David Reeder

Schooling in the city: educational history and the urban variable

Educational history has been regularly noticed in the Urban History Yearbook in reviews, and in the bibliography under the heading of urban culture, but it has been a minority interest among urban historians and in Britain the treatment of schools and schooling in town histories has tended until recently to be perfunctory or conventional. However, the impact of social and cultural history on both urban and educational history is resulting in more of an overlap of interests. Hence the publication later this year, in the series of themes in International Urban History, of a set of comparative essays on urban educational history: The City and Education in Four Nations. This article anticipates the historiographical reviews, case studies and theoretical discussions of that volume. It attempts to show, from a British perspective, how recent historiographical bends raise questions and issues of interest to urban historians of the modern period.

Book Reviews : Youth Training and the Search for Work Denis Gleeson (ed). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983. Routledge Education Books, 360 pages. £9.95

both sides of the binary divide concerned with .developing a sociology of further education and youth training. It seems to have been rushed out, understandably, to capitalise on the topicality of contributions which evaluate recent government initiatives to improve the amount and quality of youth training in response to changes in the labour market. The editor has a struggle to impose some organisation and coherence on what seems at first sight an ad hoc collection but there is a sufficient consistency of approach to allow the volume to develop a much needed critical perspective on changes affecting an educational system that is shown to be &dquo;in a state