Many Educational Pasts: Conservative Visions and Revisions of American Educational History

2012 ◽  
Vol 114 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Adam Laats
Keyword(s):  
Social Studies ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
First Century ◽  
Educational History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Outline ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Background Context ◽  
Recent Attention

Background/Context Recent attention to Texas's revision of its state social-studies curricula has focused on the Texas School Board's conservative vision of America's history. Texas is not alone. Conservative educational activists have achieved a great deal of success in recent years in revising the historical narrative prescribed for America's schoolchildren. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This article argues that in the past six decades conservative activists have offered not one but many visions of America's history. Educational history in particular has been the subject of energetic and conflicting attempts at revision. This article surveys the themes common among conservative educational histories from the 1950s until the first decade of the twenty-first century. Research Design The article first examines the broad historical outline used by most conservative educational activists. To flesh out that outline and move beyond overly simplistic generalizations, the article then looks at four specific conservative activists—Milton Friedman, Max Rafferty, Sam Blumenfeld, and Henry Morris—to examine their significant differences in close detail. Conclusions/Recommendations Conservatives have used these different visions of America's educational past to promote specific reform programs in their own times. This article suggests that anyone interested in understanding the contest for contemporary educational policy must understand the variety of contending conservative visions of the educational past.

scholarly journals Is history of economic thought a "serious" subject?

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Cristina Marcuzzo
Keyword(s):  
Research Methods ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Contextual Analysis ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
Textual Exegesis ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the nature of research methods in the history of economic thought. In reviewing the "techniques" which are involved in the discipline, four broader categories are identified: a) textual exegesis; b) "rational reconstructions"; c) "contextual analysis"; and d) "historical narrative". After examining these different styles of doing history of economic thought, the paper addresses the question of its appraisal, namely what is good history of economic thought. Moreover, it is argued that there is a distinction to be made between doing economics and doing history of economic thought. The latter requires the greatest possible respect for contexts and texts, both published and unpublished; the former entails constructing a theoretical framework that is in some respects freer, not bound by derivation, from the authors. Finally, the paper draws upon Econlit records to assess what has been done in the subject in the last two decades in order to frame some considerations on how the past may impinge on the future.

Can History Stand Alone? Drawbacks and Blind Spots of a “Disciplinary” Curriculum

2010 ◽  
Vol 112 (9) ◽  
pp. 2471-2495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Thornton ◽  
Keith C. Barton
Keyword(s):  
Social Studies ◽  
General Education ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Research Question ◽  
History Education ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Content Selection ◽  
The Subject

Background/Context Over the past quarter-century, many historians, politicians, and educators have argued for an increase in the amount of history taught in schools, for a clear separation of history and social studies, and for an emphasis on disciplinary structures and norms as the proper focus for the subject. Unfortunately, discussions of history education too often rest on the problematic belief that the academic discipline can provide direction for the nature of the subject in general education. Description of Prior Research Throughout much of the 20th century, U.S. history educators made common cause with other social educators to promote principled and critical understandings of society. Both groups stood in opposition to calls for more nationalist views of history education. In the mid-1980s, however, this situation began to change, as a coalition of historians, educational researchers, and political pressure groups promoted history as a subject distinct from and independent of the larger realm of the social studies. This new coalition has been unable to avoid conflicts over the selection of content, however, and approaches favored by nationalists often clash with the more critical and inclusive perspectives of historians. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study In this article, we trace the relationship between historians and other social educators during the 20th century and explore how the forces favoring a realignment of history and social studies coalesced in the mid-1980s. We argue that this coalition has led to an unproductive emphasis on history as a “separate subject” and a resulting lack of attention to the goals of history in general education. Research Design This analytic essay draws on curriculum theory, historical sources, and contemporary cognitive research to outline the changing relationships between historians and other social educators and to examine the limitations of a purportedly disciplinary curriculum. Conclusions/Recommendations The academic discipline of history cannot, by itself, provide guidance for content selection because educators face restrictions of time and coverage that are not relevant in the context of academic historical research. In addition, educators must concern themselves with developing students’ conceptual understanding, and this necessarily requires drawing on other social science disciplines. If students are to develop the insights that historians have most often promoted for the subject, historians must return to their place within the conversation of social studies education.

scholarly journals ФІЛОСОФІЯ ІСТОРІЇ В КОНТЕКСТІ ЛІНГВІСТИЧНОЇ (НАРАТИВНОЇ) ФІЛОСОФСЬКОЇ ТРАДИЦІЇ

2018 ◽  
pp. 5-12
Author(s):  
Н. І. Моісєєва ◽  
С. С. Романова
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Classical Philosophy

The authors consider the problem of the disciplinary status of linguistic (narrative) philosophy of history. The problem is examined in the context of analysis of its basic assumptions, which have been described in the works of A. Danto and F. R. Ankersmit. This philosophical tradition mainly developed in the first half of the twentieth century as a reaction to the impossibility of empirical verification of the scientific adequacy of the theoretical concepts of the regularities of historical development, which were established within the classic philosophy of history. Rejection of the gnosiological problematics lies on the basis of linguistic (narrative) philosophy of history. Also the notion of a fact is replaced by the notion of interpretation of a fact on the basis of narrative. The study of meanings and values of these narratives is based on language as the ontological Foundation of consciousness.According to A. Danto the scientific failure of the theory (concept) of the historical process lies in the impossibility of assessment by the researcher of the entire length of the process, especially of the stage of completion (the «end of history»). The observer does not know the final result of the whole process. Therefore, the observer can not estimate the value and meaning both of a process as a whole and its individual stages. Thus, the conclusion is that the history as a series of past events cannot be the subject of the philosophy of history. Only the interpretation of history in the philosophical studies and narrative representations can be the subject of the philosophy of history.According to F. G. Ankersmit «past» and «history» by themselves do not have narrative structure. The researcher also doesn’t have a set of rules of language translation of the past into the language of modernity. These rules would allow to compare the historical narrative with the «past».Thus, in the context of linguistic tradition the «philosophy of history» transforms into the «theory of historical narrative». This theory only logically analyzes the existing historiographical narrative. In fact, this position does not replace the basic methodological approach of classical philosophy of history to the study of reality (a theory based on the uncertainty of the outcome of the process). Only the subject of study is changed: the historical process is replaced by a historical narrative (not the source of the study of history but its interpretation).This approach can be used for the formation of historical consciousness, but it is unsuitable for real historical research. At the same time in the frames of classical philosophy of history a series of methodologies have been recently created. These methodologies allow to use empirical research methods and build it on the basis of concepts. These concepts find a complete confirmation with the help of an independent group of historical sources. So, today, as a result of repeated empirical evidence the concepts of cliometrics, revolutionary crises, and historical development as a result of adaptation of society to changing conditions of existence are finally created. These concepts were developed on the basis of the methodology of historical materialism. At the same time a linguistic (narrative) philosophical tradition only explains the basic foundation of own methodology and criticizes the methods of the opponents. Predictive capability of the methodology of narrative philosophy of history doesn’t enable to adequately use it in a real historical research, although this methodology has been successfully used for the formation of a historical consciousness, including professional surrounding. Therefore, at the present stage of development of the philosophy of history, linguistic tradition as the methodology of the research is much less promising than the methods developed on the basis of classical historical materialism.

The Dewey School as Triumph, Tragedy, and Misunderstood: Exploring the Myths and Historiography of the University of Chicago Laboratory School

2017 ◽  
Vol 119 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Thomas Fallace ◽  
Victoria Fantozzi
Keyword(s):  
Research Question ◽  
The Other ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
Laboratory School ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Background Context ◽  
Objective Research

Background/Context Over the last century, perhaps no school in American history has been studied more than John Dewey's Laboratory School at the University of Chicago (1896–1904). Scholars have published dozens of articles, books, essays, and assessments of a school that existed for only seven and a half years. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This article reviews the extensive firsthand accounts and historiography of the famed school. In the first section, the authors trace the published accounts of those who experienced the Dewey School firsthand between 1895 and 1904. In the second section, the authors review accounts of the school by contemporaries, reformers, and historians between 1904 and 2014, focusing on three historiographical areas: the events surrounding the closing of the school, the rationale underlying its curriculum, and the impact of the experiment on U.S. schools. In the third section, the authors argue that most accounts of the Dewey School convey one of three historiographical myths: the Dewey School as misunderstood; the Dewey School as triumph, and/or the Dewey School as tragedy. Research Design A historiographical essay is a narrative and analytical account of what has been written on a particular historical topic. Following this methodology, the authors are less concerned with establishing what happened at the Dewey School, than they were with how the school was analyzed and interpreted by contemporaries and historians over the past 120 years. Conclusions/Recommendations The authors analyze each myth to conclude that Dewey only subscribed to the myth of the Dewey School as misunderstood, while the other two were historiographical constructions created by Dewey's contemporaries and historians.

scholarly journals Debating the Greek 1940s: histories and memories of a conflicting past since the end of the Second World War

HISTOREIN ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
Manos Avgeridis
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
First Century ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Politics Of History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Core Issue ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Second World

The article examines aspects of the long history of a major field of public debate in the second half of the twentieth century, that of the Greek 1940s, taking as its starting point the recent “history war” in Greece. It attempts to trace histories and memories from the immediate postwar years and to place them within a broader process: the historisation of the Second World War in Europe. In that context, the article begins by exploring one part of the initial efforts to form a European history of the resistance, from the perspective of the Greek case. Then, the focus is transferred to Greece, and to the mapping of a constellation of different memory and history communities, and the practices of history of the same period: the activities of veteran partisans and eye-witnesses with regard to their contribution to the formation of the first narratives on the war is a core issue at this level. Last, by following the developments in the academy and the politics of history during the Metapolitefsi, the focus returns to the current discussion, attempting a first approach to the subject through the strings that connect it with the past and, at the same time, as a debate of the twenty-first century. 

scholarly journals ISLAM AND THE WEST

1997 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-98
Author(s):  
Mohammed Abdou Yamani
Keyword(s):  
Children's Television ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Mass Communications ◽  
Television Programs ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Printed Word ◽  
Made In

On the verge of the twenty-first century, the world witnesses anunprecedented instability. Wars and culture conflicts widen the gapbetween the various civilizations and sow the seeds of hatred betweenindividuals. Islam, with its universal precepts of peace and respect for thedignity of humanity, was and still is the most misunderstood religion.When represented in the West, it is always associated with negativeimages that repel Westerners from seeing what Islam really is. Hence thegreat necessity for a peaceful and enlightened dialogue between theworld of Islam and the West.A great deal has been said and written on the subject of Islam andthe West and many conferences have been convened, yet no discernibleprogress has been made in bringing a better understanding or dampeningthe assault on Islam and the Muslims in the western media. PrinceCharles noted in his lecture at Oxford:The depressing fact is that, despite the advances in technologyand mass communications of the second half of the twentiethcentury, despite mass travel, the intermingling of races, the evergrowingreduction- or so we believe- of the mysteries of ourworld, misunderstandings between Islam and the West continue.Indeed, they may be growing.The misrepresentation of Islam, which was limited in the past tothe printed word, has now mushroomed to all forms of mass communication.The entertainment industry, news telecasts, radio shows, themovie industry, children’s television programs, and even commercialson billboards all have become vehicles for propagating the misrepresentationof Islam in the West. Literary fiction and nonfiction remainamong the most insidious vehicles for permanently damaging theimage and concept of Islam in the minds of non-Muslim readers ...

scholarly journals Taking Action in Teacher Education: Social Studies as a Means of Cultivating Engaged Citizenship

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-85
Author(s):  
Theodore Michael Christou
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Social Studies ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Action Projects ◽  
Meaningful Experiences ◽  
A Site ◽  
Taking Action

Social Studies was introduced into the Ontario curriculum in 1937, integrating history and geography, but also various matters pertaining to law, government, and civics, as a means of focusing students’ attention on the world around them thoughtfully and critically. Informed by the past, students were directed to gaze upon the future and to take action within their communities. Civic engagement and Social Studies were very closely linked. This essay argues that Social Studies education has a particular role to play in teacher education, as a medium of cultivating meaningful experiences relating to contemporary life and as a means of exploring the disciplinary roots of the subject. Teacher education is explored as a site for "take action" projects, which relate citizenship, historical thinking, and social action.

Surviving The Jungle Book: Trans-temporal Ventriloquism in Ian Iqbal Rashid's Surviving Sabu

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 532-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Cristina Mendes
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Temporal Ventriloquism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Film Maker ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Political Intervention

The process of screen adaptation is an act of ventriloquism insofar as it gives voice to contemporary anxieties and desires through its trans-temporal use of a source text. Screen adaptations that propose to negotiate meanings about the past, particularly a conflicted past, are acts of ‘trans-temporal ventriloquism’: they adapt and reinscribe pre-existing source texts to animate contemporary concerns and anxieties. I focus on the acts of trans-temporal ventriloquism in Ian Iqbal Rashid's Surviving Sabu (1998), a postcolonial, turn-of-the-twenty-first century short film that adapts Zoltan and Alexander Korda's film The Jungle Book (1942), itself an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's collection of short stories by the same name. Surviving Sabu is about the survival and appropriation of orientalist films as a means of self-expression in a postcolonial present. Inherent in this is the idea of cinema as a potentially redemptive force that can help to balance global power inequalities. Surviving Sabu's return to The Jungle Book becomes a means both of tracing the genealogy of specific orientalist discourses and for ventriloquising contemporary concerns. This article demonstrates how trans-temporal ventriloquism becomes a strategy of political intervention that enables the film-maker to take ownership over existing media and narratives. My argument examines Surviving Sabu as an exemplar of cultural studies of the 1980s and 1990s: a postcolonial remediation built on fantasy and desire, used as a strategy of writing within rather than back to empire.

Music and Memory: The Tlatelolco Refrain

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Kun
Keyword(s):  
State Violence ◽  
First Century ◽  
Student Movements ◽  
Octavio Paz ◽  
Mexican History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Rock Bands ◽  
To Come ◽  
Musical Memory ◽  
A Current

Ever since the 1968 student movements and the events surrounding the Tlatelolco massacre, Mexico City rock bands have openly engaged with the intersection of music and memory. Their songs offer audiences a medium through which to come to terms with the events of the past as a means of praising a broken world, to borrow the poet Adam Zagajewski’s phrase. Contemporary songs such as Saúl Hernández’s “Fuerte” are a twenty-first-century voicing of the ceaseless revolutionary spirit that John Gibler has called “Mexico unconquered,” a current of rebellion and social hunger for justice that runs in the veins of Mexican history. They are the latest additions to what we might think about as “the Mexico unconquered songbook”: musical critiques of impunity and state violence that are rooted in the weaponry of memory, refusing to focus solely on the present and instead making connections with the political past. What Octavio Paz described as a “swash of blood” that swept across “the international subculture of the young” during the events in Tlatelolco Plaza on October 2, 1968, now becomes a refrain of musical memory and political consciousness that extends across eras and generations. That famous phrase of Paz’s is a reminder that these most recent Mexican musical interventions, these most recent formations of a Mexican subculture of the young, maintain a historically tested relationship to blood, death, loss, and violence.

Pakistan’s Development: Successes, Failures, and Future Tasks (Presidential Remarks)

1997 ◽  
Vol 36 (4I) ◽  
pp. 321-331
Author(s):  
Sarfraz Khan Qureshi
Keyword(s):  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
General Meeting ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Golden Jubilee ◽  
Freedom Movement ◽  
Past Half ◽  
Do So

It is an honour for me as President of the Pakistan Society of Development Economists to welcome you to the 13th Annual General Meeting and Conference of the Society. I consider it a great privilege to do so as this Meeting coincides with the Golden Jubilee celebrations of the state of Pakistan, a state which emerged on the map of the postwar world as a result of the Muslim freedom movement in the Indian Subcontinent. Fifty years to the date, we have been jubilant about it, and both as citizens of Pakistan and professionals in the social sciences we have also been thoughtful about it. We are trying to see what development has meant in Pakistan in the past half century. As there are so many dimensions that the subject has now come to have since its rather simplistic beginnings, we thought the Golden Jubilee of Pakistan to be an appropriate occasion for such stock-taking.

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