The Professional Significance of History of Education
1967; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/367560
ISSN1748-5959
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Education Studies Worldwide
ResumoHISTORY OF ANY SORT connotes, me, searching, exploration, and increasingly complex designs. I think of what Henry James spoke of as a fineness of insight and perception, of what he described in Portrait of a Lady as expanded consciousness, the pursuit of a larger, more plentiful life. Isabel Archer in that novel is a kind of exemplary figure-one who carried within herself a great fund of lifewhose deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between her own soul and the agitations of the world. For this reason she was fond of seeing great crowds and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures-a class of efforts to which she had often committed the conscious solecism of forgiving them much bad painting the sake of the subject....' We, too, dealing with the history of education at a moment like this, have much to forgive; and for the sake of the subject, we obviously need to confront the difficult question of the discipline's significance in teacher education. Not very long ago, such questions were either set aside or resolved by administrative fiat. Educational history tended to be validated by the contributions it made to the public image of the profession. The men who wrote it (as Bernard Bailyn and others have been reminding us) conceived the schools of the past to be but preparations the common school; and the emergence of that common school was seen to represent one of history's culminations-the fulfillment of a promise made (perhaps) at the beginning of time.
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