Age-Period-Era: Temporal visions and periodisation constructions in the works of Ukrainian researchers of educational history (mid 19th – 80s of the 20th century

Abstract

The study relevance is stipulated by the lack of research in Ukrainian and foreign historiographical science on the temporal visions and periodisation constructions of Ukrainian scholars who, from the 40s of the 19th century to the 80s of the 20th century, studied various aspects of the educational history, such as educational policy, schooling system, educational movements, pedagogical ideas, educational figures’ biographies, etc. The article aims were to present the study results of domestic scholars’ views on the phenomenon of historical time and to highlight the characteristic features of temporal constructions introduced into the study of educational history. In the course of the study, the author used general scientific methods (abstraction, analysis and synthesis, induction, deduction, classification, generalisation), interdisciplinary methods (contextual and interpretative, lexical and semantic, logical and semantic, critical, structural and systemic) and special historical methods (historical and genetic, historical and comparative, historical and systemic, periodisation, retrospective), which made it possible to comprehensively, multidimensionally and representatively clarify the domestic researchers’ views on the phenomenon of historical time and to identify the key approaches to the periodisation construction of the past in works on educational history. The study revealed the following characteristic manifestations of temporal constructions introduced by researchers into works on the educational history from the mid 19th to the end of the 20th century: 1) the lack of clarity in the use of temporal nominations, which manifested itself not only in the concepts identification of “period”, “era”, “stage”, but also in the unconstructive systematisation of these concepts; 2) linking the time periods of school development and pedagogical thought to political, economic and, to a lesser extent, cultural and educational events; 3) the initial dominance of conventional periodisation approaches (for example, the history division into centuries or the reigns of successive monarchs), after which the theoretical and conceptual principle based on the formation theory was established; 4) the belief of most scholars that time intervals – periods, stages and epochs – actually existed in the past, and therefore the historian of education can identify them in the research course and show them in a scientific narrative