Postmodernity or High Modernity? Emerging Approaches in the New History of Education

Abstract

This paper analyses the repercussions of the crisis of Modernity in the historiography of education in recent decades, both in research discourse and practice and in the academic approaches to the teaching of our discipline. At the same time, and as an example, it examines certain emerging themes in the new history of educa‐ tion, within this context of the present epistemological debate, with special attention to ethnomethodological and microhistorical approaches and to some modernised traditional genres. These new study practices, which have been introduced with certain delay with respect to their presence in other disciplines, are seen to be similar to the new narrative styles of postmodernism, albeit with a certain theoretical relativism and a markedly eclectic attitude in historico‐ educational writing.