‘Timeless memories’: memory and temporality in histories of education

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank everyone in the DOMUS Centre, especially Ian Grosvenor and Sian Roberts, for their involvement in organising the conference and the programme.

Notes

¹ For overviews see Alon Confino, ‘History and Memory’, in The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 5: Historical Writing Since 1945, ed. Axel Schneider and Daniel Woolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz, eds., Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). Examples of work exploring the characteristics of memory, and its consequences for the present, can be found in Daniel Dorling and Sally Tomlinson, Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire (London: Biteback Publishing, 2019); Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Graham Dawson, ‘The Meaning of “Moving On”: From Trauma to the History and Memory of Emotions in “Post-Conflict” Northern Ireland’, Irish University Review 47, no. 1 (2017): 82–102.

² Berber Bevernage, History, Memory and State-Sponsored Violence: Time and Justice (New York: Routledge, 2012).

³ ‘Betty Campbell: Statue Honours Wales’ First Black Head Teacher’, September 29, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-58721710, (accessed September 2, 2023).

⁴ Funké Aladejebi and Crystal Gail Fraser, ‘Lessons in Relationality: Reconsidering the History of Education in North America’, History of Education 52, no. 2–3 (2023): 154–81.

⁵ Rita Hordósy and Monica McLean, ‘The Future of the Research and Teaching Nexus in a Post-Pandemic World’, Educational Review 74, no. 3 (2022): 378–401.

⁶ From an already substantial but still emerging literature see, for example, T. Loose, M. Wittmann and A. Vásquez-Echeverría, ‘Disrupting Times in the Wake of the Pandemic: Dispositional Time Attitudes, Time Perception and Temporal Focus’, Time and Society 31, no. 1 (2022): 110–31.

⁷ Notable exceptions include the work of Stephen Humphries, Hooligans and Rebels? Oral Histories of Working-Class Childhood and Youth, 1889–1939 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995); Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996); Peter Cunningham and Philip Gardner, Becoming Teachers: Texts and Testimonies, 1907–1950 (London: Woburn Press, 2004).

⁸ Dale Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 3.

⁹ Antoinette Burton, “‘History’ is Now: feminist theory and the production of historical feminisms,” Women’s History Review, 1, 1 (1992), 26.

¹⁰ Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 163.

¹¹ Ibid., 164–5.

¹² Stephanie Spencer, Women, Work and Education in the 1950s (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005); Penny Summerfield, Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice (London: Routledge, 2019).

¹³ Some examples of other texts in the same genre include Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1984); Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (London: Routledge, 2002).

¹⁴ See for example S. Pembroke, ‘Acts of Survival and Resistance in Industrial and Reformatory Schools in Ireland in the Twentieth Century’, in The Carceral Network in Ireland: History, Agency and Resistance, ed. Fiona McCann (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

¹⁵ Richard J. Evans, ‘The Wonderfulness of Us (the Tory Interpretation of History)’, London Review of Books 33, no. 6 (March 17, 2011).

¹⁶ Popular Memory Group, ‘Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method’, in Making Histories: Studies in History Writing and Politics, ed. Richard Johnson, Gregor McLennan, Bill Schwarz and David Sutton (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 207.

¹⁷ Alastair Thomson, ‘The Anzac Legend: Exploring National Myth and Memory in Australia’, in The Myths We Live By, ed. Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson (London: Routledge, 1993), 73.

¹⁸ Textbook studies are manifold. A useful overview, noting areas for further development, is Eckhardt Fuchs and Marcus Otto, ‘Introduction: Educational Media, Textbooks, and Postcolonial Relocations of Memory Politics in Europe’, Journal of Educational Media, Memory and Society 5, no. 1 (2013): 1–13. Studies utilising or drawing on specific popular memory approaches include Jonathan Doney, Stephen G. Parker and Rob Freathy, ‘Enriching the Historiography of Religious Education: Insights from Oral Life History’, History of Education 46, no. 4 (2017): 436–58.

¹⁹ A similar observation was a stimulus for the very different kinds of work collated in Cristina Yanes-Cabrera, Juri Meda and Antonio Viñao, eds., School Memories: New Trends in the History of Education (Cham: Springer, 2017).

²⁰ David Tyack and William Tobin, ‘The “Grammar” of Schooling: Why Has It Been So Hard to Change?’ American Educational Research Journal 31, no. 3 (1994): 453–79.

²¹ Hans Ruin, ‘The Claim of the Past: Historical Consciousness as Memory, Haunting and Responsibility in Nietzsche and beyond’, Journal of Curriculum Studies 51, no. 6 (2019): 798–813.

²² Anna Fazackerley, ‘Sand, Sex and Sick: Cornish Village Braced for Invasion of Party Pupils’, Observer, July 9, 2023.

²³ Caroline Benn, ‘Common Education and the Radical Tradition’, in Rethinking Radical Education: Essays in Honour of Brian Simon, ed. Ali Rattansi and David Reeder (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1992), 143.

²⁴ Michael Fielding and Peter Moss, Radical Education and the Common School: A Democratic Alternative (London: Routledge, 2010); Ian Grosvenor, ‘What Do They Know of England Who Only England Know: A Case for an Alternative Narrative of the Ordinary in Twenty-First-Century Britain’, History of Education 47, no. 2 (2018): 167; Jane Martin, ‘Telling Stories about Comprehensive Education: Hidden Histories of Politics, Policy and Practice’, British Journal of Educational Studies 68, no. 5 (2020): 649–69; Julia Paulson, Nelson Abiti, Julian Bermeo Osorio, Carlos Arturo Charria Hernández, Duong Keo, Peter Manning, Lizzi O. Milligan, Kate Moles, Catriona Pennell, Sangar Salih and Kelsey Shanks, ‘Education as Site of Memory: Developing a Research Agenda, International Studies in Sociology of Education 29, no. 4 (2020): 429–45.

²⁵ Grosvenor, ‘What Do They Know of England’, 163.

²⁶ Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of the Self Under Colonialism, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Nation in Heterogeneous Time’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 38, no. 4 (2001): 399–418; Giordano Nanni, The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire. (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2012); Michael Hanchard, ‘Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora’, Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999): 245–68.

²⁷ For an overview of some of this work in the field of Education see Arathi Sriprakash, ‘Reparations: Theorising Just Futures of Education’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (2022), https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2022.214414. For arguments with particular implications for historians of education see Carla Rice, Susan D. Dion, Hannah Fowlie and Andrea Breen, ‘Identifying and Working through Settler Ignorance’, Critical Studies in Education 63, no. 1 (2022): 15–30; Catherine Hall, ‘Doing Reparatory History: Bringing “Race” and Slavery Home’, Race and Class 60, no. 1 (2018): 3–21.

²⁸ ‘Beyond Commemoration: Community, Collaboration and Legacies of the Great War’, December 13, 2021, https://www.voicesofwarandpeace.org/2021/12/13/resource-beyond-commemoration-community-collaboration-and-legacies-of-the-first-world-war/ (accessed September 2, 2023).

²⁹ Richard Aldrich, ‘The Three Duties of the Historian of Education’, History of Education 32, no. 2 (2003), 133–43; Grosvenor, ‘What Do They Know of England’, 168.

³⁰ ArCasia D. James-Gallaway and Francena F. L. Turner, ‘Towards a Racial Justice Project: Oral History Methodology, Critical Race Theory, and African American Education’, Paedagogica Historica (2022), https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2022.2105152.