Over the past two hundred years German education policy and practice has attracted interest in England. Policy makers have used the 'German example' both to encourage change and development and to warn against certain courses of action. This monograph provides the first major analysis of the rich material from government reports (including work by Matthew Arnold), the press, travel accounts, memoirs, scholarly publications and the archives to uncover the nature of the English fascination with education in Germany, from 1800 to the end of the twentieth century. David Phillips traces this story and uses recent work in theories of educational policy 'borrowing' to analyze the reception of the German experience and its impact on the development of English education policy.

Author Biography

David Phillips is Professor of Comparative Education and Fellow of St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford and Director of the Centre for Comparative Studies in Education, UK. He has written widely on issues in comparative education, with a focus on education in Germany and on educational policy borrowing. He was for twenty years Editor of the Oxford Review of Education and serves on editorial boards of various journals, including Comparative Education.