Folds of Past, Present and Future

Reconfiguring Contemporary Histories of Education

Sarah Van Ruyskensvelde, Geert Thyssen, Frederik Herman, Angelo Van Gorp, Pieter Verstraete, Sarah Van Ruyskensvelde, Geert Thyssen, Frederik Herman, Angelo Van Gorp, Pieter Verstraete

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110623727
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

This volume brings together important theoretical and methodological issues currently being debated in the field of history of education. The contributions shed insightful and critical light on the historiography of education, on issues of de-/colonization, on the historical development of the educational sciences and on the potentiality attached to the use of new and challenging source material.

1 Leaving Marks of Inquiry: Ravels of Theory, Methodology, and History of Educational Historiography

Section editor: Geert Thyssen

The Cultural History of Education: Between the Siren Song of Philosophy and the Discrete Charm of the Philosophy of the Social Sciences

Antonio Fco. Canales

Note: This work has been conducted in the framework of the National Research Project The boundary between science and politics and science in the boundary: Spanish science, 1907 – 1975, MINECO/FEDER FFI2015 – 64529-P.

Abstract

This chapter presents some reflections on the history of education. The starting point is that the renewal and development of research in the field should resist the seduction of Philosophy with a capital P and instead take into account the much more modest contributions offered by the philosophy of the social sciences. To defend this approach, the program of micro-foundations, developed by Jon Elster and others, is presented as a way to address some of the concerns of cultural historians of education, and to integrate most of the new approaches to the history of education in a theoretical and methodological framework that appears to be more solid than those of the postmodern proposals. The final proposal is to reformulate the main theoretical approaches as mid-range theories able to be empirically researched.

Keywords: philosophy of social sciences, theory of history, micro-foundations thesis, mid-range theories

During the last decade of the twentieth century, history was characterized by a far-reaching debate that called into question many of the discipline’s widely accepted truths. Some authors went as far as to suggest a paradigm shift,¹ although establishing just what new hegemony was taking the place of the former reign of social history is no easy task. Faced with the demise of the comfortable certainties with which they had been trained, some authors succumbed to the siren song of Philosophy with a capital P, venturing in search of answers into realms that traditionally had only been visited by historians on rare occasions. Others, such as Marc Depaepe, chose instead to explore a humbler, less showy path of renewal,² as part of a group of “more pragmatically-oriented researchers, who, while going along with the so-called contemporary ‘turns’ in cultural history in general (…), attempted to incorporate them critically and heuristically into a more sophisticated interpretation, rather than following them slavishly.”³ Such renewal was much more in keeping with the historian’s practice, or what one could call le métier d’historien, to borrow from Marc Bloch’s famous posthumous essay.⁴ Métier here refers to a notion the historian must be careful not to lose sight of when navigating the turbulent waters of historiographic debate. Researching history is a craft, and like all crafts, it has rules. The aim of this chapter is to explore the possibilities for the renewal of this craft through recourse to the theoretical aid of the philosophy of science, and more specifically, the philosophy of social sciences.

The Postmodernist Challenge

During the 1980s, dissatisfaction with the existing paradigm of social history gave rise to multiple proposals that emerged from reflections taking place within the discipline. Some warned that the plurality of historiographic proposals would lead to a crumbling of history, in the words of François Dosse.⁵ The risk was that the structural understanding of the past that had been built by social history would be weakened and fragmented into a multitude of kaleidoscopic visions. However, the debate took a sudden change of course, making a qualitative leap with the emergence of a group of proposals linked to Foucault and the linguistic turn; in simple terms, we can refer to this change as the postmodernist challenge.

Before scrutinizing the effect that these approaches have had on history, it is important that we clarify this initial point: unlike other proposals that had previously been debated, postmodernism is not an approach that arises out of history; nor does it specifically relate to history. Postmodernism is a philosophical questioning of modernity, a questioning of the foundations upon which Western thought has been based since at least the Enlightenment. What is at stake is not a particular conception of history as a discipline, but rather our inherited conception of the world. The certainties upon which our societies are built waver in the face of a discursive conception of such key notions as Reason, Justice, Progress or Democracy. In fact, given the magnitude of the challenge, I for one feel that it is as a citizen, rather than as a historian, that one should feel more concerned or alarmed by this discourse. In the face of the social, moral, and existential unease we are drawn into by the crisis in the narrative of modernity, a lack of faith in history as privileged knowledge of the past becomes a rather innocuous matter.

To return to history – which is our craft and the way we earn our living –, the postmodernist challenge, despite its tangential nature in relation to history or, if you will, its transversal relationship to thought in general, seems to have become the central point around which the historiographic debate revolves. Alongside it having become an academic trend, two factors have helped put postmodernist approaches center stage. The first is the insistence and forcefulness with which its advocates warned of a terminal crisis in social history. The second is the way in which they were able to convince historians that beyond their field a fully-fledged intellectual revolution was taking place, and that historians risked being left behind. With regard to this, G. Eley and K. Nield denounced the apocalyptic and apodictic tone used by the proponents of this approach.⁶ In truth, the postmodernist approaches are in themselves an example of the centrality of the language that they champion; it is their forceful rhetoric that seems to have established so firmly the notion that social history is dead. The discourse, then, has created its own reality.

In any case, what is certain is that the proposals associated with postmodernism succeeded in demolishing the solid structural bases on which social history was founded. Now, in the wake of this, it is not a question of tearfully evoking a past Arcadia, but of rebuilding the discipline following this radical questioning. This is where the true challenge lies, since so many of the seemingly attractive, seductive proposals for reconstruction actually threaten to destroy the discipline itself. The debate is far-reaching and the positions are varied, but in my opinion any present-day historian who positions themself within what is generally understood to be the new cultural history has an obligation to take a stand on at least two key issues: the role of subjects and the nature of history as a discipline.

With regard to the role of subjects, following the linguistic turn, discourses are said to be independent of individuals; they are said to be given, determined by the prevailing conceptual framework’s potential for evolution. This approach is in principle acceptable (who is going to argue against the constrictions of historical actions?). Nonetheless, at its core lie two very dangerous possible future lines of development. The first concerns a return to the purest metaphysical idealism. Where do these conceptual frameworks come from? Are they in some way a human product, despite being alien to indivi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the editors
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Leaving Marks of Inquiry: Ravels of Theory, Methodology, and History of Educational Historiography
• 2 The Politics of Diversity: Gender, Culture, and Post-colonial Education
• 3 Flood Lands of Pedagogy: Meanderings between Empiricism, Theory, and Practice
• 4 Walking the Line: The Attraction of Psychology and Medicine in Educational Theory and Practice
• 5 Turns Taking Turns: Concepts, Approaches, and Methodologies in the Making
• Index