British Historiography of Education in International Context at the Turn of the Century, 1996-2006

摘要

This essay discusses themes in the historical literature on education produced in Britain over the last decade and sets these in a broader temporal, intellectual and geographical context. It is argued that the enormous expansion of the British field over the 15 years from the mid-1960s was checked in the 1980s and that, in turn, this triggered early in the 1990s the beginnings of a major reappraisal of aims and methods that gathered pace in the late 1990s and has led to a further surge in work since 2001. A similar pattern was experienced elsewhere and, as intellectual trends became increasingly international in character by the turn of the century, so, too, did debate among historians of education over future directions for their field, its relative strength in different countries and the centrality that it should accord to schooling. In Britain, as elsewhere, the core concern of the field over the last half century has been that of education and social change, a preoccupation retained in the renewed expansion of recent years as the concepts, disciplinary frameworks, sources and methodologies deployed have widened.