摘要：The essays in this Special Issue of Neo-Victorian Studies see the Victorian period as marked by crises, contradictions and complexities that, together with the motives and drivers for the radical changes that took place, can seem uncannily familiar to us in the twenty-first century. This introduction is embedded in the work of contemporary educational historians and philosophers, who revisit nineteenth-century ideas about the role of education to interrogate our relationship to the present and future – an engagement that may at once involve revivifying and mourning ‘old’ ideas (particularly in light of recent political and institutional changes including the massification and corporatisation of tertiary education), and recognition of the inadequacies and inequities of the past.
