History and education
From Studyplace
Education and the Uses of the Past
Why should people bother with the history of education? What will the public learn from it and how? Does it have a role in the development of professional educators? If so what? What are the current developments in the history of education that have significance for the public and the profession? These are the questions we need to address in presenting the field in ways that demonstrate its significance, explain its substance, and advance its development.
This article sketches out what matters need serious attention and why they need it. It has three parts. The first speaks to the public at large about the value of historical perspective in education. Does the history of education have a purpose that reaches beyond the professional schools of education? Does it have something of significance to say to parents concerned with the education of their children? Will historical studies education contribute to the sound understanding of educational policy issues? Should consideration of educational experience inform general historical interpretation and narrative? What value does the subject have for the enterprise of scholarship?
History of modern pedagogy
Pedagogy, Wilhelm Dilthey suggested, is the blossom and goal of all philosophy, the formative theory of man. Our humanness may have timeless elements in it, but that humanness appears only through a history for those timeless elements can manifest themselves only through the concrete influence of historical circumstances. Thus our timeless elements are beyond human ken, for we live our lives as historical beings, always finding ourselves in a particular time and place, the circumstances of which condition what we are and how we can know ourselves.
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