“This issue of Encounters/recontres/Encuentros on Education reunites historians working in Departments of History and Sociology with historians and sociological historians working in Faculties of Education. History of Education brings with her particularities inherent to the subject matter and, when situated in faculties of education, the contextual power of teacher education programs. Historians of education in faculties of education, particularly in the USA and Canada, are finding it increasingly difficult to insert themselves in their faculties’ agenda.”
Rosa Bruno-Jofre with Daniel Tröhler, Introduction, The Historian’s Métier: A Critical Engagement With History of Education in Encounters in Theory and History of Education, Vol. 15, 2024, xiii.
And further on the same page:
“In the last decades, the technocratic ideal has prevailed over other ideals in most faculties of education (Bruno-Jofré, 2014a). As Nel Noddings (2007) has pointed out, educational aims are neglected; not enough attention is paid to the ideals guiding us in the construction of goals and objectives in the enactment of our pedagogical approaches. Gert Biesta (2014) has gone even further, calling our attention to a shift toward ‘the new language of learning’ in education – one that focuses on process and misses questions of content, relationship, and purpose – and to the current talk of ‘effective education’ (not necessarily good), without a discussion of what and for whom. Both philosophy of education and history of education are losing ground in most faculties.”
Is this not Dr Neville Buch confronting his alma mater, The University of Queensland, on what has been lost in the institution for 30 years?
On Thursday 4th July, at the Australian Historical Association, at the session on “Histories of Teaching and Teachers,” I will be presenting the paper, Rethinking School: Historical Forgetfulness and Educationalist Theory 1971–89. On the same day I will be chairing a session called, “Teaching and Doing History in a Digital Age.”
Here, I have been following the contemporary global theoretical thinking, from “Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, theorists of the ‘new’ history of political thought” (Bruno-Jofré, 2014b; 2024, xv), and “Bruno-Jofré, [who] recently wrote that for many, the linguistic and cultural turn ran their course, and that a look back at what has been valuable, in order to move ahead in a prospective approach…”, as well as “David Armitage (2012), ‘iterations of the same idea turn out to be distinct conception in need of disaggregation rather than assimilation into broader narrative over time or across space’ (p. 29).”
The paper is home truth for Queensland schools. Academic leadership in education had, not only forgot the theories of schooling in era of critical theory (e.g. Habermas 1991a-b, 1992, 1997, 2010; Giroux 1981, 1983, 1985, 1991; etc.), from frameworks of Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire, too many academic leaders do not know how they have got to the States of Affair in the present time. The explanation for the spiraling and networking presentism comes in models of Randall Collins, who stated clearly in his The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998):
“…The channel that carries the energies of intellectual creativity is more than ideas floating in an atmosphere of influence, even if we can pin down such influence to the presence of a certain text in the personal library of a certain thinker; the central channel is the personal contact of face-to-face encounters. I will demonstrate the paramount importance of two further kinds of ‘schools’ or ‘circles.’
One of these involves chains of personal relationships, of which the most important are relationships between teachers and their pupils; besides these vertical ties are horizontal links of personal contacts among contemporaries.
Finally, a ‘school’ can be literally an organization: a place where teaching takes place and authority and property are passed down through an explicit succession…(1998: 88)”
The paper’s educationalist historians, on the 4th of July, spell out the relationship between the criticism of schooling from Illich and Freire in the Collin’s intellectual history analysis and within the framework of critical theory. The Paper is founded in the 1970s and 1980s work of Queensland’s Dr Michael Macklin (1972, 1975, 1976, 1986).
The Integrity of Learning and the Political Silence
References
Armitage, David. (2012). The international turn in intellectual history. Plenary lecture at the 12th Conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies, NYU Stern School of Business, August 10.
Biesta, Gert. (2014a, Spring/Summer). Good education: What it is and why we need it. Queen’s Education Letter, 8-10.
Bruno-Jofré, Rosa. (2014a, Spring/Summer). Current issues in education: An inquisitive engagement (Words from the editor). Queen’s Education Letter, 1-3.
Bruno-Jofré, Rosa. (2014b). History of education in Canada: Historiographic “turns” and widening horizons. Paedagogica Historica, 50(6), 774-786. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0030923 0.2014.948009
Collins, Randall (1998). The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.
Freire, Paulo (1998a). Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Freire, Paulo. (1970a). Cultural Action and Conscientization, Harvard Education Review 40, (3), 452-477.
Freire, Paulo. (1970b). Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Seabury Press.
Freire, Paulo. (1973). Education for Critical Consciousness, New York: Seabury Press.
Freire, Paulo. (1972a). Conscientizing as a Way of Liberating, Washington, DC: LADOC II.
Freire, Paulo. (1972b). A letter to a theology student, Catholic Mind, 70, 1265.
Freire, Paulo. (1976). Education, the Practice of Freedom, London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative.
Freire, Paulo. (1975). Conscientization, Geneva: World Council of Churches.
Freire, Paulo. (1985). The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation, South Hadley: Bergin & Garvey.
Freire, Paulo. (1984a). Education, Liberation and the Church, Religious Education, 79 (4), 524, 544-545.
Freire, Paulo. (1984b). Know, Practice and teach the gospels, Religious Education, 79 (4), 547-548.
Freire, Paulo. (1984c). Conscientization, Cross Currents, 24 (1), 23.
Freire, Paulo. (1994). Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum.
Freire, Paulo. (1998b). Politics and Education, Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications.
Giroux, Henry (1981). Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Giroux, Henry (1983, co-edited with David E. Purpel). The Hidden Curriculum and Moral Education: Deception or Discovery? Berkeley: McCutchan.
Giroux, Henry and Stanley Aronowitz (1985). Education Under Siege: The Conservative, Liberal, and Radical Debate Over Schooling, Westport: Bergin and Garvey Press.
Giroux, Henry and Stanley Aronowitz (1991). Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Habermas, Jürgen (1991a). Knowledge and Human Interests, Polity Press.
Habermas, Jürgen (1991b). The Theory of Communicative Action : Lifeworld and Systems, a Critique of Functionalist Reason, Volume 2, Polity Press.
Habermas, Jürgen (1992). Communication and the Evolution of Society, Polity Press.
Habermas, Jürgen (1997). Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, Polity Press.
Habermas, Jürgen (2010). Legitimation Crisis, Polity Press.
Illich, Ivan (1971). Deschooling Society, New York Marion Boyars
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Illich, Ivan (1974). Energy and Equity. London: Calder & Boyars.
Illich, Ivan , et al (edited,1977). Disabling Professions, New York Marion Boyars
Macklin, Michael (1972). To Deschool Society, Cold Comfort, December 1972.
Macklin, Michael (1975). Those Misconceptions are not Illich’s, Educational Theory, 25 (3), 323-329
Macklin, Michael (1976). When Schools are Gone: A Projection of the Thought of Ivan Illich, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press.
Macklin, Michael (1986). Education in and for a Multicultural Australia, Australian Teachers Federation Conference, Sydney, October 1986.
Noddings, Nel (1984). Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Noddings, Nel (1996). Stories and Affect in Teacher Education, Cambridge Journal of Education, 26 (3).
Noddings, Nel (1999). Justice and Caring: The Search for Common Ground in Education, Teachers College Press, New York.
Noddings, Nel (2005). Identifying and Responding to needs in Teacher Education, Cambridge Journal of Education, 35 (2).
Noddings, Nel (2005). What does it mean to Educate the WHOLE child? Educational Leadership, 63 (1).
Noddings, Nel (2007, Spring/Summer). Intellectual habits of mind. Queen’s Education Letter, 1-3.
Noddings, Nel (2013). Education and Democracy in the 21st Century, Teachers’ College Press
Pocock, J. G. A. (1985). Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge University Press.
Skinner, Quentin (1978). The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume 1: The Age of Reformation, Cambridge University Press.
Skinner, Quentin (1978). The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume 2: The Renaissance, Cambridge University Press.
Tröhler, Daniel. (2006). The formation and function of histories of education in continental teacher education curricula. Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, 2. http://www2.uwstout.edu/content/jaaacs/vol2/trohler.htm
Tröhler, Daniel. (2011). Historiographische Herausforderungen der Bildungsgeschichte. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 1(1), 9-22.
Tröhler, Daniel. (2013). Pestalozzi and the educationalization of the world. New York, NY: Palgrave Pivot. [Published in Spanish: (2014). Pestalozzi y la educationalización del mundo. Barcelona, Spain: Octaedro.] http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781137346858
Tröhler, Daniel. (2013). Truffle pigs, research questions, and histories of education. In T. S.
Featured Image: Michael Macklin’s When Schools Are Gone
Neville Buch
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