A Critical History for the Twenty-first Century? Critique, Truth, Method and Audience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critical perspectives have been recurrent in history of education research since the 1960s. In this article, we examine what critical histories of education can be in the twenty-first century, when scepticism towards accepted truths is widespread, and critical analysis has become essential to neoliberal assessment practices. This article identifies four key elements of such research – critique, truth, method, and intended audience – and argues that up-to-date critical histories must engage with these. Using perspectives from Indigenous Studies, it offers reflections on how such histories might be constructed. Although not providing definitive answers, it outlines important considerations for designing critical research, including the type of narratives produced, researcher positionality, the discomfort generated, and how potential audiences are engaged. As a result, this article raises the question of whether research can be truly critical if it does not provoke discomfort for the researcher, or provoke restorative or transformative actions. Keywords: critique, critical pedagogy, history of education, applied history of education, Indigenous studies
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.035 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.108 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".