History and Historiography: Approaches to Historical Research in Education

Abstract

Since the emergence of history of education around 1800 in Germany, approaches to writing history of education have been developed, altered, and diversified and have eventually become complex, not seldomly challenging or competing (with) each other. Initially, history of education began by reducing the complexity of the issue by focusing on idea(l)s in order to serve its intended target group, future teachers. It only hesitantly drew attention to epistemological developments in historical scholarship outside of education, which then resulted in an intellectual richness and diversity of approaches that are performed at the expense of a rather easily teachable, consistent, and more or less linear overall account of the past. Accordingly, the target groups of educational historiographies are no longer necessarily teachers but are that part of the scientific community in different academic disciplines that tries to make sense of the past, be it with or without ambitions with regard to what is called the “history of the present,” the self-illuminating power of historiography. The present chapter, an introduction to the part “Foundations and Directions,” aims at providing a historic overview of milestones in educational historiography – the ways of writing history in education – making no pretense at completeness and making no claim to historiographical or methodological accuracy. It does not represent the history of historiography but is instead a preliminary and inevitably incomplete effort to identify and describe some of the major historiographical approaches, without itself fulfilling the rigorous standards of historical contextualization: It is a more or less chronological spotlighting that aims to suggest a historiographical development in four phases.