Cultural History and Education

Critical Essays on Knowledge and Schooling

Thomas Popkewitz, Barry M. Franklin, Miguel Pereyra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• eBook ISBN: 9781136792472
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Cultural History and Education brings together an outstanding group of the leading scholars in the study of the cultural history of education. These scholars, whose work represents a variety of national contexts from throughout Europe, Latin America, and North America, contribute to a growing body of work that seeks to re-think historical studies i

part 1
History, the Problem of Knowledge, and the New Cultural History
of Schooling:
An Introduction

1
History, the Problem of Knowledge,
and the New Cultural History of Schooling¹

Thomas S. Popkewitz, Miguel A. Pereyra,
and Barry M. Franklin

History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it.

—Pierre Nora, 1984

"What is knowledge" in a preliminary way is the social meaning of human-made symbols, such as words and figures, in its capacity as means of orientations. In contrast to most nonhuman creatures, humans have no inborn or instinctive means of orientation. When growing up, humans have to acquire through learning sets of social symbols with their meaning and thus parts of a social fund of knowledge from their elders. Access to wider knowledge, to better and more comprehensive means of orientation increases the power potential of human groups.

—Norbert Elias, 1984

History becomes "effective" to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself. "Effective" history deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it does not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending. It will uproot its traditional foundations and relentlessly disrupt its pretended continuity. This is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.

—Michel Foucault, 1977

Have we wrestled with the problem of the changes in the mediations of language, analysis, image and voice in the world around us and introduced problematics derived from that intellectual effort into our investigation of the past? ... At this time the discipline of history needs new cognitive maps, new strategies of analysis, and new thought experiments.

—Mark Porter, 1997

This book emerges out of a long-term pursuit to understand the present of schooling as historical practices in producing ways to think, act, feel, and "see." While it is easy and almost clichéd to say that the past is in the present and that we need a historical understanding of schooling, the placement of our "self" in time and space is a difficult and profound task. History is not the movement toward some form of reliable representation. Rather, historical thought is part of the present. It is conveyed in the very structures of representation that provide the narratives that construct memories of the present. As Huyssen (1995:3) argues, "The past is not simply there in memory but it must be articulated to become memory. Memory is recherché rather than recuperation."

History, in the sense that we use it in this chapter, is an understanding of the present and of collective memory as the weaving together of multiple historical configurations that establishes connections that make for the common sense. A history of the present thus makes possible "the suspension of history itself"; that is, it makes visible what is assumed through the narratives that join time, space, and the individual (Tessitore 1995: 33). For us, an understanding of the past in the present is an ironic undertaking to suspend history itself.

A cultural history as a history of the present considers reason as a field of cultural practices that orders the ways that problems are defined, and possibilities and innovation sought. But this concern with knowledge and reason, what is sometimes narrowly called "the linguistic turn" in the social and historical sciences, is not only a concern with text and discourse but with the relation of knowledge and the social. Its methodological approaches aim at dissolving the boundaries between what has previously been viewed as distinct—discourse and reality, text and the world—divisions that are residues of modernity. Thus, while we use the term "cultural history," our interest is in a history of the present that dissolves the textual, real, cultural/social distinctions.²

The history of the present, as Walter Benjamin (1955/1985) suggests, is where each generation encounters the past in a new way through a critical encounter in which the fragments of the past meet the present. This approach to historical studies is a counter to what Benjamin calls an empty history: the picturing of a universal, boundless human progress associated with ideas of an infinite perfectibility, an additive viewpoint whose illusions are of a seemingly continuous movement from the past to the present, and whose methods have no theoretical armature. To write history is to rethink the possibility of history as a reliable representation of the past and to engage in a critical conversation where previously, Benjamin argues, there was only a present emptied of history. The past is not the point that culminates in the present from which people "learn" about their domestication and that provides a temporal index for their future. Benjamin argues, as do we, that history is the critical engagement of the present, by making its production of collective memories available for scrutiny and revision.

This history of the present that we call "cultural history" also stands against an old and unfruitful tendency in the U.S. academy. That tendency rejected any idea that history is related to the situation of contemporary life. The argument was that if history is of the present time, then history does not exist. On the contrary, a self-understanding of the present, we believe, is a historical orientation that challenges the making of "the past into an aesthetic refuge for the pressing problems of the present" (Rüsen 1993: 182).³

This task of writing cultural histories is made easier by a wide range of English-language literature that has emerged in multiple disciplines over the past few decades (see, e.g., Bonnell and Hunt 1999; McDonald 1996; Jenkins 1997; Cooper and Stoler 1997; Schram and Neisser 1997; Neubauer 1999; Bentley 1999; and Wilson 1999). Cultural history is made possible through the important translations of the pioneering work of Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias, although neither used the term "cultural history" in his writing. Both thinkers, in distinct yet at times overlapping ways (see Smith 1999), focus on how systems of knowledge organize our being in the world through the construction of rules of reason, the ordering of the objects of reflection and the principles for action and participation. Traditions of the German conceptual historians have also been brought into the U.S. context to help shape some of these thoughts about the change of concepts over time and the social conditions that relate to those changes (see, e.g., Koselleck 1985; Hampsher-Monk, Tilmans, and van Vree 1998). Thus, a major task of this book is to examine a broad band of theoretical strategies and methodologies that move across the educational research of Europe, Latin America, and North America to form what we call a "cultural history."

But while our initial interest is to explore a field of scholarship that is generally unacknowledged in U.S. educational history,⁴ the very epistemological and methodological frameworks of a cultural history that we speak about intersect with the intellectual trajectories associated with postmodernism in the United States (see, e.g., Rosenau 1992; Popkewitz 1997; Porter 1997, Bentley 1999). This book enables a consideration of postmodernism within the broader arena of the active reshaping of the humanities, the social sciences, and particularly the field of scientific history that has been taking place for at least the last three decades in both the English and non-English-speaking worlds. In this context, educational critics of postmodernism in the United States (and Spanish followers of the trends in American research) have too narrowly conceived the resulting scholarship by misrecognizing the historical and global connections and networks through which contemporary researchers of different political ideologies work.⁵ As the essays of this book suggest, what is called "postmodern" scholarship in the United States draws from a broad international context of scholarship, and is much more than the fruits of French scholarship brought to American shores.

This chapter initially considers all strands of current historical work as his-toricist, a general outlook of modernity that is concerned with understanding the past through dimensions of temporality. We then proceed to differentiate between various approaches to historicism. We first discuss social and intellectual history, focusing on the approach to the writing of history that is subservient to a philosophical structure of an a priori and (ironically) ahistorical subject that shapes and fashions the meanings and images of historical narratives. The following section draws attention to cultural history, which makes knowledge a central concern of inquiry. We again differentiate between social and intellectual history and cultural history by revisiting the Spencerian question that has dominated curriculum history ("What knowledge is of most worth?"). Our purpose in this discussion is not to summarize the individual contributions to this book but to engage the specific historical arguments made by the authors in a broader context of rethinking educational research.

Changing the Subject: Historicism, History, and Knowledge

We focus on how the general attitude of historicism is made concrete through social and intellectual histories that focus on social regulation and social control. This historicism, which we relate to "the hidden curriculum" tradition in U.S. research, has an ironic quality. It takes for granted the knowledge of the school and thus, we argue, inscribes an ahistorical subject through which the narratives of the past are structured in the present. That structure of historical narratives, even when seeking critique, embodies salvation stories that denude it of a critical stance.

We Are All Historicists, Or Are We?

This first section begins our journey to think broadly about a contested idea in historical studies, that of historicism.⁶ We can think of historicism as a product of the modern imagination that assumes that history will always be made new and in need of rewriting in each generation. Ancient and medieval cosmologies conceived a closed universe in which nothing new or unfamiliar was allowed to become real. But modern historicism reconfigured reality through a change in the concept of time that enabled discussions of difference and continual change.

The modern concept of reality is related to the rise of historicism, because it depends upon a changed notion of temporality opposed to that of the ancient and medieval world. The modern concept of time implies that events ... take place not only in history but through history, and temporality has become a component part of reality.... [As such,] historicism, a product of modern imagination, assumes that history will always be made. As a result, the history of historicism is marked by perpetual claims to newness. (Thomas 1991: 32)⁷

We can state here, early in our discussion, that all modern historical studies are historicist through the interest in temporality. Kracauer (1993a; 1993b), for example, insightfully argued in the first decades of the twentieth century that photography and historicism could be understood as having a certain parallelism (see Frisby 1986). For Kracauer, historicism was the photography of time.

Oil the whole, the advocates of historicist thinking believe that they can explain any phenomenon purely in terms of its genesis. That is, they believe at the very least that they can grasp historical reality by reconstructing the series of events in their temporal succession without any gaps. Photography presents a spatial continuum; historicism, the complete mirroring of a temporal sequence, simultaneously contains the meaning of all that occurred within that time. (Kracauer 1993a: 424-25)

This conception of temporality saturates the "new histories" of the first third of the twentieth century and those of the 1960s and 1970s (from Lam-prechtian cultural history, adopted by the American progressive historians to the French historical school of the Annales and the different Marxist and Annaliste-oriented social histories). The focus on temporality is also embodied in the '"new' new histories" that emerge with postmodern thought.

further, historicism, with its various trajectories, embodies the Enlightenment's commitment to reason in the search for progress. Knowledge, it is believed, is how we have contact with the world, the means by which we assume the security and stability of our place in it, as well as the guarantor in the pursuit of our commitments toward social betterment. This commitment is, at one level, one of the general legitimating "truths" of modernity and modern social and historical studies, including the cultural studies discussed in this book. But to talk about a legitimating truth of the Enlightenment, we will continually have to differentiate between the different trajectories taken in working through this modern co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part 1 History, the Problem of Knowledge, and the New Cultural History of Schooling: An Introduction
• Part 2 Rethinking the Discipline of History of Education
• Part 3 Constructing a Cultural History
• Part 4 Schooling as Fields of Cultural Practice
• Notes on Contributors
• Name Index
• Subject Index