in neo-Victorian times. We are awash in restless evangelicals, profligate of stern and apocalyptic advice. We have had praying leaders who imagine that foreigners, usually with beards, require reform and invasion. Celts threaten secession and the Union is extolled. There is much talk of families, education, and the anxieties of class. Our novels grow long and vexed, and even have plots. Historians seek the common reader and write meandering narratives, full of metaphor, which may be purchased at railway stations.

What prompted New York City teachers to form a union in the Progressive Era? The founding of the journal American Teacher in 1912 led to creation of the Teachers’ League in 1913 and then the Teachers Union in 1916, facilitating formation of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Despite historiographical claims that teacher union drives needed a focus on bread-and-butter issues to succeed, ideals of educational democracy and opposition to managerial autocracy motivated the Teachers’ League. Contrary to claims that early New York City teacher unionism was unrepresentative because dominated by radical male Jewish high-school instructors, heterogeneous majorities of women and elementary school teachers formed the Teachers’ League and Teachers Union leaderships. Board of Education representation, maternity leave, free speech, and pensions were aims of this radically democratic movement led by socialists and feminists, which received demonstrably greater mass teacher support than the conservative feminism of a rival association.

AbstractThis article argues that political considerations, economic theory, attitudes toward public finance, and concerns about regional development all influenced contemporary responses to the Galway packet-boat contract of 1859–64. Though historians have conventionally depicted the dispute over the contract as an episode in Victorian high politics, it maintains that the controversy surrounding the agreement between the Galway Company and the state cannot be understood solely in terms of party manoeuvre at Westminster. In the context of the Union between Britain and Ireland, the Galway contract raised important questions about the role of the British government in fostering Irish economic development through public expenditure. Politicians and opinion-makers adopted a variety of ideologically informed positions when addressing this issue, resulting in diverse approaches to state intervention, often across party lines. While political calculation and pressure from interest groups certainly affected policy, the substantive debate on the contract helped to shape the late Victorian Irish policy of both British parties by clarifying contemporary ideas about the economic functions appropriate to the Union state.

Presenting Prof. Marian Walczak’s achievements concentrated on the field of Polish Teachers’ Union and the history of education. The presentation of Prof. Marian Walczak’s biography and achievements in all fields of his rich academic activity, especially in the scope of the history of Polish Teachers’ Union, underground teaching, the activity of high schools and education as well as the martyrdom of Polish teachers during the Nazi occupation. Moreover, the results of the professor’s research into the history of Polish education after WWII have also been presented. The achievements of Prof. Marian Walczak were significant. He is remembered by posterity for his activity in the history of Polish Teachers’ Union and the history of education in the 20th century.

In the 1850s, at St. Mark's training college in Chelsea, London, ten students regularly violated the “lights out” rule in the evening at the end of long, exhausting days. Desirous of increasing their culture and general knowledge, they gave over half an hour every evening before sleep to what they styled, after the working-class clubs of the same name, “a mutual improvement society” in which they took turns giving lectures on a wide range of topics. They were not alone: throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, teachers-in-training across Britain supplemented their already daunting workload by writing poetry, reading novels, discussing Shakespeare, and holding debates about pressing social and political questions. From the perspective of many Victorian observers and historians today, this anecdote is an anomaly, an aberration that carries little weight in telling the story of the training colleges in which the majority of teachers in Victorian Britain eventually came to receive an education. For them, training colleges were the sites of rote memorization and pedagogical learning. Though some educationalists called for a more liberal curriculum for teachers, according to this view, teachers' education only began to emphasize expansive reading, original thinking, the cultivation of the individual, and general curiosity beginning in the 1890s with the rise of day training colleges affiliated with universities.

This article presents the case of a Victorian schoolteacher who claimed mystical experiences, including ecstasy, the stigmata and mystical espousals. Rather than attempt retrospectively either to prove or disprove these claims, the author seeks to discover where contemporaries drew the line between the natural and supernatural. Reactions shown to the schoolteacher in the 1870s and 1880s by priests, teachers, religious and doctors suggest that clear-cut oppositions between the rationalist and credulous were uncharacteristic of the time. The more common position was to find both atheism and internally consistent Christian theology inadequate and to prefer an idiosyncratic blend of the two.

In the literature on African trade unions during decolonization and in the immediate post-independence period, two schools of thought can be distinguished: one is pessimistic about the unions' economic and political roles, and the other is optimistic. This study attempts to assess the role of autonomous teachers' trade unions in Anglophone Cameroon during the period 1959–72. The emergence, development and dissolution of these unions appears to have closely followed the region's political and educational reforms. It is argued that two main issues formed a constant source of conflict between the government and these unions, namely the preservation of trade union autonomy, and union demands for a substantial improvement in members' conditions of service.

This paper is a study of the relationship between economic culture and trade union economic subculture during the years in which both the Victorian trade union movement and the classical economists' view of it reached their maturity. This period represented a turning point in the history of the movement, which achieved a full institutionalization and legitimation. The Webbs, and a historiographic tradition since them, maintained that these results were obtained at the price of a complete submission to the ideological hegemony of the bourgeoisie. In the 1960s R. V. Clements challenged this view and argued that such a subordination had never taken place, and that trade unionists had managed to keep their independent views – especially at the level of economic thought. Recent discussions have been content to stress the sound and ‘aseptic’ pragmatism of the working men, and the abstruse dogmatism of the economists. A footnote quoting Clements' article seems to be all that readers can reasonably ask for. The possibility of an alternative interpretation – namely, that classical economics could actually be useful to trade union strategies and interests – has not yet been sufficiently considered. The aim of this paper is to argue that there is much evidence in support of such an interpretation.

Purpose The Victorian School of Languages began on the margins of the Victorian education system in 1935 as a “special experiment” supported by the Chief Inspector of Secondary Schools, J.A Seitz. The purpose of this paper is to present a historical analysis of the first 15 years of the “special experiment” and it reports on the school’s fragile beginnings. Design/methodology/approach The historical analysis draws on archival materials, oral sources and other primary documents from the first 15 years of the Saturday language classes, to explore its fragile role and status within the Victorian education system. Findings The Saturday language classes were experimental in nature and were initially intended to pilot niche subjects in the languages curriculum. Despite support from influential stakeholders, widespread interest and a promising response from teachers and students, the student enrolments dwindled, especially in the war years. As fate would have it, the two languages initially established (Japanese and Italian) faced a hostile war environment and only just survived. Questions about the continuing viability of the classes were raised, but they were championed by Seitz. Originality/value To date, this is one of few scholarly explorations of the origins of the Victorian School of Languages, a school which became a model for Australia’s other State Specialist Language Schools. This paper contributes to the literature about the VSL, a school that existed on the margins but played a pioneering role in the expansion of the language curriculum in Victoria.

The article shows the process of founding and developing trade union functions at education institutions. On the ground of factual material the role and importance of the Russian Plekhanov University of Economics were studied in different periods of interaction between workers of people’s education and society and state in order to ensure their defense in sphere of labour. Today the Professional Union of Workers of People’s Education and Science of the Russian Federation keeps upholding social and labour rights and professional interests of teachers, pre-school nurses, lecturers and other workers of education. The principle goal of developing contractual regulation in social and labour relations is to improve its quality and efficiency for workers of education. The trade union has joined both Russian and international union movement. When we reveal history of the trade union, it can help union bodies and activists comprehend both the past and the present significance of the trade union movement in education.

In this paper, we present and explore the case of the Teaching Support Staff Union (TSSU), an independent, directly democratic, and feminist labor union at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Operating continuously since the 1970s, we argue that TSSU is an important example of the ways in which gender and class have intersected within the history of the Canadian labor movement, and a fascinating case of a longstanding socialist feminist union. We also argue that alongside the historical relevance, exploring the constraints and possibilities of a feminist nonhierarchical organizational structure can offer important lessons for organizing in the twenty-first century. Adopting a socialist feminist framework, we speak from our experiences serving as TSSU executives, as graduate students, and as teachers within the larger academic machine. Marking its fortieth year in 2018, this active, young, and angry labor union can provide the labor movement and academics with a case study to reflect on how we can conceptualize social movement unionism; organize around and toward equity, diversity, and justice; and maintain a deep commitment to both feminist and class struggle.

For many years a consensus among historians of the Edwardian age drew a contrast between the essentially stable, liberal society of the late Victorian years, when discussion, compromise and orderly behaviour were the norm, and an Edwardian society in which tacit conventions governing the conduct of those involved in social and political movements began to be rejected – by Pankhurst feminists, Ulster Unionists, trade union militants and syndicalists. This period of crisis was so described in 1935 by Edward Dangerfield in the The strange death of liberal England, a brilliantly evocative title which, despite the lack of precision contained in the argument presented in his book, exercised an enduring influence on subsequent interpretations of British social and political history before 1914. G. D. H. Cole and Raymond Postgate reinforced this interpretation of a society in crisis, and not until Dr Henry Pelling's Politics and society in late Victorian Britain appeared in 1968 was the notion firmly rejected. There he denied that the convergence of the Irish conflict over home rule, the violence of the militant suffragettes, and unprecedented labour unrest signified either connexions or a common fundamental cause. The re-printing of Dangerfield's book in 1980 (and Pelling's in 1979) has been followed by renewed interest in these competitive hypotheses, and has led historians to re-examine the Edwardian age.

Abstract This article examines the early history of the Institute of Journalists as a case study of occupational development in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. It argues that disagreements over the putative meaning of ‘professional’ led to widespread belief that journalists’ interests were best served by organizing as a trade union rather than as a ‘professional organization’. Drawing on trade periodicals, memoirs and journalism handbooks, this article illustrates the complexities of the ‘professional ideal’ and underscores the ambiguous position of the ‘mental labourer’ in British society.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore philosophies of progressive education circulating in Australia in the period immediately following the expansion of secondary schools in the 1960s. It examines the rise of the alternative and community school movement of the 1970s, focusing on initiatives within the Victorian government school sector. It aims to better understand the realisation of progressive education in the design and spatial arrangements of schools, with specific reference to the re-making of school and community relations and new norms of the student-subject of alternative schooling. Design/methodology/approach – It combines historical analysis of educational ideas and reforms, focusing largely on the ideas of practitioners and networks of educators, and is guided by an interest in the importance of school space and place in mediating educational change and aspirations. It draws on published writings and reports from teachers and commentators in the 1970s, publications from the Victorian Department of Education, media discussions, internal and published documentation on specific schools and oral history interviews with former teachers and principals who worked at alternative schools. Findings – It shows the different realisation of radical aims in the set up of two schools, against a backdrop of wider innovations in state education, looking specifically at the imagined effects of re-arranging the physical and symbolic space of schooling. Originality/value – Its value lies in offering the beginnings of a history of 1970s educational progressivism. It brings forward a focus on the spatial dimensions of radical schooling, and moves from characterisation of a mood of change to illuminate the complexities of these ideas in the contrasting ambitions and design of two signature community schools.

The aim of this article is to explain the political and trade union stance of the British National Union of Teachers (NUT) – representing the teachers of England and Wales – against the arms race and nuclear warheads set up in the European Continent during the Cold War (1947-1991). After adopting resolutions in support of «Education for Peace» at its Annual Conferences (Jersey, 1983 and Blackpool, 1984), the NUT held an International Peace Conference (1984) involving Western and Eastern European countries in which teachers’ unions from the following countries participated: the United States, Finland, the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic and Bulgaria. The international event was held in Stoke Rochford Hall (England) during the British miners’ national strike against the socioeconomic reforms instituted under the governments of Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990). The article started from the methodological presupposition based on the principle of political connection on an international scale within the scope of the trade union movement of teachers. Indeed, despite differences in nationalities, the educational processes institutionalized by schooling have acquired a universal character. Thus, teachers, irrespective of their nationality, are workers who are politically committed to the cultural values consecrated by the knowledge accumulated by humanity throughout history, especially when it comes to peace among peoples. It should be emphasized that the topic addressed has never before been analysed on an international level, and that primary sources that fall within the historical context of the facts studied were used in the production of the article.

The historiography of leisure has made considerable advances since the pioneering years of the early 1970s. Research into Victorian leisure has shown that some of the ruling elite attempted to fashion the life-style of working people in order to create a disciplined and reliable labour force which suited the needs of a maturing industrial and urban society, although it must be added that sections of the British public remained immune to attempts at moral reform and improvement. Professional labour leaders were also eager to control and regulate the amusements of the poor. According to trade union bosses like John Doherty, only a sober, industrious and thrifty working class could hope to achieve progressive reforms and some form of political and economic emancipation: workers who were intemperate would apparently stifle the opportunities and aspirations of the emerging Labour movement. Nowhere is this more true than in the Labour leadership's perception of and policy towards working-class drinking.

The article investigates an archival file concerning a project submitted by French teachers to the Director of Elementary Schools in Moscow Guberniia in 1795. The project’s authors aimed at creating a trade union and a platform for legally authorized socializing and mutual aid. Fourteen individuals signed the project, about whom the archival file contains brief dossiers from the Secret Investigation Office (the administrative body in charge of domestic intelligence). The teachers’ initiative gave rise to correspondence between the Governor of Moscow and the Prosecutor General, as well as a direct personal appeal of the latter to the empress. All in all, the documents show the circumspect attitude of the Russian authorities toward the French community in Russia in the time of the French Revolution. The authors analyze this particular episode in the context of the history of the French community, and especially of French teachers, in eighteenth century Russia. The text of the Project for the Union of Teachers is published in the appendix.

Malcolm Quinn’s book,Utilitarianism and the Art School in Nineteenth-Century Britain, is an historical study of the birth pangs of the state-funded art school that interrogates the politics of art’s reproduction within the context of Victorian reformism in which the art school was proposed as a mechanism to improve the standards of taste of manufacturers and factory workers, as well as of artists, designers, art teachers and others. The review locates the political and cultural transition from the academy to the art school as the construction of a specifically bourgeois institution of art.

The paper provides a review on the joint Russian-Belarusian tutorial “History of the Great Patriotic War. Essays on the Shared History” published for the 75th anniversary of the victory in the Great Patriotic War. The tutorial was prepared within the project “Belarus and Russia. Essays on the Shared History”, implemented since 2018 and aimed at publishing a series of tutorials, which authors are major Russian and Belarusian historians, archivists, teachers, and other specialists in human sciences. From the author’s point of view, the joint work of specialists from the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus in such a format not only contributes to the deepening of humanitarian integration within the Union state, but also to the formation of a common educational system on the scale of the Commonwealth of Independent States or the Eurasian integration project (Eurasian Economic Union – EEU). The author emphasises the high research and educational significance of the publication reviewed when noting that the teaching of history in general and the history of the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War in particular in post-Soviet schools and institutes of higher education is complicated by many different issues and challenges (including external ones, which can be regarded as information aggression by various extra-regional actors).

School finance reforms caused some of the most dramatic increases in intergovernmental aid from states to local governments in U.S. history. We examine whether teachers' unions affected the fraction of reform-induced state aid that passed through to local spending and the allocation of these funds. Districts with strong teachers' unions increased spending nearly dollar-for-dollar with state aid and spent the funds primarily on teacher compensation. Districts with weak unions used aid primarily for property tax relief and spent remaining funds on hiring new teachers. The greater expenditure increases in strong union districts led to larger increases in student achievement.

AbstractBringing together leading observers of the 2018 teachers’ strikes in the United States, this forum surveys the origins, character, and trajectory of the rebellion as a whole. We examine the relations between union bureaucracies and the rank and file, the wider political context of the United States, the geography of the strike, immediate and longer-term grievances in the public-education sector, spontaneity and organisation, local cultural contexts and labour histories, strategies and tactics, social reproduction and gender, race and racism, and the potentialities and obstacles facing the movement in the near future.

AbstractDid late Victorian strikers have a right to poor relief? Historians have suggested they did not. Scholars point out that nineteenth-century strikers rarely turned to the Poor Law for assistance, and when they did, during a colliers' strike in South Wales in 1898, Poor Law officials were taken to court by disgruntled coal companies. In the subsequent High Court ruling known as the Merthyr Tydfil judgment of 1900, the Master of the Rolls decided that the policy of relieving the strikers had indeed been unlawful. However, it is argued in this article that the judgment has not been properly understood by historians. Contemporaries did not think it obvious that the giving of poor relief to strikers was illegal. On the contrary, in 1898, there was widespread agreement that Poor Law officials had no choice but to support destitute strikers; the Poor Law demanded they relieve the men and their families, a point confirmed in an earlier High Court ruling in 1899. Thus, Poor Law scholars should view the Merthyr judgment as a notable innovation in Poor Law policy. Labor historians should see the ruling as part of the employers' counteroffensive against the labor movement of the 1890s and 1900s. Merthyr came out of the same febrile atmosphere that produced the Taff Vale judgment. That its true significance has been forgotten can largely be explained by the labor movement's unease at having a striker's right to poor relief confirmed in 1899. Respectable workers, union leaders averred, should not be supported out of the poor rates.

Historians such as Seth Koven and Carolyn Steedman have shown how visual and literary depictions of children helped move late-nineteenth-century middle- and upper-class audiences to join in child-saving philanthropy aimed at the deserving poor. This was certainly true of the promotional literature of the free kindergartens, an analysis of which forms the focus of this essay. Starting from the concepts of fact, truth, and intertextuality utilized by Koven in his analyses of nineteenth-century representations of child-saving, this essay analyzes texts written by free kindergartners (that is, teachers in free kindergartens) Kate Douglas Wiggin in San Francisco and Lileen Hardy in Edinburgh during the 1880s and 1910s, respectively. It contends that we can better understand the purposes, messages, and relatedness of Anglo-American free kindergartners' accounts—and the movements of which they were a part—if we read them as contemporary readers might have; that is, as “artistic fictions” in the mold of the late-Victorian evangelical “true narratives” and as depictions of how child-saving was consciously performed for and presented to multiple audiences.

The British educated classes have long worried and fantasized about working-class religious belief and unbelief. Anglican churchmen feared Methodist “enthusiasm” in the eighteenth century, radicalism in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and urban, industrial irreligion after the 1851 Religious Census on churchgoing. In a mirror image of these old anxieties, most labour historians have wished away Christianity in the twentieth century. The long-standing shared socialist teleology of Marxists and Fabians leads to the modern, socialist labour movement. In this Marxian take on secularization theory, a new, more cohesive proletariat or singular “working class” forms, with an anti-capitalist, “socialist” consciousness reflected in the political, trade union, and co-operative institutions of the “labour movement”. Suddenly, economic, social, and political history find a single, unified subject. At the level of belief, socialism displaces those old Victorian pretenders for working-class hearts and minds: conservatism, liberalism, and Christianity. Sometime between 1914 and 1918, the Christian religion disappears from ordinary lives, as in Selina Todd's recent, The People, where popular religious faith is barely worth talking about.

The article discussed the role of contemporary tapestry art in modern culture, the history of the formation and growth of national decorative-applied and monumental art schools in the Republics of former Soviet Union, the importance of both group and personal tapestry exhibitions organized by regional creative organizations of the Union of Artists and the Russian Union of Artists as well as the state Museum-Reserve “Tsaritsyno”. It emphasizes the importance of using richest traditions of folk art, stories and legends of the people living in multiethnic Russia. The works of teachers and graduates of the Department “Folk Art Culture and Contemporary Art” of the Institute of National Culture of Ogarev Mordovia State University have been demonstrated as an example of those who apply modern tapestry in architectural space design. The paper also defines prospects for the development of tapestry art in the works of young artists.

With the advent of the Bologna Process to develop higher education in the European Union, university teachers and students have gone through a process of change. This change required an adjustment to the demands of higher education reform governed by European convergence. However, the resulting transformations in pedagogical practice have ostensibly affected not only teacher-student attitudes and relationships but also the academic culture. Within the new educational paradigm, the shift to a student-centered pedagogy has meant the empowering of individual students providing them with the opportunity to direct their own learning. However, the issue now is how to address and exercise student empowerment in the real-life class. This study is an investigation into the role of teachers to strike a balance between the forces pushing them to adapt to the new pedagogical framework and the need to improve student self-reliance and ownership of learning. It concludes by reaffirming the advantages of applying an empowerment-based approach, already recognized by current research, that enhances teacher and students relations in an effective learning environment.

Educational conditions reflect society’s cultural traditions and political system, in turn affecting society’s development. The development of the younger generation is guided by way of education, for which reason working out educational policy requires the participation of society’s various interest groups. This article analyses changes in the teaching of history in the transitional period from the Soviet era to restored independent statehood. The development of subject content, the complicated role of the history teacher, the training of history teachers, and the start of the renewal of textbooks and educational literature are examined. The aim is to ascertain in retrospect the developments that took place prior to the restoration of Estonia’s independence, in other words the first steps that laid the foundation for today’s educational system. Legislation, documents, publications, and media reports preserved in the archives of the Ministry of Education and Research and the Archival Museum of Estonian Pedagogics were drawn upon in writing this article, along with the recollections of teachers who worked in schools in that complicated period. These recollections were gathered by way of interviews (10) and questionnaires (127). Electronic correspondence has been conducted with key persons who participated in changes in education in order to clarify information, facts, conditions and circumstances. The discussion in education began with a congress of teachers in 1987, where the excessive regulation of education was criticised, along with school subjects with outdated content, and the curriculum that was in effect for the entire Soviet Union. The resolution of the congress presented the task of building a national and independent Estonian school system. The congress provided an impetus for increasing social activeness. An abundance of associations and unions of teachers and schools emerged in the course of the educational reform of the subsequent years. After the congress, the Minister of Education, Elsa Gretškina, initiated a series of expert consultations at the Republic-wide Institute for In-service Training of Teachers (VÕT) for reorganising general education. The pedagogical experience of Estonia and other countries was analysed, new curricula were drawn up and evaluated, and new programmes were designed for school subjects. The solution was seen in democratising education: in shaping the distinctive character of schools, taking into account specific local peculiarities, establishing alternative schools, differentiating study, increasing awareness and the relative proportion of humanities subjects and foreign language study, better integrating school subjects, and ethical upbringing. The problems of schools where Russian was the language of instruction were also discussed. The Ministry of Education announced a competition for school programmes in 1988 to find innovative ideas for carrying out educational reform. The winning programme prescribed compulsory basic education until the end of the 9th grade, and opportunities for specialisation starting in the second year of study in secondary school, that is starting in the 11th grade. Additionally, the programme prescribed a transition to a 12-grade system of study. Schools where Russian was the language of instruction were to operate separately, but were obliged to teach the Estonian language and Estonian literature, history, music and other subjects. Hitherto devised innovative ideas for developing Estonian education were summed up in the education platform, which is a consensual document that was approved at the end of 1988 at the conference of Estonian educators and in 1989 by the board of the ESSR State Education Committee. The constant reorganisation of institutions hindered development in educational conditions. The activity of the Education Committee, which had been formed in 1988 and brought together different spheres of educational policy, was terminated at the end of 1989, when the tasks of the committee were once again transferred to the Ministry of Education. The Republic-wide Institute for In-service Training of Teachers, the ESSR Scientific-Methodical Cabinet for Higher and Secondary Education, the ESSR Teaching Methodology Cabinet, the ESSR Preschool Upbringing Methodology Cabinet, and the ESSR Vocational Education Teaching and Methodology Cabinet were all closed down in 1989. The Estonian Centre for the Development of Education was formed in July of 1989 in place of the institutions that were closed down. The Institute for Pedagogical Research was founded on 1 April 1991 as a structural subunit of the Tallinn Pedagogical Institute, and was given the task of developing study programmes for general education schools. The Institute for the Scientific Research of Pedagogy (PTUI) was also closed down as part of the same reorganisation. The work of history and social studies teachers was considered particularly complicated and responsible in that period. The salary rate of history teachers working in secondary schools was raised in 1988 by 15% over that of teachers of other subjects, since their workload was greater than that of teachers of other subjects – the renewal of teaching materials did not catch up with the changes that were taking place in society and teachers themselves had to draw up pertinent teaching materials in place of Soviet era textbooks. Articles published in the press, newer viewpoints found in the media, published collections of documents, national radio broadcasts, historical literature and school textbooks from before the Second World War, and writings of notable historians, including those that were published in the press throughout the Soviet Union, were used for this purpose. Teachers had extensive freedom in deciding on the content of their subject matter, since initially there were no definite arrangements in that regard. A history programme group consisting of volunteer enthusiasts took shape at a brainstorming session held after the teachers’ congress. This group started renewing subject matter content and working out a new programme. The PTUI had already launched developmental work. There in the PTUI, Silvia Õispuu coordinated the development of history subject matter content (this work continued until 1993, when this activity became the task of the National Bureau of Schools). The curriculum for 1988 still remained based on history programmes that were in effect throughout the Soviet Union. The greatest change was the teaching of history as a unified course in world history together with themes from the history of the Estonian SSR. The first new curriculum was approved in the spring of 1989, according to which the academic year was divided up into three trimesters. The school week was already a five-day week by then, which ensured 175 days of study per year. The teaching of history began in the 5th grade and it was taught two hours per week until the end of basic school (grades 5 – 9). Compulsory teaching of history was specified for everyone in the 10th grade in secondary school, so-called basic education for two hours a week. The general and humanities educational branches had to study history three hours a week while the sciences branch only had to study history for two hours a week. Students were left to decide on optional subjects and elective subjects based on their own preferences and on what the school was able to offer. The new conception of teaching history envisaged that students learn to know the past through teaching both in the form of a general overview as well as on the basis of events and phenomena that most characterise the particular era under consideration. The teacher was responsible for choosing how in-depth the treatment of the subject matter would be. The new programmes were implemented in their entirety in the academic year of 1990/1991. At the same time, work continued on improving subject programmes. After ideological treatments were discarded, the aim became to make teaching practice learner-oriented. The new curriculum was optional for schools where the language of instruction was Russian. Recommendations for working with renewed subject content regarding Estonian themes in particular were conveyed by way of translated materials. These schools mostly continued to work on the basis of the structure and subject content that was in effect in the Soviet Union, teaching only the history of the Soviet Union and general history. Certain themes from Estonian history were considered in parallel with and on the basis of the course on the history of the Soviet Union. The number of lessons teaching the national official language (Estonian) was increased in the academic year of 1989/1990 and a year later, subjects from the Estonian curriculum started being taught, including Estonian history. The national curriculum for Estonian basic education and secondary education was finally unified once and for all in Estonia’s educational system in 1996. During the Soviet era, the authorities attempted to make the teaching profession attractive by offering long summer breaks, pension insurance, subsidised heating and electricity for teachers in the countryside, and apartments free of charge. This did not compensate the lack of professional freedom – teachers worked under the supervision of inspectors since the Soviet system required history teachers to justify Soviet ideology. The effectiveness of each teacher’s work was assessed on the basis of social activeness and the grades of their students. The content and form of Sovietera teacher training were the object of criticism. They were assessed as not meeting the requirements of the times and the needs of schools. Changes took place in the curricula of teacher training in 1990/1991. Teachers had to reassess and expand their knowledge of history during the transitional period. Participation in social movements such as the cultural heritage preservation movement also shaped their mentality. The key question was educational literature. The government launched competitions and scholarships in order to speed up the completion of educational literature. A teaching aid for secondary school Estonian history was published in 1989 with the participation of 18 authors. Its aim was set as the presentation of historical facts that are as truthful as possible from the standpoint of the Estonian people. Eesti ajalugu (The History of Estonia) is more of a teacher’s handbook filled with facts that lacks a methodical part, and does not include maps, explanations of terms or illustrations meant for students. The compendious treatment of Estonian history Kodulugu I and II (History of our Homeland) by Mart Laar, Lauri Vahtre and Heiki Valk that was published in the Loomingu Raamatukogu series was also used as a textbook in 1989. It was not possible to publish all planned textbooks during the transitional period. The first round of textbooks with renewed content reached schools by 1994. Since the authors had no prior experience and it was difficult to obtain original material, the authors of the first textbooks were primarily academic historians and the textbooks had a scholarly slant. They were voluminous and filled with facts, and their wording was complicated, which their weak methodical part did not compensate. Here and there the effect of the Soviet era could still be felt in both assessments and the use of terminology. There were also problems with textbook design and their printing quality. Changes in education did not take place overnight. Both Soviet era tradition that had become ingrained over decades as well as innovative ideas could be encountered simultaneously in the transitional period. The problem that the teaching of history faced in the period that has been analysed here was the wording of the focus and objectives of teaching the subject, and the balancing of knowledge of history, skills, values and attitudes in the subject syllabus. First of all, Soviet rhetoric and the viewpoint centring on the Soviet Union were abandoned. The so-called blank gaps in Estonian history were restored in the content of teaching history since it was not possible to study the history of the independent Republic of Estonia during the Soviet era or to gain an overview of deportations and the different regimes that occupied Estonia. Subject content initially occupied a central position, yet numerous principles that have remained topical to this day made their way into the subject syllabus, such as the development of critical thinking in students and other such principles. It is noteworthy that programmes for teaching history changed before the restoration of Estonia’s independence, when society, including education, still operated according to Soviet laws. A great deal of work was done over the course of a couple of years. The subsequent development of the teaching of history has been affected by social processes as well as by the didactic development of the teaching of the subject. The school reform that was implemented in 1987–1989 achieved relative independence from the Soviet Union’s educational institutions, and the opportunity emerged for self-determination on the basis of curricula and the organisation of education.

Abstract This article examines Lancashire commentary on the American Civil War during the Cotton Famine of 1861–65 through poetry which has recently been recovered from local newspapers. The complexity and variety of the often labouring-class subjectivities figured in the texts works to further disrupt the conventional historical view of a region united in moral and political sympathy with the Union cause, as exemplified by discourses surrounding Lincoln’s letter to the region in 1863. Much of this poetry displays an acute awareness of its place in the world. Labouring-class Lancashire people were forced by economic circumstances to confront the nature of a Victorian globalization which had proved its instability, and many began to see themselves in terms of a global subjectivity for the first time. This poetic discourse may have been materially and culturally adjacent to journalistic comment on the crisis, but poetry’s imaginative freedom and ability to compress language and hence cultural meaning often represented an amplification, distortion, or even contradiction of implied editorial comment. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the sometimes febrile context of Lancashire commentary on the American Civil War and its domestic effects. Even when no particular resolution was offered as an option the ability of Lancashire poets to represent the voice of their fellow sufferers with some degree of authenticity served to reflect the ever more intimate relationship between the Victorian global and the local which the effects of the American war demonstrated in such stark terms.