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20. How Should the History of Education be Written? Some Reflections about the Nature of the Discipline from the Perspective of the Reception of our Work
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20 How Should the History of Education be Written? Some Reflections about the Nature of the Discipline from the Perspective of the Reception of our Work* M. Depaepe The title question, which was submitted to us by the guest editorial team of Studies in Philosophy and Education, obviously has a high normative content. At first sight, that is rather remarkable, because the question about how it should be done contrasts sharply with the blurred norms that are prevalent in postmodern society, as well as with the plurality of opinions and views that are consciously cultivated there. Perhaps it is because in the field of the history of education, there are no longer any “eminent examples”1 that the question is put explicitly? There too, a diversity of approaches prevails. Anyone performing an analysis on a more or less valid sample of the many publications that have been put forward in this category in recent years will probably have to conclude that among the multiplicity of research questions and applicable research methods, it is scarcely possible to deduce a norm for well conceived research.2 Usually, it is hard to go beyond a few platitudes about the necessarily cross-disciplinary character of the field, the need for an almost ethnographic empathy in order to reach a contextualized, multifactor and/or multi-tier interpretation, the richness of a comparative approach within the scope of a globalizing society, and the need for varied source material, such as the use of verbal and pictorial sources alongside traditional written material. These are all * Originally published in: Studies in Philosophy and Education, XXIII,5 (2004) 333345 (special issue ed. by D. Troehler & J. Oelkers, Historiography of Education: Philosophical Questions and Case Studies) 1 Perhaps there never really were any, but one can say that, for example, in the days of “revisionism” in the United States, the work of Bernard Bailyn and Lawrence A. Cremin exercised a certain appeal. A whole generation of researchers emulated their arguments in favour of socio-historic research. Since then, the mystique of these “pioneers” has been dispelled in the post-modern sense, see Cohen (1999) and Gaither (2001), who challenges, among other things, the Bailyn myth of the “new history of education” since the 1960s. 2 To an extent, an attempt is made to do this by Roy Lowe (2000). Part V: The Self-Concept of a Demythologized ‘New Cultural’ History of Education 452 things that are easier said than done, because they are dogged by various methodological problems (see, e.g., Errante, 2000; Crook and McCulloch, 2002; Dams et al., 2002; Depaepe et al., in press). It is true that there has been a preference since the ‘nineties for the “new cultural history of education”, which has displaced the “new social history of education” of the ‘sixties, while that same “new social history of education” was put forward to oust the old “history of educational thought” dating from the ‘fifties (Tenorth, 2002; Depaepe, 2003). But it is questionable whether this kind of phasing of successive paradigm changes has contributed much to understanding the historic reality of the research, let alone given rise to concrete indications of how to optimize it. To start with, there is tremendous heterogeneity within the longestablished general labels. So, in the study of the theoretical-methodological discussioninpost-war(West)Germany,weareconfrontedwithawholerange of divergent and even diametrically opposed views about the relationship between history and theory, and that is the case both in the “old” history of thought and the “newer” socio-historic paradigms (Depaepe, 1983, of which a Spanish translation has been made, nearly 20 years later by Juan Saez Carreras). Mutatis mutandis, the same applies for the uninterrupted torrent of discussion articles and historiographical introductions to the specialist field, which continue to roll off the presses today.3 One must take sufficient account of the gulf between the ideotypical portrayals on the one hand and the results of practical research on the other hand. Historiographical summary articles that aim to give a picture, for example, of the development in leading professional journals do not find it easy to find appropriate classification criteria (e.g., Wolff, 1986; Depaepe and Simon, 1996; Richardson, 1999; Caspard, 2000; Jablonka, 2001). There too, diversity prevails. They do appear to point in the same direction of the very general trends that come to the surface in a superficial perusal of the literature, but still show yet again that the progress of scientific production is much more unpredictable and multihued than is usually...