What role can the history of education play in the framework of public history? Looking back on 50 years of involvement in educational historiography…

Abstract

The present article on the relationship between the history of education (i.e. my own research over the past five decades) and public history concerns the keynote address at a conference of the Catalan Society for the History of Education. Rather than list the successive paragraphs here, I briefly state here the two underlying thoughts: (1) Even though I am not a specialist in the field of "public history," I believe that any published historical research, even if its results appear only in elite (top?) journals for specialists, reaches the "public" space. But many people - including intellectuals - have lost their way to libraries, and thus also to printed books and journals... Which, of course, does not prevent authors themselves from making an effort to open up as much as possible their acquired knowledge to a wide public, for example, through publications in their own language (and not only in English), and/or through lectures, collaboration in exhibitions, and so on. (2) In the latter regard, I have gained experience mainly through the world of education and/or school museums. And there I have seen, that many museums, often also forced to do so by their patronizing government, go out of their way to realize the goals of a supposed educational mission. But if I have learned anything from the history of education, it is that true education never works according to the pre-programmed strategies of any didactic plan. Rather, Bildung, in the old-fashioned German sense of the word, must rely on true encounters. Of course, this does not prevent museums from carefully choosing their material in function of such a possible pedagogical dialogue, without, however, losing sight of its scientific foundation. More even, as workplaces for the development of such historical-pedagogical knowledge, museums themselves can also contribute to this scientific job. Which in turn need not imply a hierarchical relationship of scientific over educational tasks, for example in terms of personnel.