Popular Education is a concept with many meanings. With the rise of national systems of education at the beginning of the nineteenth-century, it was related to the socially inclusive concept of citizenship coined by privileged members with vested interests in the urban society that could only be achieved by educating the common people, or in other words, the uncontrollable masses that had nothing to lose. In the twentieth-century, Popular Education became another word for initiatives taken by religious and socialist groups for educating working-class adults, and women. However, in the course...

This collection of essays is drawn from a series of international seminars in which participants explored different methodologies for writing the social history of the classroom. Essays in the collection address questions of research methodology and approach in writing the history of education, drawing on oral history, photographs, architecture, letters, and diaries. The authors explore the different ways in which historians might use different methodologies and sources. In so doing they raise different questions about history and historical practice.