The International Emergence of Educational Sciences in the Post-world War Two Years: Quantification, Visualization, and Making Kinds of People

The book brings together contributions from curriculum history, cultural studies, visual cultures, and science and technology studies to explore the international mobilizations of the sciences related to education during the post-World War Two years. Crossing the boundaries of education and science studies, it uniquely examines how the desires of science to actualize a better society were converted to the search for remaking social life that paradoxically embodied cultural differences and social divisions.

The book examines how cybernetics and systems theories traveled and were assembled to turn schools into social experiments and laboratories for change. Explored are the new comparative technologies of quantification and the visualization of educational data used in the methods of mass observation. The sciences not only about the present but also the potentialities of societies and people in the psychologies of childhood; concerns for individual development, growth, and creativity; teacher education; and the quantification and assessments of educational systems. The book also explores how the categories and classifications of the sciences formed at intersections with the humanities, the arts, and political practices.

This informative volume will be of interest to researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of curriculum studies, the history of the social sciences, the history of education, and cultural studies, and to educators and school leaders concerned with education policy.

Thomas S. Popkewitz is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and the Holtz Center for Science & Technology Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA.

Daniel Pettersson is Associate Professor in Pedagogy at the University of Gävle and Uppsala University, Sweden.

Kai-Jung Hsiao is a PhD student of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA.