Rethinking the History of Education

Transnational Perspectives on Its Questions, Methods, and Knowledge

T. Popkewitz, T. Popkewitz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137000705
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

Drawing on a wide variety of traditions and methods in historical studies, from the humanities and social sciences both, this volume considers the questions, methods, goals, and frameworks historians of education from a wide variety of countries use to create the study of the history of education.

Chapter 1

Styles of Reason: Historicism, Historicizing, and the History of Education

Thomas S. Popkewitz

This chapter examines two different historical styles of reason to talk about how the traces of the past are studied. In talking about history as styles of reason, it explores the principles that govern the forms of historical questions, its methods and meanings of the archive, and the modes of judgments in the narratives of history. Differences discussed as styles of reason are to explore how complex movements of thought and cultural practices produce ways in which judgments are made, conclusions drawn, and the fields of existence made manageable within the field of history.

The problem of thinking of historical work can be initially approached through the work of Marc Bloch (1964), a founder of the French Annales historical school. Bloch wrote that historians have only tracks left from the past; not the past! It is these tracks that provide traces¹ from which history is written from the present; even when that history seeks to hermeneutically understand the past. The problem of thinking about what constitutes historiography is how, then, the traces are connected as ways of thinking about change.

I focus on two different historical styles of reason to talk about how the traces of the past are studied. One is historicism that I associate with the dominating style of reason in American educational history. While historicism has different variations such as in social and intellectual histories, my interest is on certain principles that order and classify the objects of history. A different style of reason, again with variations, I call historicizing.² Its landscape, explored in this volume, is given expression as cultural history, genealogy, and history of the present, among others (see, e.g., Popkewitz, Franklin, and Pereyra, eds. 2001).

In talking about history as styles of reason, I borrow from Hacking (1992) to explore the principles that govern the forms of historical questions, its methods and meaning of the archive, and the modes of judgments as the narratives of history. Differences discussed as styles of reason is to explore how complex movements of thought and cultural practices produce ways in which judgments are made, conclusions drawn, and the fields of existence made manageable within the field of history.

The volume is to engage the history of education in a conversation by its questions, methods, and knowledge. The introduction uses styles of reason as a way to engage in that conversation. First, historicism is discussed as embodying epistemological principles that order its narratives of the past. These principles relate to a particular notion of humanism in historicism. These principles insert the subject of history as the agent through which change is traced and the past known. The agents are, for example, children for whom educational psychologies provide the concepts that make visible their growth and development; the teacher whose paths are directed to professionalism from that of a craft; the institutional forms that evolve into the common school; and tracks that enable or limit the child from becoming the democratic citizen. The irony of this humanism, I argue, is that the authorial subject is taken as the origin of inquiry that places the actors as outside of history itself. The second section explores how the principles of this humanism work on the meaning given to the archive. The archive becomes the sacred space for “finding” the past through tracing the development and growth of the subject that history tells about. The third section focuses on a different style of reason that I call historicizing, a way of problematizing the ahistorical subject through asking about the conditions that make possible what is “seen” and acted on as the subject of schooling; for example, the notion of the artist as genius and inventive that is made possible as an object of reflection and action in schooling. Historicizing gives attention to the archive to consider the events that make possible the objects of social life rather than as the physical depository from which to trace the origins of the present. Where paradoxically historicism organizes the past to speak about the future, historicizing is a critical project to make fragile the seeming causality of the present.

The concern with styles of reason is neither to pose historicism and historicizing as a binary, nor is the argument normative about the Philosopher’s Stone of finding ultimate Truth. The distinctions are pragmatic and historical ways of “seeing” the field of history itself. Styles of reason are homologous to the Kuhn’s (1970) sense of paradigm in science. Kuhn’s historicizing of the practices of physics was to make visible the emergence of anomalies to the normal, dominant way of organizing scientific problems and think about change.³ The focus on the idea of styles of reason, discussed in the final section of this introduction and again in Fendler’s chapter, is to consider the limits of historicism, with historicizing as an alternative to the study of the past.⁴ The strategy of this introduction, then, is to make visible the principles of “reason” that circulate in historicism through a comparative mode of analysis, and place the chapters that follow within that context to suggest a possibility of a different order of questions and notions of methods than typically found in the American history of education.⁵

Historicism: Style of Reason in the Search for the Past

While historicism in American history is generally debated, it is interesting to observe that the debate is absent from the history of education.⁶ My focus, however, will not be on the internal debates about historicism. However important, my concern is different. It is with the style of reason that such debates about historicism presuppose. Four principles are discussed: (1) The particular humanism that inscribes the subjects of the child, teacher, and family as the origin of change; (2) the function of human consciousness as a particular “modern” way for thinking and ordering the representation of the actor as agent of change; (3) the examination of change as the tracing of moments, activities, and “thoughts” of the subject who is the actor of history; and (4) difference as the distinctions about the represented identities that form the historical subject. The principles form a grid that shape and fashion a style of “historical” reason to “see” and act on the archive as documents from which the past is made available as memory.

Humanism as the Insertion of the Subject as the Site/Agent of Change

The humanism that I speak about is given shape and fashioned by particular turns in the European and North American enlightenments. Previous notions of a transcendent entity, of a world fixed by one’s birth and of human beings as subjects of fate or Divine Will were relocated to the “City of Man [sic],” to borrow from Becker (1932). In its varieties and nuances, human reason (wisdom and morality) and rationality (science) were given as central for understanding the present and producing progress. Visible in the Anglo-Saxon, French, and German-speaking enlightenments was the individual who could know and act in the world, which allowed for the discovery of an autonomous social order that was subject to its own laws (Wittrock 2000, p. 42).⁷ The American Declaration of Rights and its Constitution are exemplars of this notion of universal reason. The human subject was given transcendental qualities that were “endowed” “with certain unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The embodiment of these “inalienable rights” of humankind was placed in the citizen as a new kind of person entitled to “liberty and freedom.”

This attitude toward human reason and rationality has a particular logic within historicism that emerges in the eighteenth century and later in the social and psychological sciences. The human actor is made as the a priori of historical studies. The social and individuals are given independent space and identity that seem autonomous but paradoxically interrelated in an ordered time. That ordering of time makes possible knowing about human development from which direction is given to what the future might be.

Intellectual and biographical histories follow these epistemological rules. The author is the agent of change whose history is traced through examining letters, diaries, books, and pamphlets. The “actor” as the transcendental social force is given in social histories as the structure whose materiality constrain and restrain individual freedom and liberty. History is to illuminate the structures (the hidden curriculum, for example) and, by knowing the structural rules, is to allow for interventions in order to enable human agency. Marx’s notions of class defined by labor and Weber’s notion of bureaucracy are two such examples of discussion of what constrains agency.

The inscription of the autonomous subject is central to the historicism of social reform, the welfare state, and the emergence of modern schooling in the nineteenth century. The narratives of history tell of their growth, development, conflict, and debates in the pursuits of liberty and freedom.

The humanist inscription of the agent as the subject of history is the doxa of historicism. It is argued that without the subject represented, the world is deterministic and without the possibilities of change. Oddly though, the historicist inscription of the actor and origin of change places the authorial subject of history as transcendental, outside of history and determined.

Agency and the Inscription of Consciousness and Human Intentionality

The humanism of historicism is connected and assembled with the emergence of consciousness as a particular historical principle about thought and action. It is not that people prior to this historical space did not think, reason, and have sensitivity to their experiences in the world. Consciousness, as a historical notion, is a particular awareness of ordering, classifying, and “thinking” through concepts that enable the individual to analytically divide and order the things of the world and the inner qualities of the self into systems. Being in the world entails qualities of the mind given as the capability to “see” and develop interpretive schema that appear as “facts” external to the self; yet express social relations that pass through the consciousness of the subject.

The systems of discrete things enable sense to be made of the world as well as the possibilities of interventions as strategies of change. Perhaps related to the Reformation self-reflective individual who finds the inner source of truth, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries entail a self-awareness of two distinct but interrelated worlds in which human reason is enacted. One is the objective world of nature and the other is the interior world of the self.⁸ The objective world is not only of organic and physical nature but also of the nature of society and the individual. In the eighteenth century, for example, the concepts of the individual and society emerge simultaneously. Society is perceived as an abstract set of relations whose order, structures, and systems become autonomous realms of reflection by which to understand and act. The simultaneous appearance of society and individuality as concepts of human life provide particular rules and standards of what is seen, acted on, and thought about; what is given as consciousness. The “reason” that links the individual and society makes it possible for one to think of him or herself as a citizen. The citizen is a kind of person who belongs to the collective home of the nation and, at the same time, embodies the collective civic virtues in everyday living.

Paradoxically, the reason of consciousness entails the idea of the “unconsciousness,” in its nonpsychoanalytic sense. Social and “natural” forces and structures that stand outside of history are viewed as framing how human interests are given expression, and which the rules and standards of “reason” will make conscious. The unconscious “forces” are told, for example, as the movement and adaption of European ideas (Rousseau and Pestalozzi) and organizational forms (the German kindergarten and Horace Mann’s references to the Prussian School) that are brought to the American shores but used in unique ways to form the common school. The “reason” of historicism is to order and calculate the social and intellectual processes that tell of the movements and activities that make possible the representations of the subjects of schools.

The inscription of this modern notion of consciousness is connected to a different radical innovation; that of thinking about human diversity in the ordering and classifying of what is known outside the given theological world and the given chain of being. Eisenstadt (2000) argues, for example, that “transcendental and mundane are bridged through giving human a conscious order and interest that can be exercised in social life [and] which also emphasized a growing recognition of the legitimacy of multiple individual and group goals and interests, and as a consequence allowed for multiple interpretations of the common good” (p. 5). Diversity entails thinking about difference that is not only about multiple interpretations but also of a hierarchy of values. Difference seems as merely technical. The origin of difference is from the given representations of identities, whether described as variations of civilizations along a continuum of advanced to primitive, or as comparative norms embodied in probability theories about populational differences wherein, for example, children are classified as representing “the achievement gaps.”

This self-reflection of modern consciousness can be thought of as “the homeless mind” (Berger, Berger, and Kellner 1974). “Homeless” in that it becomes possible to order and differentiate individual life and immediate experience in modernity through abstract terms that are both external and internal to what constitutes humanity. One such homeless term is the child as “learner,” a term that universalizes the qualities and characteristics of who the child is and should be, and which thus seems to supersede and transcend specific locations such as whether the child lives in wealth or poverty, or in Madison, Tokyo, or Cape Town! The abstract notions have no historical location, cultural specificity, or geographical boundaries; yet they are accessible through reason and rationality to order and give direction to daily life in a chronology of time about the future. The irony of the homeless mind is that the abstractions about kinds of people enter perception as principles that locate people in the particular givenness of time and space.

The consciousness embodied in the homeless mind constitutes the self-reflective practice embodied in historicism.⁹ Consciousness is where knowledge generated about events and their processes have an autonomy and authority to prescribe processes of change. Knowledge is believed to provide contact with the world, the means by which we assure the security and stability of our place in it, and which guarantees pursuing our commitments toward the world. In speaking of the enlightenments, Cassirer (1932/1951) argues that “thought consists not only in analyzing and dissecting, but in actually bringing about that order of things which it conceives as ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Chapter 1   Styles of Reason: Historicism, Historicizing, and the History of Education
• Section I   “Seeing” the Historical Object: Alternative Possibilities
• Section II   In Search of the Archive: Comparative Studies and Theories of Its Spaces
• Section III   The Monuments of the Past as the Events of History: Historicizing the Subject
• Section IV   Historicizing and the Space of American Historicism
• Notes on Contributors
• Index