Mass Education and the Limits of State Building, c.1870-1930

The first comparative study of the spread of mass education around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this unique new book uses a bottom-up focus and demonstrates, to an extent not appreciated hitherto, the gulf between the intentions of the government and the reality on the ground.

LAURENCE BROCKLISS Fellow of Magdalen College, UK, and Director of the Oxford Centre for the History of Childhood. His area of research is the history of education, science and medicine in Britain and France. His latest book, co-edited with Heather Montgomery, is Childhood and Violence in Western Tradition (2010).

NICOLA SHELDON has degrees in history from Manchester and Oxford Universities and worked as a teacher of history and politics, and latterly as a head teacher, in sixth form colleges from 1987-2003. Since 2009, she has been working on the History in Education Project (www.history.ac.uk/historyineducation). From late 2011, she will be working for the Institute of Education, London.