Abstract
The statement from this article that historical reflection remains essential in educational research will not be demonstrated by one or another theoretical reasoning, but by four illustrations taken from my 44-year-old research career in the history of education. Each one of these illustrations represents an important research line of my career. The first deals with the history of primary education (mainly in Belgium, but also elsewhere). It concentrates on the relationship between continuity and change within the educational practices, in general, and on the irony and immunisation of educational innovations, in particular. The second deals with the history of educational sciences from the point of view of the history of science. The more concrete topic here is the importance of demythologising the rhetoric of the well-known ideals and idols of educational reforms. The third deals with colonial and post-colonial history of education, by zooming in on the educational realisations and its effects in the former Belgian Congo. Finally, the fourth deals with our position within the theoretical, methodological and historiographical debates of the discipline. More specifically, it wants to show the sublime relevance of the so-called irrelevant, not only as far as the research in the history of education is concerned, but also as far as its place as a teaching subject in the curriculum is concerned.
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Notes
- 1.
9 November 2018, KU Leuven, Kortrijk, Campus Kulak. A preliminary version of this was presented as a keynote lecture at the Conference “History of Education as a Scientific Pedagogical Discipline and a Teaching Subject—Past, Present and Perspectives”, held at the University of Montenegro, Faculty of Philosophy, Department of Pedagogy, in Nikšić, on 25 and 26 June 2019.
- 2.
- 3.
M. De Vroede (1979) did also use the term, but this was really exceptional and in German. For him the field was “history”, and thus “history of education”.
- 4.
In this essay, I have included as few literature references as possible, in order to limit the number of footnotes. More information about our work can be found in the detailed bibliography on our personal website.
- 5.
Since, as will be discussed later, a lot of the research I engaged in was conducted as part of a team, I prefer to use the plural in those cases.
- 6.
For example, the project of Denise ANGOTAKO, Etude historique du décrochage et de la réinsertion scolaire des filles en République Démocratique du Congo de 1960 à 2010.
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Depaepe, M. (2021). Lost in Enthusiasm? An Elementary Qualitative Analysis of 44 Years of Research in Order to Show Why Even Today Educational Historiography is Not an Unnecessary Luxury. In: Smeyers, P., Depaepe, M. (eds) Production, Presentation, and Acceleration of Educational Research: Could Less be More?. Educational Research, vol 11. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3017-0_8
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