Histories of Ideas and Ideas in Context

Abstract

History of education was initially and for a long time predominantly written as the history of ideas, developed for teacher education. The early scholars in this field were, as a rule, German theologians and/or philosophers interested in the origin and historical manifestations of eternal (educational) ideas. These ideas were characterized as describing the idea of (morally) the good, most often combined with the idea of the true and connected to the idea of the beautiful. Through the nineteenth century, these histories took different nationalist configurations, first of all in France, then also in England, and the United States, aiming to convince future teachers that the true heroes of these eternal ideas for the good, for the true, and occasionally for the beautiful in postclassical antiquity in fact shared their nationality. It was the consequences of the linguistic turn that challenged this idealism by contextualizing the early ideas of the heroes of education rather than recognizing in them the incarnation of eternal ideas. The research interest focused more and more on discourses or langues of education, styles of thought, and epistemologies and, with this, on questions of power as both restricting and enabling conditions of knowledge production. Ideas in context became a research program that is open to academic history and to philosophy and is thus capable of emancipating the genre from its traditionally assigned role as agent of dominant ideas and preferences and guiding it instead to its analytic potential.