Gone but not forgotten: the decline of history as an educational foundation

Abstract

This paper contends that history of education should be a required part of teacher preparation. The discipline’s languishing status in schools of education is widespread, and should be seen in relation to the general decline of humanities and social science subjects as foundations of teacher training. This paper examines the reasons for the disappearance of mandatory history of education courses in teacher preparation, and argues that a misrepresentation of the relationship between theory and practice permits a view of history as not immediately applicable to classroom concerns, and thus expendable in a curriculum driven largely by utilitarian concerns of accountability. Ii recommends strategies for reintroducing history of education courses into teacher education programmes in such a way as to develop habits of mind that promote critical and reflective inquiry.

Keywords:

• educational foundations
• educational history
• knowledge base for teaching
• Ontario education
• reflective teaching
• teacher education

Notes

1. See, e.g. Butin (2005a), Gibson (2002), Mueller (2006), Ryan (2006), Sabik and Storz (2004), and Tozer and Miretzky (2005).

2. Even when, in 1914, Queen’s University’s Faculty of Education in Kingston, Canada, mandated that all teacher candidates study the history of education, records of the summative examinations illustrate instructional emphasis on the rote memorization of facts and dates rather than on creative or critical inquiry (Queen’s University 1914).

3. I regard the Ontario College of Teachers as an agency created by provincial government as a means of regulating and supervising the teaching body, including teacher candidates. The College certifies teacher education programmes (and can remove their certification), has input into entrance/exit requirements, sets the standards of practice for the profession, and requires that certain topics be covered.

4. I co‐instructed the history of education course offered as an elective in foundations: it has an enrolment of six out of nearly 700 students. This is an instance in which an educational history course is provided in the curriculum, but students are not required to take it.

5. Egerton Ryerson, chief superintendent of education for Canada West/Ontario, 1844–1876, is regarded as the ‘father’ of Ontario schools.

6. The use of historical mindedness as an aim follows from the work of Rosa Bruno‐Jofré and Karen Steiner (2007) who defined the notion in terms of thinking historically and of being aware of the socio‐political functions of historical knowledge. Historical mindedness had been depicted by Ken Osborne (2001), who recovered the idea from an 1899 report by the American Historical Association Committee of Seven, as entailing “a way of looking at the world at large that derives from a familiarity with the past and with trying to understand and interpret it” (553). Bruno‐Jofré and Steiner reconfigured the notion as entailing an aim in history education and in teacher preparation.