Rethinking the history of education: considerations for a new social history of education

ABSTRACT

In the 2020s, there are both societal and academic reasons to reflect on the field of history of education. In this article, we focus on the issue of the social, which remains central to the field as we acknowledge that society shapes education and education shapes society. By exploring the social on theoretical, methodological and broader societal levels, we provide suggestions for how we can rethink the field of educational history in the future. In line with a postmodern emphasis on particularity and complexity, we do not present any simple or general answers. We do not promote a return to the social history accounts of the post-war era and its emphasis on social class, economic development and the state. Instead, we encourage efforts to rethink the terms social and society on the basis of both classic social history accounts and the lessons learned from new cultural history of education. What would a new social history of education look like in the twenty-first century, and how can we write updated histories on education and society today?

KEYWORDS:

• history of education
• social history
• new cultural history
• linguistic turn

History of education is clearly a field of research that is doing well. Despite the challenges posed by the reforms of massified higher education and the strengthened ideals of certain kinds of “scientific” or “empirical” educational research, the field is marked by wide-reaching and innovative journals, attractive conferences and networks, and a constant influx of talented researchers. While academics may have a certain nostalgic reminiscence of the universities of the past, the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) certainly provides ample evidence of the rich research currently produced. Other indications delineating the accomplishments of the field include the handbooks published during the last couple of years by Springer and Oxford University Press, and the massive six-volume edition of A Cultural History of Education.¹

At ISCHE 42, organised online in 2021 from Örebro University, Sweden, we chose “Rethinking the Social in the History of Education” as our conference theme. Our intention was to encourage further reflections on our historical analyses of education. We wanted to encourage conference participants to reflect on what historical studies of education have been, what they are, and what they might be in the future. As the title of the conference indicated, we encouraged our colleagues to focus on the issue of the social in history of education, which remains central to the field as we acknowledge that society shapes education and education shapes society.

This theme is timely for two reasons. First, a range of societal and cultural developments affect the discipline of history of education, including globalisation, climate change, increasing social inequality, the rise of far-right populism and, in recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. We also see several social movements addressing a variety of major political issues (#metoo, #FridaysForFuture, #BlackLivesMatter). Such developments raise questions not only about how we organise our research field, but also about how our research examines social change, and what kind of research in history of education will be relevant in the social context of the twenty-first century.

Secondly, the conference theme of rethinking the social addresses changes within the field of educational history. In terms of theoretical approaches and topics, history of education has expanded significantly through a range of so-called “turns” as part of a cross-fertilisation with neighbouring disciplines or strands of research. We have seen a constant widening of research interests to include fields such as global, postcolonial and environmental history of education, and the social and entangled histories of knowledge, emotions, memory, materiality, spatiality, technology, corporality and visual culture. In addition, the possibilities offered by digital history are still being discovered and the opportunities to analyse big data pose important questions and challenges for future research in history of education. The implications of such developments for research in the history of education remain largely uncharted.

In the context of these developments, both in society and in history of education, there are good reasons to reflect on the field of history of education. In the spirit of the ISCHE 42 conference, we will do this by discussing how we may rethink the social, focusing on three questions: how can the social be conceptualised? How can the social be studied? How can we understand the role of our historical investigations in our contemporary society? By consequently exploring the social on theoretical, methodological and broader societal levels, we provide suggestions for how we can rethink the field of educational history in the future.

Rethinking the social and the history of education

As William Sewell noted, the concept of social is ambiguous and vague. For example, it may be used to refer to society as a whole when we discuss social structures and social classes, but it may also refer to more specific social practices when denoting social networks, social lives, social status or social worlds. In this context, the term societal has been used to offer some precision: where social norms may denote the norms of a specific group, societal norms are those that an entire society subscribes to.²

While the concept of the social has often remained undefined, historians of education have addressed the social in various ways. Social historians of the 1960s and 1970s paid increasing attention to the relationship between education and society, the latter often perceived as a kind of totality. As John Lawson and Harold Silver remarked, such a social history of education was, in principle, an endless task since the social included “every possible aspect of changing social structures, relationships and ideals”. According to Lawson and Silver, this meant that historians of education would link education not only to social and political movements, but also to population structure, the church, the state, and “the social needs and philosophies of all sorts and conditions of men”.³

The inclusive understanding of the social notwithstanding, the themes addressed by social historians of education were more specific. Social historians stressed the role of social groups, social interests and social movements, and the role of social class, economic development and the state.⁴ Transferred to the field of history of education, this implied a growing interest in often critical analyses of education and society, examining relationships between education and social class, family life, gender, demography and economic structures. The social history of education also had a preference for certain historical actors. In that sense, the term social could introduce a distinction between the elite and the society they wished to explore. Social history problematised studies written from the perspective of politicians and legislators, and instead promoted grass-roots histories of teachers, children and parents. As a result, this social history of education implied interdisciplinary tendencies, taking advantage of the advances of demography, economics, history and sociology. These preferences were followed by an emphasis on the realities and experiences of wider non-elite groups, an interest in quantitative data, and a widening of source materials used.⁵

In Sweden, the path-breaking efforts of Egil Johansson illustrate these features of a social history of education. Starting with his PhD thesis in 1972, Johansson promoted a new history of literacy in Sweden, developing quantitative techniques to exploit the information buried in catechetical examination registers. In doing so, he explored the literacy and schooling of the population, rather than the elite, and developed methods to use the rich source materials available at Swedish church archives. Johansson himself embodied interdisciplinarity by taking positions in educational sciences, demography and religious studies, and developed a research group encompassing historians, educational researchers, theologians and linguists.⁶

Although such an interest in the social context of education has remained, research in the history of education has changed since the 1970s, partly in response to the linguistic turn, the rise of cultural history and the increasing importance of postmodern, post-structuralist and postcolonial theory.⁷ These developments implied an emphasis on language, on ideas and discourses, and how language not only reflects reality, but shapes our knowledge and our perceptions. Starting from such assumptions, researchers have stressed how language and meanings were no less “real” than social and economic contexts. Consequently, discourses and ideologies were no longer examined as a reflection of the social classes of society, and the conflicts between working classes, middle classes and upper classes. Instead, such social categories were in themselves explored as a discursive construct with a significance independent of the social grouping identifiable in social networks, wages, level of education or consumption patterns.⁸ Rather than examining the relationship between education and society, such studies explored the discursive construction of the social.

Currently, such a new cultural history provides what is probably the most influential framework of the history of education, at least from a European horizon.⁹ Given its popularity, it is a broad tradition that is difficult to define. But Thomas Popkewitz’s definition of this kind of history as “the study of the historically constructed ways of reason that frame, discipline, and order our action and participation in the world” is useful.¹⁰ It is a study that, in a certain sense, can be described as a “discourse about discourses” that examines “how ideas construct, shape, coordinate, and constitute social practices”.¹¹ Thus, it “focuses on the construction or production of reality, rather than the idea that texts and images simply reflect social reality” to borrow a formulation from Marianne Larsen.¹² In this conference issue, Marino Miranda Noriega’s article on the production of illiteracy as a social problem provides a striking illustration of such an approach, in which the author also reflects on the nature of his research design as a kind of post-social social history.

The new cultural history has undoubtedly rejuvenated the history of education in the last 30 years. Although prominent researchers such as Jurgen Herbst saw stagnation at the end of the 1990s, condemning researchers to repeat the old mantras of class, gender and race, the new cultural history of education has proved him and other sceptics wrong.¹³ A glimpse at the list of special issues published in Paedagogica Historica provides ample evidence of this. Far from merely repeating the themes of social history in the 1970s and 1980s, we have seen a widening of the field to include new topics, theoretical concepts and source materials. Consider just the following special issues: “Transnationalising the History of Education in Modern Korea” (2016), “Educational Soundscapes” (2017), “Education and the Body” (2018), “Education and the Visual Dimension of Writing” (2019) and “Spaces and Places of Education” (2021). These are examples of twenty-first-century new cultural history of education that not only made refreshing contributions, but also fundamentally expanded this field of inquiry.

These successes of new cultural history of education have raised a number of questions regarding the future of the field of history of education. How can we continue to take additional steps forward in developing our historical inquiries without repeating all these ground-breaking studies into the new cultural history of emotions, memory, materiality, spatiality, technology, corporality and visual culture? This challenge of following up on success may be exemplified by the work of Michel Foucault. The impact of his paradigmatic analyses of knowledge and power is of a magnitude that is difficult to assess, and has proven to be extremely fruitful as a fundamental inspiration for new cultural histories of education.¹⁴ This includes the wide range of impressive investigations into the microphysics of power, including those examining the history of monitorial education.¹⁵ However, while such research certainly indicates the power of Foucauldian frameworks, it raises questions about how we are to apply these in the future in order to step beyond the research that already has been done.

In this introduction, we suggest that reflecting on how we address the social after the linguistic turn is one way to manage this challenge. In line with a postmodern emphasis on particularity and complexity, we do not present any simple or general answers.¹⁶ We do not promote a return to the social history accounts of the post-war era and its emphasis on social class, economic development and the state. Instead, we encourage efforts to rethink the terms social and society on the basis of both those classic social history accounts and the lessons learned from new cultural history of education.¹⁷ What would a new social history of education look like in the twenty-first century, and how can we write updated histories on education and society today?

Such efforts do not imply a transition from an idealistic focus on text, ideas and visions to a materialism of social, economic and technological structures. As Sewell noted, such a distinction between the spiritual and the material is misleading and born out of ancient Christian and aristocratic discourses. Not even the economy is ever entirely “material”, as the rather complex symbol-system of money indicates.¹⁸ And, as historians of knowledge have emphasised, all human intellectual products have a place, an institution, a geography and historical actors who produce and disseminate those products.¹⁹ Instead, this suggestion to rethink history of education utilises the nominalist stance of new cultural history to transcend such distinctions between mind and matter when examining how the social may be conceptualised and researched.²⁰

Conceptualising society

On a theoretical and conceptual level, such a rethinking of the history of education has at least three implications, as it encourages us to reflect on how we address society and historical actors and how we relate to other fields or disciplines of research.

First, the social history accounts of the 1960s and 1970s raise questions on how we conceptualise society. As Marcelo Caruso noted, there has been a tendency to create a certain distance between education and its external conditions using concepts such as Pierre Bourdieu’s “relative autonomy”, David Tyack and Larry Cuban’s “pedagogic discourse” and Basil Bernstein’s “pedagogic discourse”.²¹ Such a treatment of society is also apparent from the definitions of new cultural history of education. Defining history of education as the study of the “historically constructed ways of reason” or “the production of reality” or as a “discourse about discourses” may include parts of what we define as society. However, by stressing the construction of realities and experiences, such definitions do not encourage an examination of structures that are not described as discourses but rather in terms of social groups, economic inequalities, institutions, organisation and wide-ranging societal transformations (for example, the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions).²²

As Lawson and Silver indicated in the quote above, exploring education within a social context means that a social history of education potentially includes all kinds of human activities. Eric Hobsbawm argued that such an encompassing conceptualisation of the social is necessary. If one intends to examine the social or societal dimensions of human life, these cannot be separated from its intellectual, economic or material dimensions.²³ To use the terms of Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, such a definition of the social would imply going beyond the dichotomy of the intellectual and the social, or the technical and the social.²⁴

Sewell linked such an inclusive conceptualisation of the social to the deconstruction of the distinction between spirit and matter mentioned above. If human actions are conducted by culturally trained thinking bodies, social history is the study of human actions in the world. These actions and their results are packed with meanings and intentions that express cultures and ideas that take place in a specific physical world at a specific time and place. Thus, the study of ideas becomes a study of this social, economic and institutional context, and any study of a city, a factory or a rural village will simultaneously become a study of the culturally informed actions that created and recreated those physical settings.²⁵

Such an understanding of the social implies a significantly broader field of exploration than what is implied by definitions of history of education as the study of ways of reasoning or the production of reality, mentioned above. It is a history of education that can encompass not only the richness of discourses, experiences and emotions, but also the complexities of economic growth, demographic change and institutional practices. Thus, it is a social history of education that may both explore how school buildings are planned, perceived and experienced as “a circulation point of the organizing discourse, a source of modernising myths and controlling images”, and analyse school buildings in terms of quantity, expenditure, geographical distribution, building materials and construction work.²⁶ Thereby, history of education becomes the history of both the social construct of school buildings in educational, medical and political discourses, and the actual school buildings built out of bricks, stone and wood.²⁷ In that case, the social would not only include the human, but also the material, and would cover the histories of discourses as well as social groups, institutions, organisations, historical processes, sequences and events.

While such an approach does not need to imply a total history, it does place high theoretical demands on the historian of education. If we question distinctions between mind and matter, between the intellectual and social, and claim that a social history of education could encompass all possible dimensions of education, then we need some kind of notion of what the social is in order to make measured choices when we design our studies. In line with Hobsbawm, we argue that an elaborate model of society is not necessary in order to study the history of education. While such theoretical models based on Marx, Wallerstein, Bourdieu or Foucault have attractive features, historians do not necessarily require such elaborate theoretical models of society when realising their investigations. Instead, what such an encompassing conception of the social requires are preliminary checklists of what the social includes, or an awareness of its main features. Instead of a formal model, the historian of education requires a qualified and nuanced understanding of which aspects of society will be included in the analysis, and which ones will be excluded.²⁸

There are many ways to conceptualise and examine society. For the social historians of the Annales school, this social context was quite self-evident. A classic materialist Annales-school approach would include the geographical and environmental context, demography, the techniques of production, the structure of the economy and its distribution of labour and surplus, and the resulting social structures.²⁹ The radical revisionists of history of education also had a clear idea of what they included in their social context. In such research, society was often defined as industrialisation, urbanisation, social inequality and the social control of the working class and immigrant groups.³⁰ If we are to avoid repeating the narrative of such conceptualisations, however, we have to identify new ways of defining the social.³¹

For historians of education, Eric Hobsbawm’s pragmatic approach that does not require an extensive theoretical model probably holds certain appeal. However, it raises several theoretically challenging questions regarding how we define terms such as social context and society. What is the relevant social context for nineteenth-century schooling? Does this primarily contain the phenomena that have traditionally been perceived as most closely linked to schooling, such as the teacher profession, textbooks, educationalists and national educational policy? Should we stress the institutional context, including the organisation of the school districts, municipalities, townships or parishes in charge of providing schooling? Or should we focus more on a broader social context that includes processes such as the modernisation of the credit market, local tax system reform and the liberalisation of the real property market?³²

Similar questions on how to define the social may be posed when examining post-war phenomena. If we are to study Dutch educational policy in the 1950s, what is the proper context? Should the focus be on the pillarisation of Dutch society in accordance with religious and political beliefs or should the social context be widened – and if so, how far? Should we include the experiences of war and the hongerwinter of 1944–1945, and how should we treat far-reaching processes such as decolonialisation, emergent welfare politics, expanding enrolments in primary and secondary school and an expanding consumer society? What roles do health care, the progressive education movement, economic debates on education and human capital, and trends in childhood psychology play?³³

This conference issue does not provide universal answers to how historians of education should conceptualise the social or society; that remains an individual task for every historian in close consideration of their subject matter. Nevertheless, this issue provides interesting examples of how society may be conceptualised. These include Anne Berg and Esbjörn Larsson’s analysis of presentations of the social order and the working poor in the Swedish nineteenth-century primary school. Here, the social includes capitalist governments, the popular press, the ruling classes and the political economy of a nineteenth-century society marked by severe class differences. In Sümer Aktan’s article on the reception of the educational thought of Georg Kerschensteiner, the social context primarily includes the educational reforms of the early republic of Turkey, and the international movement of progressive education. Ana María de la Torre Sierra and Virginia Guichot Reina’s conceptualisation of the social in their article on textbooks in post-Francoist Spain highlights legislation on gender equality, female unemployment rates, gender gap in wages and the gendered patters of book consumption. By including such examples of how the social may be conceptualised, we hope that this conference issue can promote a continuous discussion of what aspects of society to include in the analysis, and what to exclude, since this remains one of the most important tasks in rethinking the social in history of education research.

Historical actors and the importance of interdisciplinary work

Apart from encouraging us to reflect on how we explore education in society, the question of how we conceptualise the social raises a second question about the historical actors that we choose to study. Who are the individuals that we include in our historical investigations? Since the break-through of history from below and grass-roots history in the 1960s and 1970s, history of education has broadened its perspective to include both elites and the masses, and the marginalised and disadvantaged. This is an important step forward, since there is a great potential in lifting peripheral and marginalised perspectives to reach more encompassing and diverse insights into social history of education.³⁴ Although peripheral perspectives do not automatically imply a “scientific authority”, such approaches do provide an opportunity to deconstruct established and dominant perspectives and narratives as done, for example, by Feminist Standpoint Theory (FST).³⁵

In this context, the social history banner of grass-roots history or history from below encourages us to continue to reflect on who it is that we are studying, and why. If we are to include a history from below that emphasises the history of ordinary people, mundane practices and the everyday history, what does that mean to us today after all we have learned about social class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability and so on? This question partly concerns the social and economic status of the historical actors under study. When we choose our study objects, will we favour the successful and powerful over the average or those less fortunate, or the pioneers and innovators over the late adopters or the reactionary? What role do assistants, secretaries and temporary staff play in relation to teachers, civil servants, educational researchers and policymakers?³⁶ Do we favour large influential towns over dusty rural settings? Here, discussions on digitalisation of newspapers have indicated the challenge posed when the most important newspapers are digitalised, providing historians with the central big-city perspective on history.³⁷

In this respect, this conference issue provides excellent examples of how these choices can be made. These include articles that focus on the educationalists, such as Lauri Luoto’s article on progressive educationalists, and Aktan’s above-mentioned article on Kerschensteiner focuses on educationalists such as Halil Fikret Kanad, İsmail Hakkı Tonguç and Hıfzırrahman Raşit Öymen. In a research field like history of education, which predominantly focuses on the west-European or United States promotors of progressive education, the latter article’s line-up of historical actors is refreshing. However, there are also other historical actors to examine, and in this conference issue we find a range of actors that are involved in education on different levels in different settings. Mariko Omori’s analysis of adjustment rooms in early-twentieth-century Los Angeles is, for example, populated by progressive educational reformers, superintendents, school principals and school boards, among many others. In Kurt Clausen and Lynn Lemisko’s article on teacher education, a number of instructors are addressed, such as those teaching household science, physical training and manual training.

These choices of historical actors are clearly linked to that of the analytical level. Although historians are aware of the challenges of methodological nationalism, the national level remains a common choice when examining the history of education. Although the local and regional level has been fundamental to the workings on education, not least in the decentralised educational systems of the nineteenth century, the local and regional settings far away from national capitals and famous educationalists remain neglected in many strands of research.³⁸ Here, the strong regional focus of the Annales school raises interesting questions regarding the role of regional and local settings, both on our study of national school systems and on our examination of international and transnational phenomena.³⁹

Finally, this rethinking of the social also concerns the relationship between history of education and other disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. The social history of education famously introduced theories and methods from the social sciences. Again, this raises questions on interdisciplinary work today. Who should historians of education work with and be influenced by if we are to rethink the social in history of education?

This conference issue includes two articles that especially illustrate the potential of interdisciplinary approaches. Angeliki Voskou’s contribution strikingly combines historical perspectives with the use of interviews and lesson observations in order to explore identity development in Greek Supplementary Schools. In terms of methods, Lauri Luoto’s advanced application of social network analysis of the New Education movement is also of special interest. It indicates how New Education may be conceptualised not in terms of a discourse or as a certain mode of production of realities, but as a social network among individuals, and how this may be studied using a so-called two-mode faction procedure. In that respect, Luoto’s article is an excellent example of what interdisciplinary inspiration may add to the history of education.

When promoting interdisciplinary work in order to rethink the social in history of education, there are a couple of research fields to consider. One of these is economic history, where research on education currently has a rather strong position.⁴⁰ In relation to the theoretical concepts commonly used in journals such as History of Education, History of Education Quarterly and Paedagogica Historica, there is something fresh in the economic historians’ approach to education and society. These approaches do not necessarily reduce education to a matter of economic development or human capital, but instead open up for a wide range of topics that can be explored via both quantitative and qualitative studies. Fundamental questions in this literature include the relationship between religion and education, which may address the interaction of religion and sociocultural features of an area, and the interplay between education and political institutions.⁴¹ Such studies may also cover the impact of fertility, mortality, landownership concentration, migration, natural resources and technological development.⁴²

Another field that promotes innovative approaches to the relationship between education and society is the history of knowledge.⁴³ As a parallel to a social history of education, history of knowledge does not focus on knowledge instead of society, but instead aims “to analyze and comprehend knowledge in society and knowledge in culture”, as Simone Lässig described the ethos of the research field.⁴⁴ By studying knowledge as “a broad political, social, and cultural phenomenon”, such a framework encourages us to pay attention not only to the systematisation and concepts of knowledge but also to the societal circulation of knowledge, the medialisation of knowledge, the arenas, actors, institutions, spaces and cultures of knowledge.⁴⁵ Using such concepts, historians of education have an excellent opportunity to develop an updated social history of education that includes society in the analysis while simultaneously accounting for the lessons learned from the linguistic turn. In that respect, Lässig’s definition of history of knowledge raises thought-provoking questions about what a definition of history of education as the analysis of education in society and education in culture would imply.

To conclude, we also see further potential in discourse approaches when rethinking the social in history of education. With concepts like dispositive and subjectivation, discourse approaches have the potential to acknowledge both the material and the non-material aspects of society, and the interrelation between different social dimensions and fields. For example, the discourse historical approach (DHA) highlights not only intertextual and interdiscursive relationships, but also local situational, social and institutional settings, as well as the broader socio-political and historical context.⁴⁶ By employing such a framework, discourse approaches can both guide an examination of education within the context of entire societies, and support interdisciplinary work by promoting the communication of historical educational research with broader fields of the social sciences.

Rethinking methods

Apart from these theoretical concerns, an ambition to rethink the social also has implications for our research methods. The choice of methods – here broadly understood to include the perspective used to pose questions to general research design as well as the collection and analysis of sources – is important. Where you sit determines what you see, and how we study historical phenomena may not only affect our results but even determine them.⁴⁷

Encouraging interdisciplinary work, a rethinking of the social in history of education certainly emphasises a further need to explain what we as historians of education actually do. When we work within fields of social and behavioural sciences, including that of educational research, there is a need to present the methods used.⁴⁸ This challenge has also been posed within the discipline of history. Paula Fass has, for example, complained of a lack of rigour in historical research, marked by “a profusion of styles and methods that seem to obey no rules but the unique bypaths of the individual historian’s mind”.⁴⁹

Such reflections on the methods of historians of education should, firstly, include discussions on historians of educations’ use of source materials. Historical research is marked by the fact that we produce knowledge based on a scarcity of source materials. History of education is not history through observations, interviews (with the exception of oral history) or experiments, but “knowledge through documents”.⁵⁰ How are these documents collected, why have they been stored and by whom? What is not available? In rethinking the social, we need to consider the source materials that we use.

The past offers a rich set of sources, including various documents stored in archives (minutes, letters, drafts, regulations, etc.), magazines, journals, books, newspapers, parliamentary records, memoirs, artefacts and statistical data, just to mention a few types of sources. Which of these will enable us to examine education embedded in a social context? Which ones enable us to write a history from below and include marginalised voices, and communicate well with other disciplines?

The answer to these questions is partly a matter of how these sources are selected. It is important to consider whether a selection based on a group of individuals, a site, an institution, or a region helps to identify and combine sources in such a way that a rich analysis of education in society can be accomplished. This is also an issue of periodisation. How does the choice of short, medium or long time-periods affect our research, and what are the principles that we use for periodisation? In that respect, it is important to consider how the choice between social, political, cultural or educational eras affects the manner in which we approach education and society. This includes reflections on the identification of critical events. How does periodisation based on educational policy reforms (the Guizot Law of 1833 in France or the comprehensive school reform of 1962 in Sweden) or significant events (the launch of Sputnik in 1957 or the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983) affect how society is addressed in research projects, compared to, for example, radical shifts in educational enrolment, sales of textbooks, teacher’s average age or school spending?

Secondly, a rethinking of the social emphasises the role of contextualisation in historical methods. If the social context is fundamental, then the historians’ practice of contextualising education is also fundamental. Apart from having an understanding of what the social context consists of, such an act of contextualisation requires reflections on what contextualisation implies. Is contextualisation an act of interpretation, historical empathy, or of reconstruction?⁵¹ Does the act of contextualisation imply the study of various layers of reality (including social, economic, cultural, political and ideological structures) or a systematic totality as in some versions of a historical materialist model? Here, useful critique has targeted the conceptualisation of the social context as a kind of box that contains and sustains the object under study, and instead argued that the social context should be studied as associations, assemblages, affinities and networks.⁵² This critical discussion is linked to that of whether contextualisation implies an analysis of depth or a background, or whether it is a horizontal analysis that “keep[s] the social domain completely flat” and requires the researchers’ attention throughout the entire research process.⁵³

To further develop how we contextualise education, we may also consider what we do when we place education in a social context. Are we mainly interested in exploring the Zusammenhang or sammanhang, terms that indicate a focus on how various aspects of human life are linked together? Does contextualisation then mean that we examine the links between social position, economic resources, beliefs, customs, lifestyle, political position, education and so forth? Another option is to examine context in terms of specific situations or locations. An example of that is the investigation of how educational ideas are situated in specific social or geographical settings, including that of a generation, a town, a community or a particular organisation.⁵⁴ Such a contextualisation certainly requires “the keen sense of locale and milieu” that has been attributed to the Annales historians.⁵⁵ In this conference issue, Omori’s article on early-twentieth-century adjustment rooms in Los Angeles is a great example of such an approach to contextualisation, featuring insights into the several exhibitions that were held in Los Angeles in 1919–1922 at locations such as the Teachers’ Institute, the Olive Street School and the Grand Avenue School building.

The practice of contextualisation can also stress an understanding of historical actors. In history education, this is denoted as historical perspective taking (HPT): that is, the ability to understand the social, cultural and intellectual context that shapes our lives, so that we can accomplish a historical empathy with individuals in the past. Such an ability requires an awareness of the dangers of anachronism, a cognitive and emotional ability to connect with people in the past, and an ability to reconstruct the historical context. In history education, the classic example is: if we are to understand the popular appeal of the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930s, we need to understand the history of World War I, the economic crisis of the 1920s, and the social and political conflicts of the era, among many other things.⁵⁶ In the history of education, similar practices of contextualisation are necessary if we are to understand the introduction of payments by results that made school spending in England and Wales partly dependent on schoolchildren’s exam results from 1862 to 1897, or the role of eugenics in the writings of the prominent educationalist and feminist Ellen Key.⁵⁷

Finally, such a rethinking also raises questions of analysis. Historians and historians of education are often concise when describing how their analysis has been conducted, while researchers in social and behavioural science often enjoy describing the steps of their analytical process at length.⁵⁸ There are reasons to be careful, so that we do not merely state the obvious or re-invent the wheel, but since the language of social science analysis has become so influential, and is already affecting how we present our own practices, it is worth reflecting on what historians of education actually do when analysing source materials. Do we actually code our materials, or do we read and create structured notes? Do we use samples, examine case studies, or perform thematic analysis? Although there are reasons not to confuse the research process of historians with those of qualitatively oriented sociologists and psychologists, such a terminology might nevertheless be useful when taking further steps in presenting history of education research for a broader audience.

In this respect, it is important not to reduce the specificity of the historian’s task at hand. Analysing education within a social context means that historians of education may take on a wide range of roles. Michel de Certeau has presented the two main options that many historians of education face: one may examine history as a voyeur at the top of a New York skyscraper, or explore history as a pedestrian. The view from the 110th floor of the skyscraper provides the historian with a panoptical power to provide a complete overview of Manhattan, identifying patterns in the complex urban landscape where others down below only see chaos. On the other hand, the historian working on the street level can provide detailed insights into the bustling everyday life of New Yorkers that is impossible to capture from up high.⁵⁹ In this conference issue, Lauri Luoto’s article is an example of the former research design, where he provides a striking overview of the development of the New Education movement based on 58 educational reformers. Clausen and Lemisko’s investigation of teacher education in twentieth-century Ontario, Canada, is an excellent example of the latter street-level approach: a micro-level analysis of North Bay normal school, in what the authors compare to a life history approach.

Such investigations also require the historians of education to reflect further on what role they intend to choose. They can be the analyst who selects, sorts and compares, or the interpreter who explores the meaning of the past. In this sense, a historian of education with a keen eye for society may be a detective who searches for clues to provide a more complete story, or a mapmaker attempting to present and package a useful presentation of historical reality.⁶⁰ Such a historian of education may attempt a reconstruction “based on scattered, diverse, and fragmentary evidence” or become a storyteller who provides an account of true events.⁶¹ Considering the risks of inappropriate objectivity claims and unlocated truth claims, a rethinking of the social encourages us to reflect on our analytical practices and what we as historians of education actually do when we conduct research.

Rethinking the relevance of history of education

The conference theme “Rethinking the Social in the History of Education” extends beyond theoretical conceptualisations of society and methods to include the function of our research in society. In our current context of societal issues – including those of the climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic – and social movements such as Black Lives Matter and Fridays For Future, what role are historians of education supposed to fill?

In the past, historians of education have certainly been able to provide critical perspectives on the workings of educational systems. In the social history of the 1970s and 1980s, critical perspectives replaced previous hagiographic accounts, highlighting inequalities, class interest and the role of the central government.⁶² Since then, historians of education have continued to broaden their scope, engaging with a wide range of topics that are high on the public agenda. These include the histories of abuse in out-of-home care and boarding schools, and in the Swedish context the central governments’ policies targeting the Saami population.⁶³ Recent initiatives that explore the societal relevance of history of education include the Education & Pandemics Archive, supported by ISCHE and the Stichting Paedagogica Historica; the section Policy Dialogue in History of Education Quarterly; and the Graduate School in Applied History of Education (2020–2025), based at four universities in Sweden.

Rethinking the history of education requires reflection on how research should engage with contemporary concerns, and for what reasons. This includes the well-known dangers of presentism and the restriction of our field of inquiry into one that may only address what is relevant to current educational policy and practice. Nevertheless, we have a responsibility to engage with these questions. Apart from the political motivations in our current context of immense challenges, history is unavoidable since there are at least two links between history and the past. History is both the process that leads up to the present and the phenomena that our culture is immersed with. Whether we talk about politics, education or our everyday life, the past is most often present in our discussions.⁶⁴

As a result of this double connection between the past and the present, it is possible to distinguish among at least four roles that history of education can play, which provide history of education with a certain meaning, relevance, function or even usefulness outside of this research field.⁶⁵ The first two of these are related to history as that which leads up to the present. First, by being able to examine such historical sequences, historians of education provide educational research with the methodological skills to study education in our past. Historians of education are, in that respect, those who have the skillset to examine education in time exploring historical source materials during defined time periods. Secondly, by examining such historical processes, history of education matters since such research may be used to explain current events. Because nothing comes from nothing, and current decisions are determined by past decisions, historians of education have the potential to explore the historical sequences that have led us to our present state, or the fundamental structures that still have an impact on schooling.⁶⁶

The fact that our current debates on education are filled with history also adds potential relevance to history of education. In this respect, history of education has a third potential role: to recontextualise current phenomena through comparisons and contrasts. By investigating our educational past, we can examine whether an issue or a phenomenon is new or old, unique or normal, changing or persistent, and whether a change is significant or not.⁶⁷ In this sense, history of education may not only help us think about the past, but also improve our understanding of the present by thinking with history.⁶⁸

Finally, in a culture where discourses of commemoration, remembrance and nostalgia have their firm place, and where media feeds us with an unparalleled access to history, history of education offers the potential to critically examine our understanding and use of history.⁶⁹ Such demythologising work is important if we are to engage with the crimes and discrimination of the past. In this respect, historians of education have the potential to be what Peter Burke denoted as remembrancers: historians who examine a past that many would like to forget.⁷⁰

While this conference issue includes original research articles, which stress the knowledge contribution to the research field, the authors also highlight how their research has wider societal relevance. In these articles, the main use of history seems to be that of history as recontextualisation: history as a point of comparison to use in discussion of current issues. Voskou demonstrates how historical perspectives can be used to understand student identity development in current Greek Supplementary Schools, which has further implications for educational policy and practices. In Kathryn L. Kirchgasler and Nele Kuhlmann’s comparative investigation of science curricular differentiation in the United States and West Germany, the authors use history to reflect on the basic assumptions of educational inclusion today. Finally, Aktan applies his historical analysis of progressive education in the early republic of Turkey to provide a deeper understanding of post-war educational developments in Turkey, where US educational traditions grew in importance. As a result, the actions of the current Ministry of National Education, which bear marks of both pre-war and post-war developments, are seen in a new light.

Conclusion

This introduction has posed a range of questions on how the history of education may be rethought, starting from a rethinking of the social. This introduction, together with the articles of this conference issue, are intended to promote such collaborative efforts.

We have encouraged a broad conceptualisation of the social that includes the intellectual and cultural as well as the practical, technical and institutional, that raises important theoretical questions regarding what parts of society our analysis should include. What role should, for example, the histories of economic growth, demographic change and educational systems play in our research? We have also discussed the historical actors we chose to study and what interdisciplinary work means in this context. In particular, we have reflected on what historians of knowledge, economic historians and the discourse historical approach can contribute to our analysis of education in society. Inspired by Lässig’s definition of history of knowledge, we consequently suggested that a definition of history of education as the exploration of education in society and education in culture might provide a useful starting point for engaging with some of the theoretical questions posed in this article.

In terms of methods, we have considered the use of source materials, contextualisation and analysis in history of education. Rethinking the social is not merely a theoretical challenge, but also a matter of research design, where the choice of source materials, contextualisation and kind of analysis is important to reflect on and to explain for our readers. As this brief introduction indicates, the options are manifold, and if we intend to explore education in its social context, those options are important to consider, both for the individual researcher and for the future development of our research field. This is also true regarding the relevance of history of education research. While we do not promote the opinion that all educational research should be useful or applicable, there are good reasons to continue the discussion on the various ways in which history of education may be relevant, meaningful, applicable, or even useful for educational researchers and educational policy.

The articles of this conference issue provide a further basis for such efforts. These articles illustrate the multiple options we have to conceptualise the social, and the wide range of sources, practices of contextualisation and historical analysis that we have at our disposal. As such, they will be of interest not only to researchers wanting to know more about their subject matter, but also to researchers who wish to develop their approaches to the history of education. If history of education is philosophy in the meaning promoted by Michel Foucault – “an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought” – then we hope that this conference issue will provide a healthy workout.⁷¹

Acknowledgements

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all who made it possible for us to organise ISCHE 42 in 2021. Organising what in effect was two conferences (first an onsite and then an online conference) required a lot of effort from a lot of colleagues. Apart from Karin Priem, Fanny Isensee, Kicki Ekberg, Christian Lundahl and not least Angelika Wegscheider at the ISCHE Berlin Office, we would like to extend our gratitude to the ECR Thinkering Group for making the online experience of the conference so much more valuable, and the department of education at Örebro University for making ISCHE 42 possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Johannes Westberg

Johannes Westberg received his PhD (2008) and habilitation (2014) at Uppsala University, Sweden, and is full professor of theory and history of education at the university of Groningen, the Netherlands. He served as full professor of education at Örebro University, Sweden, 2016–2020. He is currently scientific leader of the graduate school in applied history of education, senior editor of Nordic Journal of Educational History, and member of the editorial boards of History of Education and History of Education Quarterly.

Franziska Primus

Franziska Primus has studied Educational Science at Freie Universität Berlin (BA, 2013) and Education Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (MA, 2016). Since 2019, she has been a PhD student in Education at Örebro University and since 2020 an affiliated member at the graduate school in applied history of education. In her PhD project, she explores not only how the present decision-making in global education policy evolved from the past but also how ideas about the future affect the present.

Notes

¹ John L. Rury and Eileen H. Tamura, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Tanya Fitzgerald, ed., Handbook of Historical Studies in Education: Debates, Tensions, and Directions (Singapore: Springer Singapore, 2019); and Gary McCulloch, ed., A Cultural History of Education vol. 1–6 (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). See also Sarah van Ruyskensvelde and Pieter Verstraete, Handboek Historische Pedagogiek (Owl Press, forthcoming).

² William Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 321–323.

³ John Lawson and Harold Silver, A Social History of Education in England (London: Routledge, 1973), xxi.

⁴ For such condensed characterisations of social history, see, e.g. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, ”Introduction”, in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell, Lynn Hunt and Richard Biernacki (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 6–7.

⁵ See, e.g. Rosa Bruno-Jofré, “History of Education in Canada: Historiographic ‘Turns’ and Widening Horizons”, Paedagogica Historica 50, no. 6 (2014): 774–777.

⁶ Daniel Lindmark, “Literacy, Text, Practice, and Culture: Major Trends in the Umeå History of Education Research Group, 1972–2002”, Interchange 34, no. 2/3 (2003): 154–155. Johansson’s research also provided a background for ISCHE 28 that took place at Umeå University (Sweden) in 2006, see Daniel Lindmark and Per-Olof Erixon, “Introduction: The Many Faces of Literacy”, Paedagogica Historica 44, no. 1–2 (2008). A comprehensive presentation of the impact of Johansson’s research is provided by Harvey J. Graff et al., eds., Understanding Literacy in Its Historical Contexts: Socio-Cultural History and the Legacy of Egil Johansson (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2009).

⁷ Bruno-Jofré, “History of Education in Canada: Historiographic ‘Turns’ and Widening Horizons”, 777–778.

⁸ Bonnell and Hunt, “Introduction”, 8–9; Richard Biernacki, “Method and Metaphor after New Cultural History”, in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, 65–68.

⁹ This preference was noted already 20 years ago in Marc Depaepe, “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”, Studies in Philosophy and Education 23, no. 5 (2004): 334.

¹⁰ Thomas Popkewitz, Barry Franklin, and Miguel Pereyra, “Preface”, in Cultural History and Education. Critical Essays on Knowledge and Schooling, ed. Thomas Popkewitz, Barry Franklin and Miguel Pereyra (New York: Routledge, 2001), ix.

¹¹ Quotes from Marc Depaepe, “The Ten Commandments of Good Practices in History of Education Research”, Zeitschrift für pädagogische Historiographie 16 (2010), 32; and Popkewitz, Franklin and Pereyra, “Preface”, x. See also Lynn Fendler, “New Cultural Histories”, in Handbook of Historical Studies in Education, ed. Tanya Fitzgerald (Singapore: Springer, 2019), 1–17.

¹² Marianne Larsen, The Making and Shaping of the Victorian Teacher: A Comparative New Cultural History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 12.

¹³ Jurgen Herbst, “The History of Education: State of the Art at the Turn of the Century in Europe and North America”, Paedagogica Historica 35, no. 3 (1999): 739.

¹⁴ Fendler, “New Cultural Histories”, 2–3. The impact of Foucault in the history of education has also been discussed by, e.g. Bruno-Jofré, “History of Education in Canada: Historiographic ‘Turns’ and Widening Horizons”, 778–780.

¹⁵ See, e.g. Marcelo Caruso and Eugenia Roldán Vera, “Pluralizing Meanings: The Monitorial System of Education in Latin America in the Early Nineteenth Century”, Paedagogica Historica 41, no. 6 (2005). For examples from the Swedish context, see Esbjörn Larsson, “Classes in Themselves and for Themselves: The Practice of Monitorial Education for Different Social Classes in Sweden, 1820 − 1843”, History of Education 45, no. 5 (2016): 511–529; and Joakim Landahl, “Learning to Listen and Look: The Shift from the Monitorial System of Education to Teacher-Led Lessons”, The Senses and Society 14, no. 2 (2019): 194–206.

¹⁶ On the postmodern in historiography, see Simon Susen, The “Postmodern Turn” in the Social Sciences (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 138.

¹⁷ For this account of the traditional research interest of social history, see Patrick Joyce, “What is the Social in Social History?”, Past & Present 206 (2010): 216.

¹⁸ William Sewell, “Toward a Post-Materialist Rhetoric for Labor History”, in Rethinking Labour History – Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis, ed. Lenard Berlanstein (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 15–21.

¹⁹ Johan Östling, “Circulation, Arenas, and the Quest for Public Knowledge: Historiographical Currents and Analytical Frameworks”, History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 59, no. 4 (2020): 111–126.

²⁰ On such a historical nominalism which questions universals and taken-for-granted objects and categories, see Thomas Flynn, “Foucault and Historical Nominalism”, in Phenomenology and Beyond: The Self and Its Language, ed. Harold Allen Durfee and David F. T. Rodier (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 32–35.

²¹ Marcelo Caruso, “Why Do Finance? A Comment About Entanglements and Research in the History of Education”, Nordic Journal of Educational History 2, no. 1 (2015): 144.

²² Quotes from Depaepe, “The Ten Commandments of Good Practices in History of Education Research”, 32; Popkewitz, Franklin and Pereyra, “Preface”, ix; and Larsen, The Making and Shaping of the Victorian Teacher, 12.

²³ Eric Hobsbawm, “From Social History to the History of Society”, Daedalus 100, no. 1 (1971): 24–25.

²⁴ Bruno Latour and Steve WooIgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton University Press, 1986).

²⁵ Sewell, “Toward a Post-Materialist Rhetoric for Labor History”, 25.

²⁶ Quote from Martin Lawn and Ian Grosvenor, “Imagining a Project: Networks, Discourses and Spaces – Towards a New Archaeology of Urban Education”, Paedagogica Historica 35, no. 2 (1999): 390.

²⁷ For an inspiring investigation encompassing both the elysian ambitions of builders and the financial structures that made them possible, see Richard George Wilson and Alan Mackley, Creating Paradise: The Building of the English Country House 1660–1880 (London: Hambledon, 2000).

²⁸ Regarding this requirement, see Hobsbawm, “From Social History”, 31.

²⁹ Sewell, Logics of History, 39.

³⁰ Matthew Gardner Kelly, “The Mythology of Schooling: The Historiography of American and European Education in Comparative Perspective”, Paedagogica Historica 50, no. 6 (2014), 6–7.

³¹ William E. Marsden, Unequal Educational Provision in England and Wales: The Nineteenth-Century Roots (London: The Woburn Press, 1987), xv.

³² For an argument for the latter, see e.g. Johannes Westberg, “Multiplying the Origins of Mass Schooling: An Analysis of the Preconditions Common to Schooling and the School Building Process in Sweden, 1840–1900”, History of Education 44, no. 4 (2015): 415–436.

³³ Some of these questions are raised by a reading of Hilary Marland and Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, “Introduction: Cultures of Child Health in Britain and the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century”, in Cultures of Child Health in Britain and the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century, ed. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Hilary Marland (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), 7–30.

³⁴ For a recent example of such an analysis, see e.g. Franziska Primus and Christian Lundahl, “The Peripherals at the Core of Androcentric Knowledge Production: An Analysis of the Managing Editor’s Knowledge Work in the International Encyclopedia of Education (1985)”, Paedagogica Historica 57, no. 6 (2020): 621–637.

³⁵ Sandra G. Harding, “Introduction: Standpoint Theory as a Site of Political, Philosophic, and Scientific Debate”, in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. Sandra G. Harding (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1–15.

³⁶ See e.g. the discussion on school technicians in Daniel Töpper and Fanny Isensee, “From «School Buildings» to «School Architecture» – School Technicians, Grand School Buildings and Educational Architecture in Prussia and the USA in the Nineteenth Century”, Historia y memoria de la educación 13 (2020): 378–383.

³⁷ Ian Milligan, “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010”, The Canadian Historical Review 94, no. 4 (2013): 566.

³⁸ For a summary of the main features of decentralised nineteenth century schooling, see Johannes Westberg, “What Were the Main Features of Nineteenth Century School Acts? Local School Organization, Basic Schooling, a Diversity of Revenues and the Institutional Framework of an Educational Revolution”, Rivista di Storia Economica XXXVI, no. 2 (2020): 139–173.

³⁹ Sewell, Logics of History, 35–36.

⁴⁰ Martina Cioni, Giovanni Federico and Michelangelo Vasta, “The Long-Term Evolution of Economic History: Evidence from the Top Five Field Journals (1927–2017)”, Cliometrica 14, no. 1 (2020).

⁴¹ E.g. Timo Boppart et al., “Under Which Conditions Does Religion Affect Educational Outcomes?”, Explorations in Economic History 50, no. 2 (2013); Gabriele Cappelli, “One Size That Didn’t Fit All? Electoral Franchise, Fiscal Capacity and the Rise of Mass Schooling across Italy’s Provinces, 1870–1911”, Cliometrica 10, no. 3 (2016).

⁴² Gabriele Cappelli and Michelangelo Vasta, “Can School Centralization Foster Human Capital Accumulation? A Quasi‐Experiment from Early Twentieth‐Century Italy”, The Economic History Review 73, no. 1 (2020); Francesco Cinnirella and Erik Hornung, “Landownership Concentration and the Expansion of Education”, Journal of Development Economics 121 (2016).

⁴³ Joel Barnes and Tamson Pietsch, “The History of Knowledge and the History of Education”, History of Education Review 51, no. 2 (2022): 109–122. See also Björn Lundberg, ed., ”Exploring Histories of Knowledge and Education”, Nordic Journal of Educational History 9, no. 2 (2022).

⁴⁴ Simone Lässig, “The History of Knowledge and the Expansion of the Historical Research Agenda”, Bulletin of the GHI Washington 59 (2016): 58. The italics are Lässig’s own.

⁴⁵ Johan Östling, “Vad är kunskapshistoria?”, Historisk Tidskrift 135, no. 1 (2015): 109–119; Johan Östling and David Larsson Heidenblad, “Fulfilling the Promise of the History of Knowledge: Key Approaches for the 2020s”, Journal for the History of Knowledge 1, no. 1 (2020): 1–6.

⁴⁶ Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak, “The Discourse Historical Approach (DHA)”, in Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, ed. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2016).

⁴⁷ Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire, “Introduction: Why Bother with Method?”, in Research Methods for History, ed. Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 4.

⁴⁸ John Furlong, Education: An Anatomy of the Discipline (London: Routledge, 2013), ch. 1.

⁴⁹ Paula S. Fass, “Cultural History/Social History: Some Reflections on a Continuing Dialogue”, Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 41.

⁵⁰ Quote from Paul Veyne, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 5.

⁵¹ When discussing the ability to contextualise among students, historical empathy is often mentioned as a goal, see e.g. Tim Huijgen, Carla van Boxtel, Wim van de Grift and Paul Holthuis, “Toward Historical Perspective Taking: Students’ Reasoning When Contextualizing the Actions of People in the Past”, Theory & Research in Social Education 45, no. 1 (2017): 113–114.

⁵² Rita Felski, “‘Context Stinks!’”, New Literary History 42, no. 4 (2011): 577–578.

⁵³ See the introduction to the chapter “How to Keep the Social Flat”, Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 171. See also Noah W. Sobe and Jamie A. Kowalczyk, “Exploding the Cube: Revisioning ‘Context’ in the Field of Comparative Education”, Current Issues in Comparative Education 16, no. 1 (2014): 6.

⁵⁴ Peter Burke, “Context in Context”, Common Knowledge 8, no. 1 (2002): 158–164.

⁵⁵ Robert Forster, “Achievements of the Annales School”, The Journal of Economic History 38, no. 1 (1978): 65.

⁵⁶ Huijgen et al., “Toward Historical Perspective Taking”, 113–114.

⁵⁷ Brendan A. Rapple, “Payment by Results (1862–1897): Ensuring a Good Return on Governmental Expenditure”, The Journal of Educational Thought (JET)/Revue de la Pensée Éducative 25, no. 3 (1991); Emma Vikström, Skapandet av den nya människan: eugenik och pedagogik i Ellen Keys författarskap (Örebro: Örebro University, 2021).

⁵⁸ See e.g. Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, “Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology”, Qualitative Research in Psychology 3, no. 2 (2006).

⁵⁹ Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 91–93.

⁶⁰ David G. García and Tara J. Yosso, “Recovering Our Past: A Methodological Reflection”, History of Education Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2020): 62; John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 22–34.

⁶¹ Sewell, Logics of History, 281; Veyne, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology, 4–12.

⁶² Bruno-Jofré, “History of Education in Canada: Historiographic ‘Turns’ and Widening Horizons”, 774–777.

⁶³ See e.g. Johanna Sköld and Shurlee Swain, eds., Apologies and the Legacy of Abuse of Children in Care: International Perspectives (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015); Jane Griffith, “Of Linguicide and Resistance: Children and English Instruction in Nineteenth-Century Indian Boarding Schools in Canada”, Paedagogica Historica 53, no. 6 (2017); and Daniel Lindmark and Olle Sundström, eds., The Sami and the Church of Sweden: Results from a White Paper Project (Möklinta: Gidlunds förlag, 2018).

⁶⁴ The role of history in our culture and everyday life is discussed in Ramses Delafontaine, Historians as Expert Judicial Witnesses in Tobacco Litigation: A Controversial Legal Practice (Heidelberg: Springer, 2015), 454; John Tosh, Why History Matters (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), viii. For the potential of historical research, see also Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

⁶⁵ For a more extensive discussion and reference list, see Johannes Westberg, “What We Can Learn from Studying the Past: The Wonderful Usefulness of History in Educational Research”, Encounters in Theory and History of Education 22 (2021): 227–248.

⁶⁶ See e.g. Emile Durkheim, Education and Sociology (New York: The Free Press, 1956), 152–153.

⁶⁷ David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering towards Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 6–7.

⁶⁸ Tosh, Why History Matters, 6–7.

⁶⁹ Delafontaine, Historians as Expert Judicial Witnesses in Tobacco Litigation: A Controversial Legal Practice, 1516; Tosh, Why History Matters, viii.

⁷⁰ Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Oxford: Polity, 1997), 59.

⁷¹ Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of the History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 9.