Why Even Today Educational Historiography is not an Unnecessary Luxury. Focusing on four Themes from Forty-four Years of Research

Abstract

I will successively discuss: (1) continuity and change in education; (2) the demythologisation of the idols and ideals of New Education (in German Reformpädagogik); (3) the discourse of the colonial educational initiative and (4) the sublime relevance of the irrelevant. Each of these four specifically chosen themes is consistent with one of the research lines to which I have adhered during my career, i.e. (1) the history of education (including Belgian education) in the strict sense (and with a focus on the internal organisation of primary education, the subject of my licentiate thesis, submitted in 1977); (2) the history of educational sciences (the subject of my second, special PhD, completed in 1989); (3) colonial and post-colonial educational history in the former Belgian Congo (the theme of one of our first books, published in 1995) and lastly (4) the theory, methodology and history of educational historiography (the subject of my first PhD, which I defended in 1982).