Coeducation:A Contested Practice in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Secondary Schooling

This chapter discusses the history of coeducation in secondary schooling, mainly in Europe and North America. The analysis focuses on the gendered characteristics of educational systems and curricula, as well as on national discourses about single-sex or mixed schooling. The focus is on the latter half of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century, when the merits and perils of coeducation were debated for this stage of schooling. Until after World War II, children of the working class hardly ever attended school past the age of 13 or 14. Therefore, this is a history of middle- and upper-class education. In the early nineteenth century, girls had to do with a very limited, private education that prepared only for homemaking and motherhood, while boys could attend public grammar schools that opened the door to the university and the professions. From the mid-nineteenth century, initiatives to improve the quality of girls’ education were taken. Few countries opened up boys’ public schools for girls; in most cases, new girls’ schools were established with more serious but still unequal curricula, focusing mainly on humanities. Schools teaching a curriculum equivalent to that of the boys’ schools were not created until after the turn of the century, when a more critical view of coeducation became the rule. Democratization and coeducation came hand in hand with the introduction of comprehensive mixed secondary schooling in the 1960s and 1970s. The shortcomings of coeducation, however, were not rediscovered until after it had generally been introduced

The Liberal Playground: Susan Isaacs, Psychoanalysis and Progressive Education in the Interwar Era

The Cambridge Malting House, an experimental school, serves here as a case study for investigating the tensions within 1920s liberal elites between their desire to abandon some Victorian and Edwardian sets of values in favour of more democratic ones, and at the same time their insistence on preserving themselves as an integral part of the English upper class. Susan Isaacs, the manager of the Malting House, provided the parents – some of whom were the most famous scientists and intellectuals of their age – with an opportunity to fulfil their ‘fantasy’ of bringing up children in total freedom. In retrospect, however, she deeply criticized those from their milieu for not fully understanding the real socio-cultural implications of their ideological decision to make independence and freedom the core values in their children’s education. Thus, 1920s progressive education is a paradigmatic case study of the cultural and ideological inner contradictions within liberal thought in the interwar era. The article also shows how psychoanalysis – which attracted many progressive educators – played a crucial role in providing liberals of all sorts with a new language to articulate their political visions, but, at the same time, explored the limits of the liberal discourse as a whole

Resolution of a protracted serogroup B meningococcal outbreak with whole genome sequencing shows inter species genetic transfer.

A carriage study was undertaken (n=112) to ascertain the prevalence Neisseria spp. following the eighth case of invasive meningococcal disease in young children (5-46 months) and members of a large extended indigenous ethnic minority Traveller family (n=123), typically associated with high occupancy living conditions.Nested Multi Locus Sequence Typing (MLST) was employed for case specimen extracts. Isolates were genome sequenced, then assembled de novo and deposited into the Bacterial Isolate Genome Sequencing database (BIGSdb). This facilitated an expanded MLST approach utilising large numbers of loci for isolate characterisation and discrimination.A rare sequence type 6697 predominated in disease specimens and carried isolates (n=8/14), persisting for at least 44 months, likely driven by the high population density of houses (n=67/112) and trailers (n=45/112). Carriage was more likely in the smaller, more densely populated trailers for N. meningitidis (p<0.05) and N. lactamica (p<0.002) (2-sided Fishers exact test). Meningococcal carriage was highest in 24-39 year olds (45%, n=9/20). Evidence of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) was observed in four individuals co-colonized by Nersseria lactamica and Neisseria meningitidis One HGT event resulted in the acquisition of 26 consecutive N. lactamica alleles.This study demonstrates how housing density can drive meningococcal transmission and carriage, which likely facilitated the persistence of ST6697 and prolonging the outbreak. Whole genome MLST can effectively distinguish between highly similar outbreak strain isolates, including those isolated from person-to-person transmission, and also highlighted how a few HGT events can distort the true phylogenetic relationship between highly similar clonal isolates

Ribosomal multilocus sequence typing: universal characterization of bacteria from domain to strain

No single genealogical reconstruction or typing method currently encompasses all levels of bacterial diversity, from domain to strain. We propose ribosomal multilocus sequence typing (rMLST), an approach which indexes variation of the 53 genes encoding the bacterial ribosome protein subunits (rps genes), as a means of integrating microbial genealogy and typing. As with multilocus sequence typing (MLST), rMLST employs curated reference sequences to identify gene variants efficiently and rapidly. The rps loci are ideal targets for a universal characterization scheme as they are: (i) present in all bacteria; (ii) distributed around the chromosome; and (iii) encode proteins which are under stabilizing selection for functional conservation. Collectively, the rps loci exhibit variation that resolves bacteria into groups at all taxonomic and most typing levels, providing significantly more resolution than 16S small subunit rRNA gene phylogenies. A web-accessible expandable database, comprising whole-genome data from more than 1900 bacterial isolates, including 28 draft genomes assembled de novo from the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) sequence read archive, has been assembled. The rps gene variation catalogued in this database permits rapid and computationally non-intensive identification of the phylogenetic position of any bacterial sequence at the domain, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species and strain levels. The groupings generated with rMLST data are consistent with current nomenclature schemes and independent of the clustering algorithm used. This approach is applicable to the other domains of life, potentially providing a rational and universal approach to the classification of life that is based on one of its fundamental features, the translation mechanism