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Abstract
This paper explores major historiographic “turns” in history of education with a focus, although not exclusively, on English-speaking Canada. It addresses the transformative intellectual impact of the turn toward social history on the history of education, the impact of cultural history and the linguistic turn, the reception of Michel Foucault, and the state of the debate in history at-large today and its implications for the history of education. It also attempts to contextualise the intellectual trends permeating the writing of the history of education in light of developments in education, and signals new directions in historiography influencing history of education. Given the limitations of space, rather than engaging in a historiographical analysis of individual historians of education, the paper traces broad trends, while highlighting the contributions of a significant few.
Acknowledgements
My gratitude to my research assistant, Patricia Quiroga Uceda, who looked into the issues of Historical Studies in Education, and to my dear friends and colleagues Elizabeth Smyth, Josh Cole, Heidi MacDonald, and Eva Krugly for their useful comments.
Notes
1 For a discussion of recent “turns” in historical writing and the use of the term, see Judith Surkis et al., “AHR Forum: Historiographic ‘Turns’ in Critical Perspective,” American Historical Review 117 (2012): 698–813.
2 For a historiographic analysis from the 1970s to the 1990s, see Paul Axelrod, “Historical Writing and Canadian Education from the 1970s to the 1990s,” History of Education Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1996): 19–38. See also Harvey J. Graff, “Towards 2000: Poverty and Progress in Time History of Education,” Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’education 3, no. 2 (1991): 191–210; Micheline Dumont, “L’Histoire de L’Education,” in Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’education, 211–23; Nadia Fahmy-Eid, “La Pointe De L’Iceberg: L’Histoire de L’Éducation et L’ Histoire des Filles au Québec,” in Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’education, 224–36.
3 See for example, Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956).
4 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1983, first published in English in 1970). For valuable commentary, see Peter McLaren and Peter Leonard, eds., Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter (New York: Routledge, 1993).
5 Paulo Freire, “The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom,” Harvard Educational Review 40 (May 1970): 205–55; “Cultural Action and Conscientization,” Harvard Educational Review 40 (August 1970): 452–77.
6 The first versions of what would be Deschooling Society were published in September 1970 in CIDOC Cuadernos as “The Dawn of Epimethean Man and Other Essays,” CIDOC Cuadernos 54, Cuernavaca, Mexico. See Jon Igelmo Zaldívar, “Iván Illich en el CIDOC de Cuernavaca (1963–1976): Un Acontecimiento para la Teoría e Historia de la Educación [Ivan Illich and CIDOC in Cuernavaca (1963–1976): An Event for the Theory and History of Education],” (PhD Thesis, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2011).
7 Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Jon Igelmo Zaldívar, “Ivan Illich’s Late Critique of Deschooling Society: ‘I Was Largely Barking up the Wrong Tree,’” Educational Theory 62, no. 5 (2012): 578.
8 For a comparative analysis of both thinkers, see Douglas Kellner and Richard Kahn, “Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich: Technology, Politics, and the Reconstruction of Education,” Policy Futures in Education 5, no. 4 (2007): 431–48. Illich’s Centers in Cuernavaca attracted scholars like anarchist historian of education Joel Spring, Marxist historian of education Samuel Bowles, and critical educators including Jonathan Kozol and Paulo Freire.
9 For Katz’s own account of his move from Harvard to Toronto, see his Introduction to Michael Katz, Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the “Underclass,” and Urban Schools as History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
10 For an account of this period at OISE, see Graff, “Towards 2000.”
11 See Alison Prentice and Susan E. Houston, eds., Family, School and Society in Nineteenth-century Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1975); Alison Prentice, The School Promoters: Education and Social Class in Mid-nineteenth Century Upper Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977); Susan Mann Trofimenkoff and Alison Prentice, eds., The Neglected Majority: Essays in Canadian Women’s History (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977); Alison Prentice et al., Canadian Women: A History (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988). Particularly influential was Alison Prentice and Marjorie R. Theobald, eds., Women Who Taught: Perspectives on the History of Women and Teaching (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991).
12 See Elizabeth Smyth and Paula Bourne, eds., Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s Professional Work (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); and Elizabeth Smyth, ed., Changing Habits: Women Religious in Canada (Ottawa: Novalis, 2007).
13 Paul Axelrod sees J. Donald Wilson, Robert M. Stamp, and Louis-Philippe Audet, eds., Canadian Education: A History (Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice Hall of Canada, 1970) as a bridge to the “new” educational historiography that developed in Canada since the mid-1970s. The authors responded to the historiographical criticism made by Bernard Bailyn and Brian Simon; Axelrod, “Historical Writing and Canadian Education,” 19. Canadian historians of education developed their own style and created a solid foundation for history of education in Canada. Their theoretical framework changed over time in many cases. Most of them developed a carefully crafted bottom-up social or cultural approach.
14 William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 39.
15 The influence of American Marxist social historians Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, as well as of the British historian Brian Simon, cannot be overlooked.
16 Jason Ellis, “The History of Education as ‘Active History’: A Cautionary Tale?” Active History, activehistory.ca/papers/history-papers-11, accessed March 15, 2014.
17 The early work of Henry Giroux, in particular Theory and Resistance in Education (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1983); Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux, Education under Siege: The Conservative, Liberal, and Radical Debate over Schooling (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1985); and Giroux’s early articles paved the way for a critical pedagogy of learning.
18 Over the years, other historians became members of the editorial team: Thérèse Hamel (Université Laval), William Bruneau (University of British Columbia), Stéphane Lévesque (University of Western Ontario), Andrée Dufour (Cégep Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu), Wyn Millar, Robert Gidney, Rebecca Coulter (University of Western Ontario), Elizabeth Smyth (University of Toronto), Paul Axelrod (York University), Rosa Bruno-Jofré (Queen’s University), and Jocelyne Murray (French language editor, Québec).
19 For a sampling of the linguistic and cultural turns in international educational history, see an important collection edited by Thomas S. Popkewitz, Barry M. Franklin, and Miguel A. Pereyra titled Cultural History in Education: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Schooling (New York and London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001).
20 Sewell, Logics of History, 48.
21 Ibid.
22 A notable recent work incorporating gender theory is Kristina Llewellyn’s Democracy’s Angels: The Work of Women Teachers (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012).
23 Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011), 107.
24 Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’ éducation 1, no. 1 (Spring 1989).
25 James Scott Johnston, “Theorizing Globalization: Rival Philosophical Schools of Thought,” in Teacher Education in a Transnational World, ed. Rosa Bruno-Jofré and James Scott Johnston (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming, Autumn 2014).
26 Mona Gleason, Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Schooling, and the Family in Post-War Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). The work of Ruth Roach Pearson from OISE has influenced the analysis of gender. Another example is Patrice Milewski who applies Foucault’s theories to the analysis of educational reform in Ontario.
27 Gary Wilder, “When Was the Linguistic Turn?” American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (June 2012): 707; John E. Toews, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn,” American Historical Review 92, no. 4 (October 1987): 879–907.
28 “I encountered Discipline and Punishment and Egerton Ryerson’s report on a system of public instruction for upper Canada at the same moment; and read large archival collections with F[oucault]’s analysis in mind. Later, I took up his subsequent focus on subjectification and subjection, and joined his analysis of governmentality with my own interests in state formation. His early work on the panopticon directly stimulated my investigation of educational inspection.” Bruce Curtis, personal communication, March 21, 2012.
29 Josh Cole, “Alpha Children Wear Grey: Postwar Ontario and Soviet Education Reform,” Historical Studies in Education/Revue d'histoire de l'éducation 25, no. 2 (2013): 55–72.
30 For example, Kate Rousmaniere, Kari Dehli, and Ning de Coninck-Smith, eds., Discipline, Moral Regulation and Schooling: A Social History (New York: Garland Press, 1997. History of Education Series).
31 Ian McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History,” Canadian Historical Review 81, no. 4 (December 2000): 617–45. See also Ian McKay, “Canada as a Long Liberal Revolution: On Writing the History of Actually Existing Canadian Liberalism, 1840s–1940s,” in Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution, ed. Jean-Francois Constant and Michel Ducharme (2009; repr., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 347–451.
32 Bruce Curtis, “After ‘Canada’: Liberalisms, Social Theory, and Historical Analysis,” in Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution, ed. Jean-Francois Constant and Michel Ducharme (2009; repr., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 176–200.
33 McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 624. This summary of McKay’s article was first included in Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Josh Cole, “To Serve and Yet Be Free: Historical Configurations and the Insertions of Faculties of Education in Ontario,” in Teacher Education in a Transnational World, ed. Rosa Bruno-Jofré and James Scott Johnston (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming, Autumn 2014).
34 Jean-Francois Constant and Michel Ducharme, eds., Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). In a personal communication, Josh Cole made the following comment: “In this volume, McKay’s historiographical, theoretical, and political program is rigorously assessed from the standpoint of traditional liberal theory and historiography, the ‘Tory tradition’ in Canadian political culture, gender history, environmental history, and Foucauldian theory. Curtis takes up this last approach.”
35 Bruce Curtis, “After ‘Canada’: Liberalisms, Social Theory, and Historical Analysis,” in Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution, ed. Jean-Francois Constant and Michel Ducharme (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 194.
36 Michael Gerard McGarry, “‘To Read, Write, and Cast Accounts’: Foucault, Governmentality and Education in Upper Canada/Canada West” (PhD Thesis, Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Social Justice Education, OISE, University of Toronto, 2012).
37 Bruce Curtis, Ruling by Schooling Québec: Conquest to Liberal Governmentality – A Historical Sociology (Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 2012).
38 Curtis, Ruling by Schooling Québec, 16.
39 Sol Cohen, review of American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876–1980, by Lawrence A. Cremin, Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’ histoire de l’education 1, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 325, notes 26–7 and 40; Sol Cohen, “The Linguistic Turn: The Absent Text of Educational Historiography,” Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’education 3, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 237–48.
40 See Martyn P. Thompson, “Reception Theory and the Interpretation of Historical Meaning,” History and Theory 32, no. 3 (October 1993): 248–72.
41 For example, James Scott Johnston wrote that, in his introduction to Inventing the Modern Self, “Popkewitz comes within a hair’s breadth of condemning Dewey for the uptake of his democratic theory”. The point is that Popkewitz does not offer, Johnston makes the case, textual support for his claim. James Scott Johnston, “Intersections, Oppositions, and Configurations in the Transnational Readings of Dewey” afterword to The Global Reception of John Dewey’s Thought: Multiple Refractions through Time and Space, ed. Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Jürgen Schriewer (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), 228.
42 Timothy J. Stanley, Contesting White Supremacy: Social Segregation, Anti-Racism, and the Making of Chinese Canadians (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011). See also “Why I Killed Canadian History: Conditions for an Anti-Racist History in Canada,” Histoire Sociale/Social History XXXIII, no. 65 (May 2000): 79–104.
43 The work, for example of Dipesh Chakrabarty, while discussed at length in history, is not well known in history of education circles. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
44 For example, Judith Butler’s work.
45 Progressive education has been recently revisited in an interesting and innovative way. See Theodore Michael Christou, Progressive Education: Revisioning and Reframing Ontario’s Public Schools, 1919–1942 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Amy von Heyking, Creating Citizens: History & Identity in Alberta’s Schools, 1905 to 1980 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006).
46 Gary Wilder, “From Optic to Topic: The Foreclosure Effect of Historiographic Turns,” American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (June 2012): 726.
47 Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “The Task of the Historian: 2008 AHA Presidential Address,” American Historical Review 114, no. 1 (February 2009): 1–15; Sewell, Logics of History.
48 Sewell, Logics of History, 80.
49 Sewell, Logics of History, 80.
50 Wilder, “From Optic to Topic,” 745.
51 See Nicole Eustace et al., “AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions,” American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (December 2012): 1487–1530.
52 The senses are related to materiality of schooling, although the analysis of materiality may not go to an exploration of the use of the senses. Interesting studies on the materiality of schooling, for example, include Catherine Burke, Peter Cunningham, and Ian Grosvenor, “‘Putting Education in its Place’: Space, Place and Materialities in the History of Education,” History of Education 39, no. 6 (2010): 677–80; Martin Lawn and Ian Grosvenor, eds., Materialities of Schooling, Design, Technology, Objects, Routines (Oxford: Symposium Books, 2005). The current forthcoming work of E. Lisa Panayotidis on visual interpretations is of interest here.
53 For an interesting example of traveling ideas and the development of a global perspective, see Sebastian Conrad, “Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique,” American Historical Review 117, no. 4 (October 2012): 909–1028.
54 Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, “Approaches to Global Intellectual History,” in Global Intellectual History, ed. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 9.
55 David Hansen, “Discovering Cosmopolitanism as a Philosophy of Education for Our Era,” Queen’s Education Letter (Fall/Winter 2012): 4–6.
56 “Transtemporal” was taken from David Armitage, who discussed the term at a presentation at Queen’s University, “Horizons of History: Space, Time and the Future of the Past,” April 3, 2014. Armitage discusses the use of transtemporal in “What’s the Big Idea? Intellectual History and the Longue Durée,” History of European Ideas 38, no. 4 (December 2012): 493–507. He wrote: “I have appropriated the term transtemporal history on the model of transnational history to stress elements of linkage and comparison across time, much as transnational history deals with such connections across space…” (p. 498).
57 Among the histories, see J.R. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); Brian Titley, Indian Commissioners: Agents of the State and Indian Policy in Canada’s Prairie West (Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 2005); Brian Titley, “A Troubled Legacy: The Catholic Church and Indian Residential Schooling in Canada,” in The Colonial Experience in Education (Paedagogica Historica, Supplementary Series 1, 1995), ed. Antonio Novoa, Marc Depaepe, and Erwin V. Johanningmeier; Gillian Weiss, et al., Trying to Get it Back: Indigenous Women, Education and Culture (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2000); Jean Barman, Yvonne Hébert, and Don McCaskill, eds., Indian Education in Canada - Volume 1: The Legacy (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1986) and Volume 2: The Challenge (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1987); Cheryl Suzack, Shari M. Huhndorf, Jeanne Perreault, and Jean Barman, eds., Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011).
58 Ken Osborne, “Teaching History in Schools: A Canadian Debate” (paper presented at the Faculty of Education Colloquium, Queen’s University, January 29, 2002).
59 Marc Depaepe, “The Ten Commandments of Good Practices in History of Education Research,” Zeitschrift für päadagogische Historiographie 16, no. 1 (2010): 31–4.