Rethinking the History of Education: Transnational Perspectives on its Questions, Methods, and Knowledge (2013) by Thomas S. Popkewitz

In his acknowledgements, Thomas S. Popkewitz explains that this work grew out of conversations focused on the question of "'reason' as a historical problem" (p.ix).It is clear in reading this interesting collection of essays that, with varying degrees of explicitness, the authors are collectively challenging the legacy of Enlightenment thought on the historical method.However, the body of literature dealing with the problem of the Enlightenment that finds its origins in the work of scholars of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory is a silent shadow that haunts this volume (to borrow the term used by Lynn Fendler in her excellent final chapter).I am thinking of Ludwig Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935) as an example.Fleck offers a means to understand the way in which scientific knowledge is conditioned by society and culture.The works of scholars such as Peter Burke (2000), Helen Longino (2002), and Karl Mannheim (1985) in the sociology of knowledge remind us of the importance of exploring the relationship between an idea and its situation or context.They urge us to consider the relationship of knowledge to power because the way in which we see the world is a result of power relations that we may not be aware of on a conscious level.Rethinking the History of Education: Transnational Perspectives on its Questions, Methods, and Knowledge continues in this tradition while further elaborating on related themes introduced in a previous work by Popkewitz and collaborators Barry M. Franklin and Miguel A. Pereyra in Cultural History and Education: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Schooling (2001), who emphasise the importance of interdisciplinary and comparative history "focused on issues of knowledge, cultural and social change" (p.xiii).This 2001 collective project is worthy of attention as it calls on historians of education but this could and should be a call to historians of all stripes to grapple deliberately with the problem of subjectivity in their research programs.In this recent work (2013), Popkewitz points to a distinction between the work of North American and European scholars.American scholarly work, he argues, has long been archive and data-driven (at least since the 1960s), as historians sought to legitimate their field as a science.He calls on American scholars of the history of education to situate their research in a more complex theoretical framework and to break free from traditional paradigms.Such an appeal is laudable and is successfully carried out in the chapters that make up this work.In Chapter 1, Styles of Reason: Historicism, Historicizing, and the History of Education, Popkewitz sets the stage for what is to come.He does this by calling on the reader "to consider

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