This course offers an introduction to the history of western education. It presupposes no prior knowledge of the subject. First, looking to those enrolled, the course is intended to foster a background of knowledge basic to an understanding of notable educational ideas, theories, policies, and practices that have emerged over the millennia in an evolving western culture. Natural cataclysms and the fortunes of war may also contribute to fundamental change. Such questions fall outside the purview of this course.
Pictorial documentation is used extensively in the form of color slides.
The aim in this connection is to bring faces and surfaces to the history of education, to situate it visually, to tease imagination into play as ideas are unveiled. The common readings are drawn from mainstream scholarship thought to be within a range appropriate to an introductory survey of western education history. The readings tend to be eclectic insofar as interpretive theory is concerned. The course does not attend to the competition between advocates of alternative historiographic outlooks. Discussions of historiography have been enlivened in recent decades by various kinds of revisionism.