Beyond the Debate over Revisionism: Three Educational Pasts Writ Large

Abstract

A YEAR AGO, at this occasion, Clarence Karier closed his address with the observation that need today for a broader, more sophisticated educational history, comprehensively conceptualized on sound, structured ideas derived from free minds, playfully interacting with each other and the primary sources perhaps has never been greater, nor given today's social climate, more difficult to produce.(l) Nothing has happened during the past twelve months that would lead me to change this assessment. As before we stand in need of free minds; minds which are committed to comprehensiveness and rigor in their scholarly labors; minds which excel and delight in the play of intelligence with ideas and sources. As before, too, we are distraught by the indifference, even hostility, which our society, caught now in its own economic and moral crisis, manifests towards our concern for a more comprehensive, a more sophisticated understanding of our educational past; an understanding which, we hope, could be more adequate, more helpful for and in assessing our educational present. It has now been twenty years and more since Bernard Bailyn warned us against seeing the past simply as the present writ small. (2) In the interval the history of education as practiced in the United States and in Canada has become an immensely fruitful and rewarding branch of historical scholarship. In addition to the many path-breaking volumes of educational history that have appeared, we need only turn to the pages of the History of Education Quarterly to trace in its articles and reviews the development of our field during the past twenty years. Certainly it can be said without unduly encouraging our pride and sense of self-importance that we have attained the aim proposed in 1957 by the Committee on the Role of Education in American History. We have incorporated educational developments into the mainstream of American historiography. (3) This has been done, I would say, in large measure because we have heeded Bernard Bailyn's admonition and have consciously sought to view This essay was the Presidential Address of the History of Education Society, delivered at the annual meeting, Silver Spring, Maryland, November, 1979.