Topic: historiography

Research question: how can the past, the present and the future be (re-)connected in the history of education

Objective: To formulate an alternative framework to think about and perform histories of education

Conceptual/theoretical framwork: theoretical works of Mollenhauer, Ankersmit, Foucault, Huizinga

European/international dimension: the works used in order to build up the theoretical framework come from different parts of Europe: Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. I do hope to show that including theories stemming from different 'countries' can lead to innovations within a particular educational discipline, e.c. the history of education.

First of all, a literature review will be conducted in order to outline the dominant approaches towards the interconnectedness of past, present and future within the history of the history of education. The results of this literature review will be contrasted by an in depth analysis of the way authors like Mollenhauer, Foucault, Huizinga and Ankersmit make use of the word ‘experience’, ‘ervaring’, ‘expérience’, ‘Erfahrung’. The focus on ‘experience’ is inspired by a theoretical article published in Paedagogica Historica by Jan Masschelein & Maarten Simons, namely: ‘Do historians (of education) need philosophy? The enlightening potential of a philosophical ethos’. All authors mentioned have reflected on why and how to write histories (of education). By bringing together their particular points of view I’d like to distil some elements that might lead the historian of education to new and refreshing ways of doing history of education.

Since the beginnings of the twentieth century scholars have reflected on the way histories of education had to be written and read. If at the turn of the nineteenth century these histories mainly had to serve as a collection of good practices, historians of education nowadays are much more focussed on issues of demythologization, educationalization, etc ... If there are of course a number of possible ways to deal with the educational past, what seems to be common to all of these approaches is the reservation towards the future. In contrast to the previous century, historians of education seem to have become afraid to reflect on and think positively about the manifold possible ways to interconnect the past, present and future. In this presentation I precisely would like to take up this challenge. To be sure, the out-dated way to conceive of the future as a place where one only would have to revive good practices retrieved from the past in order to do the right thing, will not be defended. Based on the works of among others Michel Foucault, Klaus Mollenhauer, Johan Huizinga and Frank Ankersmit I will sketch another way of how to reconnect the past, the present and the future of education. The main argument that will be followed is that up till now historians of education most of the time have stick to the educational side or the historical side of their discipline and that perhaps it might be a fruitful idea to turn away from both at the same time and to jump into the abyss that lies between the two. By falling in between and exploring that particular experience the historian of education might be able to come up with new and unforeseen ways of dealing with the past in order to highlight possible futures.