Class 1: Introduction to History of education
Concepts used by historians to describe what happened during our past
The past History Historiography
= all the events that passed = interpretation of the past, analyses = the collection of methods and the
some time ago of everything in our past body of historical work
- Ex. Attack twin tower, - The book who describes a - reflection on the consequences
French revolution period in the past of particular ways of
- Reconstruct what happened reconstruction
- The past stays the same, but
changes trough time
Difficult thing = a historian can never know for sure because it’s an interpretation many historians come to
singular conclusions. The question is how can we know for sure? There is a past but you can never know for
sure, so we debate about it
Example of historical narrative: Educationalization (2 examples)
1. Traffic education (verkeersopvoeding)
- Ex. Cross the road, police officer comes speak into a class about the traffic
- Ex. book: “Jan Klaasen, kijk uit”
o Gendered content of this kind of school material
o 20th century introduction of the evolution of the car (dominant)
Deadly accidents → solve this problem by traffic education
o Different solutions are possible: abolish cars, who is responsible (fabric or individual), learn
people the right behaviour
o Social problems: accident → solution: look at school as a educational environment to learn the
right behaviours to avoid these accidents
Child books
o Not only in school: also in larger society
2. Punishments (schoolvoorbeeld)
- Monitorial education (around 1800)
o Confronted by shortage of teachers → not increase teachers
o Bigger classroom experiment (1000 pupils)
o Monitors: more experiences pupils: responsible for smaller groups
o Teachers observe in the back of the room
o Talking was forbidden → punishment for talking
1st : card as a symbol, so people would know he was punished
2th: piece of iron/wood placed into the neck of the child
3th: pupil was placed in the bag (bird in a cage) and was hung in front of the room
o Unclean child: need to be washed in front of the whole room
→ Between then and now (200 years): something happened and produced a different environment
- Scientific revolutions: impact on how we look on punishment
o Random websites about punishment in schools
o Not only punishment but more the reward empathised for good behaviour
Ex. behaviourism (Watson & Skinner): promoted reward giving
o In the EU you cannot hit your child without being sued
, What is educationalization?
= is a historical concept that describes a particular historical evolution
- How we in our Western tradition look at school to solve social and cultural problems
Quantitative characteristics Qualitative characteristics (more important)
- Process whereby more and more educational - Process in which solving social problems becomes more
institutions (school) are created and more and and more the school’s responsibility
more people are expected to spend part of their o Verkeersopvoeding, armoede
lives here (lifelong) - Social problems are redefined in terms of pedagogical
- Facts that the number of educational institutions responsibility (traffic education)
has risen - Process in which physical punishment is replaced by
- Enormous choice in primary schools more subtle forms of (psychological) influence
- What you learn depends on how old you are o Rewards
- Schools need to solve society problems
Civic education
Examples:
- Gender/race inequality
- Sputnik and cold war: Russia able to launch racket in space → US look at schools and reinvent
educational methods
- Sustainability education
- Books in kindergarten with attention to LGBTQ
- Pregnancy classes: very recent upcoming, ages they are pregnancies without classes
- Demographic evolutions: having 2 children is the ideal
- Discovery of HIV/AIDS → promotion videos to prevent the virus of spreading
Important to not only look to school!
The totally pedagogised society (Bernstein)
For a number of authors the totally pedagogised society is the culmination point of the process of
educationalization
- In all spheres of life (including the most intimate) a pedagogical reflex can be felt
o You learn in every stage of your life different things
- Not only in all spheres of life: throughout life (Cf. lifelong learning)
- Context:
o Knowledge society/Knowledge economy - educating people = enabling them to respond to
changing working conditions
Increasingly do something with knowledge (ex. jobs)
You do something in light of the economy/the future
Ex. going to an university
(1) to have your character formed or (2) in light of the economy
o Speech by Tony Blair (1997) Education, education, education
- Reducing pedagogy to a purely technical matter
- What is overlooked here: the meaning-making aspect!
o Also transaction of culture (cultural aspect)
o Older generation transfers what is important to them
Educationalized societies neglect this
- Ex: pregnancy was something natural, now it is something studied
- Pedagogy Is instrumentalized: it is just offering tools
, Educationalization and educational historiography
Pedagogisation = the result of critical reflections on and commentaries on earlier ways of historiography
- Although what happened in the past never changes, the way we look at that past is constantly
changing
- Past/history/historiography or historiography
- What can change through time?
o The justification for our interest in the past
o The choices we make regarding the themes we find interesting and worthwhile
o The sources we use to reconstruct history
o The way we shape our historical narratives
- Some examples
o Different pedagogical books, all of these books talk about the same BUT they do it in a
different way for different reasons
o History is never neutral (contains values and norms)
o History narratives reconstruct the past and have a hidden meaning
From historicism to historicizing (= a lens with how you look at something)
Historicism Historicizing
= Geschiedenis moet aangeven hoe het er vroeger = Mensen zijn objecten ten aanzien van iets anders,
echt aan toe is gegaan op objectieve manier focus op wat mensen doen en waarom
Focus on the past (a past event) Focus on the present
- Describe in detail what happened, only - How can the past help us to better understand the
interested in what happened at that period present, use the past to better understand what is
- Reconstruction going on nowadays
- Construction
Man is the engine of history Man is the result of history
- Persons as active agents, intentional behavior of - What happened is not only a result of the
a particular person is responsible intention of an individual but a complex
- People are autonoumous beings mechanism (human behaviour and economic,
- Focus on actions of human beings social and cultural processes)
Archives are the pre-eminent repository of truth Archive is constructed and truth is always
- Archives contain the truth to reconstruct what perspectival
happened in the past (NOT POSSIBLE) - Will not end as the truthful reconstruction
- Relation between the event and the historical o Not possible to reconstruct the past
narrative produced by the historian - Deconstruct all of the truths that are out there
- = the place where sources are left - Questions: how is it that these truths became so
→ is the romantic place, in that historists truthful
assumes that the archive is where the sources sit
and wait to be found
Linear ideal of progress Intertwining of complex and coincidental processes
- We went through a revolution, now we know -
what the best is, the past is something negative
Continuity or discontinuity Continuity and discontinuity
- In a text there can be an emphasize on that
everything stayed the same or has changed
Something that they have in common: they both make use of language
A fault authors can make: Presentism
- Supremacy of the present over the past (the present is dominating the past!)
- Using contemporary terminology to make sense of historical phenomena
o You make use of an actual concept, to say something about what happened in the past
o Ex. You use ADHD, while back then it was just called ‘naughty’
o Try to empathize with another conceptual framework (not ours!)
, What brought about this historiographical evolution (from historicism → historicizing)
- (1) Linguïstic turn or the inability of representation
- (2) Evolution within historiography itself → emergence of the Annales school (Febvre & Bloch) and
micro-history
- (3) 20th century emancipatory movements
(1) Linguïstic turn or the inability of representation
Before linguistic turn After linguistic turn
- Believe that it is possible to show the past in - Conviction that every representation of the past falls
a text as it was at the time short
- Language is a kind of mirror - Can never represent everything in a text
- Personal characteristics doesn’t matter - No objective representation of the past
- The subjectivity of the person plays no role - Always interpretation
whatsoever in the representation of the past - What one represents is always in a certain sense
distorted by one's own view, by the choices that were
made
Example: in 60’ – 70’ woman are absence, emphasize on male’s, after feminism movements, realise it was not
the right way to reconstruct the past, racism influenced the past
Depended on language and influenced by the dominant values and norms in a society
Sidenote: from past to history: the crucial role of choise-making
1. Historical actors decide what is important to preserve and what is not
o Information is gone because human beings decide that something is not important for the
next generation
2. Archivists/librarians decide what is and what is not included in the collections
o Is it important enough for the collection in a particular archive
o Ex. a letter from the colonial Congo important enough? They throw it away because their
voices are not important for them, = not a full representation of the past
3. Historian cannot possibly go through everything and must make choices when studying archives
o Not possible to read everything, choose what to read and what not
4. When writing his/her story, not everything can be included
o The author of a text picks particular data to write about
5. The reader interprets the text in his/her own way
o Choices the person went through before reading the text
(2) Emergence of social and micro history
- Annales school or macro history (Febvre, Braudel & Bloch)
o Focus is on the reconstruction of mentalities rather than the lives of important historical
figures or events
Also reconstruction of the daily life of normal people, not only the big events
o Complexity of this process
- Annales d'histoire économique et sociale (1929)
- Longue durée!
- "Historical events are like the foam on the waves".
(3) 20th century emancipatory movements
- Feminism movement, disability movement
- Has impact on the discipline of history
- Historians think about how they represent the woman’s in their story → they are absent!
- Change: Look through the les of: woman, person with disability,…
