Pearson Education

About Pearson Education

Pearson Education is the educational publishing business of the London-based company Pearson plc, created in 1998 when Pearson combined the education division it bought from Simon & Schuster with Addison Wesley Longman.

The merger gathered several old textbook imprints under one roof. Longman, started in London by Thomas Longman in 1724, had belonged to Pearson since 1968; Addison-Wesley was bought in 1988 and joined with Longman; Prentice Hall, formed in 1913 by Charles W. Gerstenberg and Richard P. Ettinger, arrived with the Simon & Schuster deal, together with Allyn & Bacon. Pearson had also bought HarperCollins's educational publishing arm in 1996. Its imprints include Scott Foresman, which published the first Dick and Jane stories in 1930, and Benjamin Cummings.

Many standard university textbooks first appeared under these older names and continued in later editions under Pearson. Russell and Norvig's Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach was first published by Prentice Hall in 1995, and Campbell Biology by Benjamin Cummings in 1987.

The business was rebranded simply as Pearson in 2011. In 2019 Pearson sold its US K-12 courseware business to Nexus Capital Management, which renamed it Savvas Learning Company, and the group now concentrates on assessment, qualifications and digital learning.