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Educationist and historian with a special interest in France
Wilfred Douglas Halls, who has died aged 92, played a significant role in establishing comparative education – the study of educational thinking and developments in other countries – as a legitimate field of academic inquiry in British universities. Known professionally as WD, and personally as Bill, he was a tutor in the department of educational studies at Oxford University during the 1960s and 70s. At this time there were many advances in the teaching of modern languages in British schools, and Halls was involved not only with the practical business of training modern linguists in Oxford, but also with the investigation of language teaching around the world.
His special interest was France, and his many writings on that country – including Society, Schools and Progress in France (1965) and Education, Culture and Politics in Modern France (1976) are still required reading for postgraduate students. Halls, arguing that educational systems have developed "as instruments for the transmission, diffusion and enlargement of a nation's cultural patrimony", believed that the guiding light of education in France was the "intellectualism" which links education to culture. Foreign Languages and Education in Western Europe (1970) brought out ways in which applied linguistics was influencing language teaching and addressed the teaching of foreign civilisation in the curriculum.
Halls's proficiency as a linguist helped him get on well with his coll- eagues all over Europe and he was a frequent contributor to international conferences. He undertook research on ways in which qualifications could be internationally recognised, and on the subject of educational reform in Germany for Unesco. He also became research director for the International Baccalaureate Office in Geneva.
In 1964, he co-founded the journal Comparative Education, which is currently in its 47th year. In 1974 he became the founding editor of the Oxford Review of Education. I succeeded him as editor in 1984 and inherited a strong publication with an established worldwide readership. He brought to both of these publications an unerring attention to detail which ensured that contributions were of a high quality and based on thorough research.
The work for which he is best known is The Youth of Vichy France (1981). Halls sought to picture the world in which young people lived during the Vichy period, examining the roles played by the church and schoolteachers. The Vichy government, he showed, failed to organise young people in the way the Hitler regime had managed in Germany, and the educational system survived: "Teachers, once they had recovered from the shock of being stigmatised as responsible for the defeat, continued to teach as they had always done." His research made clear that there was not one educational policy between 10 July 1940 and 21 August 1944 but several, reflecting the spectrum of politics of those years. In his retirement, he continued to translate French authors into English, his translations of the sociologist Emile Durkheim attracting particular acclaim. He returned to Vichy with his broader study, Politics, Society and Christianity in Vichy France (1995), to which he brought a sympathetic understanding as a committed Christian and regular churchgoer.
Halls was born in London. His undergraduate studies at King's College London were interrupted by the second world war, and he served for five and a half years as an intelligence officer in the armed forces, later completing his degree while simultaneously beginning a teaching career. After an MA in French in 1953 from the University of London, he wrote his doctoral thesis at Balliol College, Oxford, under the supervision of Enid Starkie, on the Belgian poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, the subject of his first book, published in 1960. Halls taught for three years at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, and in 1959 was appointed tutor and later university lecturer in educational studies at Oxford.
Towards the end of his career he was elected a fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford. As a supervisor of doctoral students he was sympathetic, courteous and supportive, and he shared his deep knowledge with characteristic modesty and generosity.
He is survived by his wife, Pamela, to whom he was married for more than 60 years, and his four children.
• Wilfred Douglas Halls, educationist and historian, born 11 December 1918; died 23 March 2011