ABSTRACT
In a widely noted paper published in 1999, Jurgen Herbst, a distinguished and experienced international historian of education, and a former president of the History of Education Society in the US and also the International Standing Conference for the History of Education, delivered a stinging critique of contemporary trends in the field. According to Herbst, the theoretical and methodological concerns of the history of education, so fresh a generation earlier, had now become stale and repetitive. In the 1960s, he suggested, the ‘revisionist’ approach to the history of education, which he associated with the American historians Bernard Bailyn and Lawrence Cremin, had revitalized interest and created new agendas. The educational histories of the 1960s pursued fresh themes, but ‘did not feel bound by any orthodoxy of ideology, subject, or historical methodology’ (Herbst 1999, p. 738). They could be conservatives, liberals or radicals; they could employ a wide range of methodologies from traditional historical narratives, to analytical social science, to quantitative methodologies, to theoretical discussions. They were also able to study education in its widest sense and in many different settings, not only as it has been experienced in school and during childhood and youth, but throughout life and society. By contrast, he complained, at the turn of the twenty-first century the history of education was stale and repetitive, with little ‘genuine fresh input’. Indeed, he emphasized, ‘Most writings tend to fill gaps in the record or bring to our attention groups or issues that have been overlooked in the past’ (ibid., p. 739). Herbst continued:
We endlessly repeat old mantras … class, race, and gender being the one [sic] most often heard – but we are no longer sure just where and how we are to apply them. They seem like empty formulae waiting to be filled with new subject matter. The best we seem able to do is, following the currently fashionable trend of identity politics, perfunctorily to reach for another topic, another subject, and hope that it will fit the pre-set mold.
(Herbst 1999, p. 739)