ABSTRACT
Throughout the world, a common feature of children's lives is education. Most children spend a very large part of their childhoods in school, and schooling is becoming a defining feature of childhood in most societies. The issues relate to many of the themes and topics in Learning and Teaching Around the World, such as the 'gold standard' of colonial education, gender and schooling, teacher training, Indigenous education and international comparative assessments. The chapter traces the historical arc of the globalisation of children's education over the past two nineteenth and twentieth century, as schooling systems, practices, and ideas have been exported globally in the service of four broad agendas: missionary activity, colonialism, international development and neoliberal corporate capitalism. During the nineteenth century in Latin America and the twentieth century across much of Asia and Africa, colonialism retreated. The significance of Christian missionaries also diminished with the increasing power of independent nation states.
