ABSTRACT
This chapter is organized into three sections. The first section summarizes some debates around periodization, commenting on their similarities and differences. The second section explicates social sciences as illustrative and constitutive of modern education. The third section suggests an alternative to extant periodization arguments by turning from scientism to effective history. As a strategy of argumentation in this chapter, author construct a case in which modernity is regarded as a discrete segment of history, bounded on both sides, discontinuous from both the Enlightenment and postmodernity. The chapter summarizes several robust and representative stances on periodization. Various arguments from modernists and postmodernists, social theorists and literary scholars illustrate a range of historiographical bases on which judgments of periodization have been made with respect to the Enlightenment, modernity, and postmodernity. The social sciences have their traditional foundations in modernity. There is recent educational scholarship that expands social-science epistemologies beyond the commitments of modernism.
