In this essay, I ask what form of historical consciousness schools should nurture in students. The two criteria I set up in this regard are plausibility--is the account of history plausible--and practicality--does the form of historical consciousness help young people contribute to the betterment of society. The level of my analysis is that of…

Did John Dewey's "new philosophy of education" really try to dissolve the whole block of tradition or is his debt namely to educational core-concepts of neo-humanism deeper than he was prepared to acknowledge? After some general remarks on the process of reception as productive re-adaptation and its implication for historiography I will deal with…

How should history of education be written? To put the question is far more easier than to provide a concrete answer. In contemporary research, there continue to be pedagogistic complaints about finding answers to present-day educational problems via history. In our view, such an ahistorical utilitarianism as well as the legitimizing and/or…

In what follows I explore the question of fictionality in history writing. First, I venture into the unfamiliar genre of "ego-histoire" and make my own professional training in the tenets of positivist or realist historiography an object of theoretical reflection and critical analysis. Then as a way of dealing with the literary dimension of…

The following contribution expands the current discussion on the status and function of the history of education at the methodological, or epistemological, level by introducing the perspective of a history of educational knowledge. This opens up a theoretical option for educational historiography that avoids the identification of history of…

Argues for the importance of Emmanuel Levinas's work for re-opening educational questions. Addresses the problem of remembrance as a question of and for history, as a force of inhabitation, as an inheritance we are obligated to live within, that intertwines with our sense of limits and possibilities, hopes and fears, identities and distinctions.…

This paper examines the consequences for agency that Foucault's historiographical approach constructs. The analysis begins by explaining the difference between "legislative history" and "exemplary history," drawing parallels to similar theoretical distinctions offered in the works of Max Weber, J.L. Austin, and Zygmunt Bauman. The analysis…

History of education emerges during the course of the nineteenth century in Germany and is marked by four features. It is educational, and not scientific in nature, because it was written primarily for teacher education and training; it is national, or even nationalistic; it is oriented almost exclusively towards German philosophy; and it is…