At the intersection of anecdotal stories and great narratives: Reflections on the cooperation between educational historians and educational philosophers

Abstract

Partly based on our publications in the series of Smeyers and Depaepe, but also on our experiences and discussions within the underpinning Research Community, we present in this chapter some meta-reflections on the potentialities of the history of education as a scientific discipline. First, we focus on the cooperation of educational historians and educational philosophers in the Research Community. What did we learn from each other? One of the things we hoped to acquire from the dialogue with philosophy was more theoretical depth - an argument that is further developed on the basis of the concept “grammar of educationalisation”. However, the openness towards more theory in history should not exclude attention to the specific and unique in the always changing nature of the historically conditioned situation. On the contrary, as is shown in the final paragraph, the awareness of “presentism” in educational discourse is one of the lasting values of educational historiography.