Do Historians of Education Matter? Some Troubling Answers from Four Recent Documentary Films on School Reform

• Anthony Di Mascio ^[1]
  1. [1] School of Education at Bishop’s Universitye, Quebec, Canada
• Localización: History of education researcher, ISSN 1740-2433, Nº. 95, 2015, págs. 5-12
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Using documentary films on school reform as a means by which to assess public knowledge about research on the history of mass schooling, this paper finds that historians of education since the 1990s have failed to disseminate their findings beyond the academy. Moreover, specialists in the History of Education are seldom called upon for their specialized knowledge in the field. The paper concludes by suggesting that new research on the history of mass schooling ought to be encouraged that, first, challenges the revisionist history, which remains the established history in the public sphere, and that, second, shifts the historiography on schooling’s origins back to an earlier period before the Industrial Revolution. Finally, the paper suggests that researchers in the History of Education need to contest the labeling of their field as a sub-field of either history or education, and should instead embrace it as a specialized field in order to better position their research on educational history at the forefront of public knowledge.