In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thousands of pupils attended boarding schools in various places across the globe. Their experiences were vastly different, yet they all had in common that they were separated from their families and childhood friends for a period of time in order to sleep, eat, learn and move within the limited spatial sites of the boarding school. This book frames these 'boarding schools' as a global and transcultural phenomenon that is part of larger political and social developments of European imperialism, the Cold War, and independence movements. Drawing together case studies from colonial South Africa, colonial India, Dutch Indonesia, early twentieth-century Nigeria, Fascist Spain, Ghana, Nazi Germany, nineteenth-century Ireland, North America and the Soviet Union, this edited collection examines the ways in which boarding schools extracted pupils from their original social background in order to train, mold and shape them so that they could fit intothe perceived position in broader society. The book makes the broader argument that framing boarding schools as a global phenomenon is imperative for a deepened understanding of the global and transnational networks that linked people as well as ideas and practices of education and childhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
"This volume ... shows how the schools fit themselves into communities and the role they assumed in promoting European-centered education. Those who study missionaries, settler colonialism, and systems of education generally are among the many scholars who will gain insight from this work. Global Perspectives provides a window into how boarding schools have been a means of empire building, emphasizing the importance in studying these institutions and the many types of violence that existed within them." (Teagan Dreyer, History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 63 (4), November, 2023)