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Histoire de l'éducation, n°157/2022

Les réformes du financement de l'éducation. France/Suède

Edited by Clémence Cardon-Quint, Johannes Westberg

Histoire de l'éducation



Educational Finance Reform. France/Sweden

The financing of education brings into play a wide range of issues - economic, but also political, social and cultural - that are addressed by many disciplines. In the field of educational history, however, it has only intermittently attracted the attention of researchers. This dossier, the result of a cooperation between the Nordic Journal of Educational History and Histoire de l'éducation, deals with reforms in the financing of education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a period marked by the expansion of access to primary, secondary and higher education. It aims to fill certain gaps in French and Swedish historiography and to stimulate new research in this field, opening the way for methodological debates across disciplines and national borders. The trajectories of France and Sweden - two examples of so-called 'advanced' economies, two forms of welfare state, facing very similar challenges - present a complex interplay of similarities and differences which makes it worthwhile to study in detail the financing mechanisms put in place in the two countries, according to the contexts and in response to particular needs: the development of technical education, pedagogical renovation, schooling in remote areas, or widening access to higher education