Sources in the Making of Histories of Education: Proofs, Arguments, and Other Forms of Reasoning from the Historian’s Workplace

Abstract

As we have often said in the past, historical research presents certain problems for the behavioural sciences. When we think about the history of education, can it, as the title of this book seems to suggest, be conceived of simply as a subdivision of educational research? And does the argumentative structure that is developed in this domain of knowledge automatically give rise to the construction of ‘one’, let alone, ‘the’ language of education? In our opinion, the history of education, if it wants to be valid, must in any event bear the stamp of what Michel de Certeau once called the ‘historiographical operation’ (see, e.g., Delacroix, Garcia, Dosse, & Trebitsch, 2002. And this historiography,in the literal sense of the word, does not allow itself simply to be dictated by the area to which it is applied, which of course does not prevent interdisciplinarity (commencing from the object studied) from being woven into it.