Since the end of the 20th century scholars repeatedly expressed their worries about the future of the discipline of history of education (See for instance Levin, 2000). Although also more nuanced voices have been raised, the dominant view since the 1980’s has been that the discipline was facing a timely death or needed to look out for escape routes in order to secure its survival (Campbell & Sherington, 2002). In times when neo-liberalism was and still is turning its back to the past in favour of a better future (in terms of efficiency and productivity) it was argued that “historians of education risk being seen as yesterday’s people in every sense of the word” (Lowe, 2002, p. 503). While the conferences, journals and research associations were flourishing, the existence of history of education courses and positions at academic level were at risk and made scholars speak about history of education in terms of ‘an endangered species’. As a consequence the place of history of education in academic curricula has been the subject of several panels, debates and standing working groups (SWG) on international conferences, such as the recent International Society for the History of Education “Mapping the discipline history of education” SWG that, among other things, focusses on “the structures of socialization and education of the new generation”. This paper wants to contribute to these ongoing debates on the usefulness and format of history of education courses (See also Depaepe, 1979; Lowe, 1983; Salimova & Johanningmeier, 1993; Simon, 1994; Depaepe, 2003; Aldrich, 2003; Finkelstein, 2013; Vinao, 2015) by mapping out existing history of education teaching practices and the pedagogical beliefs of the practitioners involved. Four main questions will be addressed in this paper: 1/do contemporary historians of education indeed consider their discipline to be under pressure as an academic subject and to what extent do they belief in a decline of the subject 2/what course contents do historians of education nowadays find important to include in their courses 3/what kind of didactical tools and processes do historians of education use when designing their courses and finally, 4/what do they hope to achieve by transferring their history of education narratives to a new generation.

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