In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5 Educationalisation: A Key Concept in Understanding the Basic Processes in the History of Western Education* M. Depaepe Finally, as knowers, let us not be ungrateful towards such resolute reversals of familiar perspectives and valuations with which the mind has raged itself for far too long, apparently to wicked and useless effects: to see differently to that degree, is no small discipline and preparation of the intellect for its future ‘objectivity’ – the latter understood not as ‘contemplation without interest’ (which is, as such, a non-concept and an absurdity), but as having in our power our ‘pros’ and ‘cons’: so as to be able to engage and disengage them so that we can use the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations for knowledge. From now on, my philosophical colleagues, let us be more wary of the dangerous old conceptual fairy-tale which has set up a ‘pure, willless , painless, timeless, subject of knowledge’, let us be wary of the tentacles of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason’, ‘absolute spirituality’, ‘knowledge as such’: – here we are asked to think an eye which cannot be thought at all, an eye turned in no direction at all, an eye where the active and interpretative powers are to be suppressed, absent, but through which seeing still becomes a seeing-something, so it is an absurdity and non-concept of eye that is demanded. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; the more affects we allow to speak about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we were able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’. (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1887) Long before there was talk of any ‘postmodernism’ in philosophy or in historiography, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), with this citation from his Genealogy of Morality,1 pointed out that our perception of things – and thus also of the past – has always been colored by our perspective. Because we are biologically situated in a specific spatial (social and cultural) and temporal (historical) context, we can do nothing other than look from a specific standpoint (casu quo perspective) at what * Originally published in: History of Education Review, XXVII,2 (1998) 16-28. 1 Keith Ansell-Pearson, Friedrich Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morality, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 92. Trans. Carol Diethe. Originally in German, 1887. Part II. About the Educationalization… of the West 122 lies behind us. And since time always further blurs (and ultimately even erases or wipes out) the past, this looking-back unavoidably implies a ‘reconstruction’ that attempts to recover ‘how it really was’, as Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), one of the ‘fathers’ of empirical historiography, was wont to say. However, our perspectivism – and this the French philosopher Michel Foucault convincingly demonstrated in the seventies of this century2 – means that this ‘re-construction’ inevitably has the character of a ‘construction ’.Eachhistorianunavoidablyproceedsfromanartificiallycompiled set of data that were grouped (and regrouped) into a ‘text’ that, according to the insight of Foucault’s countryman Michel de Certeau (1925-1986), contains a predictable ‘unity of meaning’.3 To say it in a less complicated way, in the studying of history, we ourselves construct the story of what is past, and that story, whether we want it to be or not, is automatically influenced by the place and the position (rank, sex, nationality, age, and so on) that we occupy in the present. A suprahistorical Archimedian point from which the past could be read or moved is not granted to us mortals. One who thinks he has found such an Archimedian point is like the Baron von Münchhausen, or, what is worse, like a fanatic who always wants to prove he is right in a power struggle with his opponents. To conclude that the writing of history is simply impossible because of this perspectivism or that it has to end up in boundless subjectivism, however, is not necessary. Except for the possibility of looking at something from several standpoints and positions – the ‘various eyes’ Nietzsche urged in the citation above – there is still always the scholarly community that looks over our respective shoulders to see if our story of the past is ‘acceptable’. But here, too, we have to be aware of the fact that this scholarly community ultimately constructs its own ‘stories’ and creates new ‘legends’ and ‘myths’. Following Thomas S. Kuhn,4 we can speak of successive ‘paradigms’ that have been dominant in the course of time...

Share