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At the Intersection of Anecdotal Stories and Great Narratives: Reflections on the Cooperation Between Educational Historians and Educational Philosophers

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Past, Present, and Future Possibilities for Philosophy and History of Education

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.

The quantitative and anti-anthropocentric orientation of the natural sciences from Galileo on forced an unpleasant dilemma on the humane sciences: either assume a lax scientific system in order to attain noteworthy results, or assume a meticulous, scientific one to achieve results of scant significance.

(Carlo Ginzburg, 1992, p. 124)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Kulak Kortrijk Campus, Kortrijk, Belgium

    Marc Depaepe

  2. Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Frank Simon

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  1. Marc Depaepe
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  2. Frank Simon
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Correspondence to Marc Depaepe .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Education & Society, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Stefan Ramaekers

  2. Centre for Education and Policy Analysis, Department of Education Studies, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, United Kingdom

    Naomi Hodgson

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Depaepe, M., Simon, F. (2018). At the Intersection of Anecdotal Stories and Great Narratives: Reflections on the Cooperation Between Educational Historians and Educational Philosophers. In: Ramaekers, S., Hodgson, N. (eds) Past, Present, and Future Possibilities for Philosophy and History of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94253-7_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94253-7_2

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