This article was downloaded by: [University of Helsinki]On: 24 February 2015, At: 01:16Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Paedagogica Historica: InternationalJournal of the History of EducationPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cpdh20

Book ReviewsJustino Magalhães a , Benjamin Roberts b , Thomas Buerman c ,Michel Vandenbroeck d , Ingrid Markussen e , Juliane Jacobi f ,Dirk Martin g , Edward Haasl h , Jeffrey Mirel i , Heather Lewis j ,Eva Matthes k , Bruno Poucet l , Bruno Boute m , Pieter Dhondt n ,Ronald E. Butchart o , Myriam Southwell p & Bruno Poucet qa Lisbon University , Portugalb ING , Amsterdam, The Netherlandsc Ghent University , Belgiumd Ghent University , Belgiume University of Oslo , Norwayf Universität Potsdam , Deutschlandg Centre d’Etudes et de Documentation Guerre et SociétésContemporaines , Belgiqueh KULeuven , Belgiumi University of Michigan , USAj Pratt Institute , New York, USAk Universität Augsburg , Deutschlandl CURSEP/IUFM de l’académie d’Amiens , Francem Kuleuven , Belgiumn University of Helsinki , Finlando University of Georgia , USAp Universidad Nacional de La Plata/CONICET , FLACSO, Argentinaq CURSEP/IUFM de l’académie d’Amiens , FrancePublished online: 31 May 2007.

To cite this article: Justino Magalhães , Benjamin Roberts , Thomas Buerman , MichelVandenbroeck , Ingrid Markussen , Juliane Jacobi , Dirk Martin , Edward Haasl , Jeffrey Mirel ,Heather Lewis , Eva Matthes , Bruno Poucet , Bruno Boute , Pieter Dhondt , Ronald E. Butchart ,Myriam Southwell & Bruno Poucet (2007) Book Reviews, Paedagogica Historica: InternationalJournal of the History of Education, 43:3, 433-479, DOI: 10.1080/00309230701398175

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00309230701398175

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica HistoricaVol. 43, No. 3, June 2007, pp. 433–479

ISSN 0030-9230 (print)/ISSN 1477-674X (online)/07/030433–47© 2007 Stichting Paedagogica HistoricaDOI: 10.1080/00309230701398175

Book Reviews

Taylor and Francis LtdCPDH_A_239703.sgm10.1080/00309230701398175Paedagogica Historica0030-9230 (print)/1477-674X (online)Original Article2007Taylor & Francis433000000June 2007JustinoMagalhãesjustinomagalhaes@fpce.ul.ptRepensar la historia de la educación. Nuevos desafíos, nuevas propuestasMANUEL FERRAZ LORENZO (Ed)Madrid, Biblioteca Nueva, 2005422 pp. ISBN 84-9742-365-8

The collective work Repensar la historia de la education, edited by Manuel FerrazLorenzo, is made up of 13 studies in 13 chapters, mostly carried out by Spanishresearchers and historians. These studies unveil the theoretical foundations, theepistemic status and the field of development of the history of education as a subjectguiding the historical–educational study of educational reality and educationalprocesses, which can be rethought and recreated. In the development of societies,education and history intertwine. The function of the former is to ensure that thememory constructed by history remains alive and disseminated. History and educa-tion therefore constitute a guarantee of the survival of societies.

Articulated with the common trunk of history, the history of education has under-gone, in recent decades, autonomous development, strengthening its specificity. Theset of studies in this book emphasises this innovation and aims to outline the fields ofdefinition of the subject of history of education, in its articulation with history. Thebook also looks at how the educational past is a driving force with a wide scope ofcoverage, overcoming the weight of the immediacy of the social, cultural and educa-tional reality. Through a meticulous and broad historical–educational investigation,the past can be recovered in its genealogical and changing dimension, enabling oneto grasp and interpret the current social and educational parameters.

The book is divided into five parts: the first on the evolution and historical renewalof the last few decades; the second on the relevance of and indispensable need forhistorical ethics; the third on the historical place of education, as an historical phaseand as a method in today’s complex society—a society deriving from modernity andplunged into post-modernity, marked by history as a backup to emancipation, byreinvention of politics and by the revitalisation of the subject; the fourth on the topi-cality and centrality of the history of pedagogy, its conceptual and hermeneutic foun-dations and on the relation between memory and pedagogy; part five consists of twotexts on everyday educational reality, but observed and described through distinctiveperspectives: on the one hand, the issues and challenges facing the teaching of thehistory of education and on the other, the classroom and everyday school life as an

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

434 Book Reviews

epistemic object. This book also includes a study on the renewal of the teaching func-tion and closes with a view on the regional and local history of education.

The work therefore brings together a set of texts and a group of specialists, allargued and written with their conceptual and discursive splendour and in their ownstyle, notwithstanding a coherence regarding the focus on the evolution and the meth-odological perspectives of the history of education over recent years. This set of obser-vations and reflections, compiling the advances made, and revealing a mode ofworking, constitute projects and models that shape a manner of understanding soci-eties themselves.

Although the editor, Ferraz Lorenzo, does not go beyond a general description ofhow the work was produced, the starting point was a request made to a group ofspecialists to systematise and update with complete freedom the methodological andepistemic evolutionary developments in their particular field of specialisation.

In the first study, Miguel Ángel Cabrera looks at ‘The crisis of modernity and therenewal of historical studies’ (La crisis de la modernidad y la renovación de los estu-dios históricos). He points to the 1970s as the turning point in the conceptual presup-positions and methodologies of social history, namely with regard to the relationbetween social consequences and rational action. Arising from an uprooting from thesocial imaginary, this turning point translates into a new view of this imaginary andthe start of a process of (re)individualisation.

The idealised presuppositions of a society as a grouping of individuals and a socialhistory based on the inductive method, was succeeded by a social history focussed onan objective structure of society and drawn up based on a hypothetical-deductivemethod. In the 1980s the doubts surrounding the theoretical model and presupposi-tions that social reality is an objective structure with the capacity to determineconsciences and the significant practices of subjects were strengthened by historiansof the new cultural history, who also attributed an active role to culture and individualcreativity in the conforming of the social relational processes.

But the crisis of modernity has more widespread consequences, and overcoming itleads also to the emergence of a criticism of post-modernity regarding the singlevision of progress and human future which had been built as a meta-history and meta-report of modernity. The uprooting of the meta-report from modernity, based on areassessment of language, has the immediate implication of breaking the logical chainbetween social discourses and objects. It is the social imaginary that, mediatedthrough language, generates and makes sense of the answers that individuals give tothe social reality. In their experience with reality, individuals do not recognise theworld, but rather convert it into a significant entity through the linguistic protocolsavailable. History is not a match with reality, but a representation achieved througha meaningful construction. As such, the new aim of historical research does not lie inthe reconstruction of ideas, motives and the cultural universe of actors, or in thereconstruction of the historical context, but rather in reconstructing the mediation ofsocial imaginaries or categorical marks inside which the aforementioned subjects live,think, develop and act. The crisis of modernity has generated a new theorising of thesocial and the cultural.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 435

In ‘Memory and history—An ethical-political focus’ (Memoria e historia. Unenfoque ético-político), Bello Reguera, alluding to several dramatic events of contem-porary history (the Jewish holocaust, the crimes of Stalinism, the victims of commu-nism, the American nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, the torture and death of the‘disappeared’ in Argentina, the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the genocide inRwanda, apartheid in South Africa), focuses on an essential and no less controversialtopic—the relation between memory and ethics, i.e. whether memory can be an ethi-cal judge. This is equivalent to questioning, in ideological and methodological terms,the role and legitimacy of negativity as a source of critical energy and whether ethics,often expressed in models and texts, respond to a democratic model or a totalitarianmodel. It is in the relativisation between memory and forgetting that resides a possi-ble, albeit limited, democratic consensus. Notwithstanding the lines of enquiry raisedconcerning the interpretations of historical ethics made by, among others, Derrida,Levinas and Finkielkrautt, the author questions the role ethics and politics of thememory play in the school curriculum, especially in response to a democratic modelor a totalitarian model.

Roy Lowe in ‘We need nevertheless a History of Education, but is it central orperipheral?’ (Necesitamos todavía una Historia de la Educación: es ésta central operiférica?) begins with the systemisation of the history of education, and leaningtowards a centrality of the history of education, concludes his thinking by advocatinga meticulous scientific task. Lowe summarises evolutionary trends in the history ofeducation as follows: 1) globalisation of knowledge (the focus on the Nation-Stateyields to the focus on the regions); 2) as a counterpoint one can highlight a resistanceto globalisation; 3) relegation of the written word to a secondary level; 4) crisis ordisappearance of specialists and consequent universalisation of the knowledge andtransformation of history. To (re)think the history of education it is necessary, in hisunderstanding, to return to the sources and pay attention to what distinguisheshistory as a scientific domain: the nature of research; the development of a particularmethodology; the nature of affirmations (always provisional affirmations and takinginto account previous studies). Issues are also raised concerning education, leadingRoy Lowe to interpret education as acculturation, in the broad sense, enabling theunderstanding of all the complex and subtle processes and actions that change intel-ligence, discernment and attitude. It is this complexity that the history of educationhas taken on board, meaning that the training of any young education historianshould include immersion in the historiography of the history of education, which willalways be, directly or indirectly, political.

Tiana Ferrer’s study ‘History and Education today: old and new fields of study’ (LaHistoria e la Educación en la actualidad: viejos y nuevos campos de estúdio), is adescriptive and critical inventory of the entire subject that constitutes the history ofeducation, from the 1970s, in which the renewal of previous approaches goes hand inhand with the inclusion of new fields: the history of childhood and the family; thehistory of literacy; the history of pedagogical ideas. As the main fields of renewal, theauthor mentions the history of educational systems and policies, the history of educa-tional actors and the history of the curriculum, concentrating on the history of school

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

436 Book Reviews

subjects, space and time. Raising the issue of whether these separate historiographicalfields suggest fragmentation or integration, the author leans towards the approachesthat favour overlapping of the unit rather than actual fragmentation.

Antonio Viñao in ‘The 21st century view of the history of Education: tensions,challenges and audiences’ (La historia de la Educación ante el siglo XXI: tensiones,retos y audiências) points out that, having emerged as an academic subject devotedto the training of teachers and as an open field of research, since the nineteenthcentury the history of education has been plunged into a quagmire of tensions,contradictions and paradoxes. The main tensions are: the situation of the history ofeducation as part of the educational sciences, simultaneously satisfying educationalscientists and historians; the controversy between chronological approaches andthematic approaches; the relation between the present and the past, or how to makehistory relevant. The main challenge consists of making people think of education ina simultaneously genealogical and critical manner, around a series of relevantthemes, the study of which is undoubtedly of interest in the present. It is a questionof updating debates on the past, safeguarding a genealogical and critical perspective,and bringing the past to the public, to new audiences, without damaging the profes-sional group. This transformation leads to ruptures. One of the ruptures that havebeen implemented was the opening of the sector, but the challenge goes deeper andit is a question of replacing the canon or traditional code, by illustrating historical–educational processes prolonged over time, tackled in a logic of historical and culturalconstructions.

Ferraz Lorenzo in ‘Post-modern (or post-social) history and its influences on thehistoriography of education’ (La historia postmoderna (o postsocial) y sus influenciasen la historiografía de la educación) resumes the notion of the modernity crisis andthe evolution of the conception of history operated from the 1970s, adding his voiceto a group of philosophers who all associate the crisis of modernity with a new focuson language and foresee a post-modern current. This turning point incorporatessome reservations from the author, so as to avoid a new historical meta-report thatlimits itself to suppressing the conditions that underpin the positivist guidelines ofsocial and structural history, but which, on the other hand, prevent particularisedperspectives. In the view of Ferraz Lorenzo, the history of education as an academicsubject and as a field of research, not only reflects the crisis of modernity, but it hasalso been a domain particularly marked by the evolutionary trends of post-modernity,namely by the opening of new topics, by the centrality of the discourse and even theiconic, by the search to overcome the standard approaches and by the openness toand recognition of difference. In this background he appeals for an external look overthe production of knowledge, including the theoretical presuppositions and method-ological mark of reference.

Fernández Soria in ‘The History of Education before the Second Illustration’ (LaHistoria de la Educación ante la Segunda Ilustración), resumes the post-modernperspective based on the emergence of the political and the historical–educationalsubject, and confronts the reader not only with a post-modernity but above all with aSecond Illustration, marked and geared towards the freeing of the singular and

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 437

universal man. In this process, teaching and studying history, whether in general or aspecific branch, inasmuch as it contains the deepening of the understanding of thehuman being, his actions, his beliefs, his twofold acceptance of creatures and creatorsof history, constitute pedagogy for emancipation, especially if they involve a resump-tion of the ‘political’, the ‘cultural’ and a rescaling of the role of the subject. It isthrough this theoretical backdrop of the subject, a subject with memory, identity,idealism, responsible, supportive, that the history of education, corresponding to the‘meeting’ between political history and the new cultural history, gains a new sense inthe background of the Second Illustration.

Conrad Vilanou in ‘The return of the history of Pedagogy: to a conceptual andcultural hermeneutic’ (El retorno de la historia de la Pedagogía: hacia una hermenéu-tica conceptual y cultural) looks to widen horizons and the discussion so as to allowhim to rethink pedagogy, based on texts and their academic institutionalisation withhermeneutic references—a pedagogic memory with a cultural base. From the eigh-teenth century the constellation of pedagogy includes memory, historicity and herme-neutics. As such, the author distinguishes different conceptions of pedagogy, inaccordance with the biggest role each of the following elements play: the pedagogictradition of the Sciences of the Spirit; the association between hermeneutics andhuman training (strengthened from the 1970s onwards by Gadamer’s contribution);the irruption of conceptual history and its evolution to sociocultural history, throughthe convergence of intellectual and cultural history; the articulation between concep-tual history and cultural history. Presenting this evolution, Conrad Vilanou focuseson the articulation and summation generated in the latest phase, in which sociocul-tural history, mediated by the anthropologist, presents itself as a new totality.

Maria de Lourdes González Luis in ‘Pedagogy and memory’ (Pedagogía y memo-ria) writes a text on the register of intertextuality, in a constant to and fro betweenmemory and pedagogy and between pedagogy and memory, with references to theindividual and societies, in the background of the cultural history of the West. If theentire act of memory, mediated between forgetting and (re)updating, becomes peda-gogical, it is pedagogy that, in turn, confers meaning to memory and writes it in thefuture.

A. Terrón, V. Álvarez, G. Braga in ‘History of Education teaching: as for innova-tion? The manner of critical reflection’ (La enseñanza de la Historia de la Educación:cuánto de innovación? A modo de reflexión crítica), referring to a trend towards thebreak-up of traditional and institutional logic, point out that the teaching of thehistory of education has undergone a thematic revision, linked to the adoption ofemerging didactic strategies in research and in the epistemic renewal that has takenplace since the 1970s and 80s, which includes resorting to a constructivist methodol-ogy of implying pupils in the development of their own curriculum. However, theauthors of the study formulate a clarification between research and teaching, suggest-ing a curricular project that will lend sense to a complex and personal teaching actionthat reinforces the instructional role of the history of education.

Marc Depaepe and Frank Simon in ‘Sources and methods for the history of theclassroom’ (Fuentes y métodos para la historia del aula) carry out a critical review of

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

438 Book Reviews

research on the classroom, which, as an object of investigation constitutes a recentdomain of the history of education, through macro and meso studies. In thisapproach, the authors undertake a review of the methods that have been used inethnological and historical studies, the former based on external observation,combined with a register of occurrences by teachers and pupils, and the latter basedprincipally on inspection reports. Likewise, they analyse studies that, based on theperceptions of pupils and teachers, focus on what they label ‘classroom climate’.Grounded on educational journals, Depaepe and Simon attempt to get close to theclassroom reality. But as the journals generate the standard, it becomes necessary toarticulate this standard with the normality itself. It is this relativization, this acknowl-edgement of the adequacy of the standards that has to be faced: the classroomthrough a (re)construction of sense, of a representative construction and not only areconstitution of the visible and the sensitive. The classroom is an epistemic objectthat challenges a review of the grammatical concept of schooling through a pedago-gising grammar, i.e. among other aspects, through (re)approaching the action of theteacher. Carrying out this crossed reference, Depaepe and Simon insist on the limi-tations of the visual to reconstitute the classroom and stress the importance of text-books as a source, in themselves, and in articulation with the educational journals.

Juan Carlos Tedesco and Emílio Tenti Fanfani, in ‘New times and new teachers’(Nuevos tiempos y nuevos docentes) analyse the historical-pedagogical evolution ofthe teaching function, its status, its representation and its current state, and conclude,namely based on surveys carried out in several Latin American countries, that therehas been an authentic change of paradigm in the teaching function. This has comeabout, among other aspects, because of a mutation in the traditional ways of accessingand recruiting teachers, alteration of the didactic-pedagogical means, associated withthe advances in new information and communication technology, changes in workscenarios and contexts, which increasingly require a workplace instructor, and finallythrough the transformation of the representations and social expectations regardingthe role of the teacher. In this backdrop of change, they end their study suggestingthat a complete policy that pushes for a new teaching professionalism should includethree basic dimensions: training, work and career conditions, and the material andsymbolic compensation system.

Narciso de Gabriel in ‘the regional educational historiography in Spain’ (La histo-riografia regional en España) considers regional historiography the evolution ofeducational phenomena in a given region. This acceptance has didactic referencesand investigative references. With regard to didactics, the presence of offshootsubjects (pedagogy, social education) has been amplified and articulated with newsubjects generated, based on new domains of research (history of child education,history of physical education). Narciso de Gabriel believes that it was as educationalhistoriography approached the epistemological and methodological criteria of generalhistoriography that it incorporated the regional mark, placing the educationalphenomena into a specific context and relating it to economic, social, political andcultural factors. However, particularly in Spain, the consolidation of a regional educa-tional historiography coincided with the restoration of democracy, together with

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 439

other factors, such as autonomy of the universities. The curricular autonomisationhas focussed on educational practices, pedagogical ideas, legislation, schooling ideol-ogies, which are aspects that due to their very nature cannot be ignored in a morewidespread, national and global history. Therefore, Narciso de Gabriel concludesthat regional and even local history, on the one hand, makes sense in itself, but alsodoes so inasmuch as it is the starting point from which one can construct a history ofthe entire State, which is more meticulous and in tune with the reality, and thusimprove knowledge about historical–educational problems, to a greater or lesserdegree, of a universal nature.

This is how I read a fundamental work, from the substantive and epistemic view-points. My interpretation is a construction of sense marked by my epistemic, culturaland professional reference bases. Confronted with this set of essays, rigorously docu-mented, individualised and theorised, I tried for my convenience to overlay a line ofharmonisation, in seeking a symphony of perspectives and directions, while takingcare not to destroy the particular of each study. But while I read them and rereadthem attentively, in this brief outline without systematising either the archive or theextremely vast encyclopaedia and the argumentative grounds that underpin each ofthe studies, I hazard at my interpretation.

The history of education affirms itself here as a subject domain and a field of studywhere the furthering of theory has been equally dedicated to as the enlargement of thetopics, and where pedagogical responsibility, dissemination and training has bene-fited from constant attention by the most highly renowned historians and peda-gogues. This is an essential work from the substantive and epistemic viewpoints,because in constructing the history of education it also lists, marks out and brings tothe fore a set of concerns, which constitutes an unequivocal sign of the vitality andmaturity of this scientific and pedagogical area, both as regards history, and at theheart of education sciences.

JUSTINO MAGALHÃES

Lisbon University, Portugal© 2007, Justino Magalhães

The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society 1150–1650KONRAD EISENBICHLER (Ed.)Toronto, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2002349 pp. [Essays and Studies, 1] ISBN 0-7727-2018-5, Can $32.00

According to Steven Ozment alcohol, sex, and leisure activities were the three horse-men of the sixteenth century. However, scholars of early modern history andmodern history might be disappointed in The Premodern Teenager. Youth in Society1150-1650 when they learn that many of the same pastimes were already the horse-men of youths in the early and high Middle Ages. Initially, it would seem that mostof the struggles of youth and being young just never seem to change. However, that

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

440 Book Reviews

would be oversimplifying the matter, and that is definitely not the inclination of thishandsomely illustrated collection of essays edited by Konrad Eisenbichler. Thiscompilation illustrates that being young during all ages of history is problematic butthe way youths express themselves is distinctive. This work provides readers with acolourful mosaic of adolescence in pre-early modern history from the perspective ofseventeen scholars in Europe and North America who have addressed adolescencefrom various scientific disciplines ranging from art history, literature, educationalhistory, gender studies, and linguistics. Of the various issues of youth culture andadolescence that are addressed in this period, six areas of adolescence are paramountand not just for the Middle Ages.

The first and foremost problem with studying youths in all ages is the terminologyand definition of youth and adolescence. What age defines the phase of life betweenchildhood and adulthood? Is it age, financial independence, sexual development,social standing? Secondly, what are the ritual roles given to youths? Thirdly, education;how were youths educated, girls and boys, rich and poor, the gifted and the average?Fourthly, the fascination young people had with the military, the existence of teenagersoldiers, knights and leaders. Fifthly, the everlasting preoccupation youths have withsex, and finally the medical, social, and legal problems of youths. Throughout thecollection these questions are addressed and answered according to the social groupthat is under scrutiny.

With regard to laying the parameters and terminology of adolescence, LudovicaSebregondi does not define youth in terms of semantics but rather by examining howteenagers dressed in fifteenth-century Florence. Based on Florentine paintings andfrescos, male adolescents wore close-fitting clothing that accentuated their masculinephysique and young women sported tight attire revealing their ‘physical constitutionsuitable to procreation’, which was a contrast to married adults who wore loser-fittingclothing. For young men, the codpiece—which was originally a sack that was sewn inthe groin and used to stuff the excess of the shirt that protruded from the belt—wasdecorated and padded. Thus the organ it was meant to conceal became accentuatedand the object of attention, and suggested according to its inflated sized—alluded toone’s sexual prowess.

Ottavia Niccoli’s unveils how violence was an integral part of youth rituals inBologna in late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Based on court proceedings,she reveals how the youths of Bologna were disciplined under the scrutiny of theCouncil of Trent (1545–1563). In this period violence played an important part ofBologna society, and young people—especially adolescent boys—were the mostdominant in publicly expressing their discontent. In this realm, violence can beregarded as a accepted ritual for young people—not tolerated by society—but idio-syncratic of the youth phase. This occurred physically such as the popular pastime oftossing stones at buildings that symbolically had some meaning such as synagoguesor the homes of Jews during Holy Week, or throwing stones at the windows of ayoung girl who was accused of being a prostitute. The violence of young peoplecould also express itself non-physically by ruining one’s honour by mocking andname-calling. One of the most offensive verbal profanities used by young people in

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 441

late sixteenth-century Bologna was to call a man a becco fottuto (fucking cuckold),which meant that the man’s wife had been unfaithful and implied that he might beraising another man’s child. Of course, insults of this calibre could easily escalate intophysical violence. Another ritual that expressed violence and thus tainted one’shonour was the act of decorating a person’s house with defaming objects such asmaypole decorated with a donkey’s bell, a pair of slippers and a rag doll. In general,the maypole was a positive expression of spring and symbolized courting a youngwoman, but when it was adorned with negative ornaments such as a donkey’s bell,which represented stupidity, and slippers that alluded to exposed female genitals,and the rag doll which was a play on the words of putta (young girl, doll) and puttana(prostitute)—the girl’s honour was a stake. Rituals that entailed violence and thatdegraded one’ sexual honour (such as that of a girl) or mocked one’ masculinity(such as a cuckold) were a reoccurring topos.

In the article entitled ‘Young Knights Under the Feminine Gaze’, Ruth MazoKarras uncovers how sanctioned violence and sexuality are integrally intertwined.By examining biographies of men from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, MazoKarras has discovered that love played an important role in the emergence ofadolescent boys into manhood because it was a sign of his chivalric virtues. ‘Aknight who appealed to women through his behaviour simultaneously demonstratedto other men that he knows how to behave with women’. If the knight attracted thegaze of women, it could increase his value among his male peers. In essence, ‘aristo-cratic men thus reaffirmed their masculinity by performing deeds before the admir-ing gaze of women and then displaying the rewards of such admiration before othermen’.

The diversity of the adolescent sexuality in the Middle Ages becomes moreevident in the article by Fiona Harris Stoertz who examines the sexual practices ofmonks, nobles, apprentices, and students. Among these socially diverse groupsruled contrasting ideas and sexual practices. Whereas monks and men of the clothwere obliged and socially expected to be chaste and denounce their feelings of lust,aristocrats who served at court were sexually promiscuous. Young apprentices, wholived with a tradesman and were not (yet) permitted to marry, sought sexual gratifi-cation by visiting prostitutes, and students who just as apprentices, frequentedwomen of ill-repute sometimes also had concubines. With the exception of monks,these groups of young men who were expected to delay marriage until achievingeconomic independence enjoyed great sexual freedom. There is a general feelingthat youths in the Middle Ages had greater sexual freedom—or at least there werelesser constraints towards sexuality than youths in the early modern period had.However, this moral was ambiguous when it came to women who were not allowedthe same freedoms as men.

By not implementing a general theory of adolescence and youth, this study success-fully illustrates a wide-angled view and perception of adolescence in the Middle Ages.In additional to the standard ingredients of adolescence being a transitional phasefrom childhood to adulthood, characterized by emotional turmoil, budding sexuality,and violence, this collection keenly reveals that adolescence is also influenced by

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

442 Book Reviews

cultural, social, and gender factors - and that the teenage experience is unique foreach age throughout history.

BENJAMIN ROBERTS

ING, Amsterdam, The Netherlands© 2007, Benjamin Roberts

Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890-1970. The MaternalDilemmaANN TAYLOR ALLEN

New York/Houndsmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005354 pp. ISBN 1-4039-6236-7, £35.00.

Ann Taylor Allen’s book focuses on the different answers feminists, of differentnations and times, have given to the question if it is possible for women to be both,mother and autonomous individual. She calls this question the maternal dilemma.

In her introduction Allen states that the feminist discourse on the maternaldilemma has known an exceptional shift in Western Europe during the twentiethcentury. From being the highest of human achievements, motherhood became ameans to oppress and confine women. To prove this point and particularly to explainthe changes in feminist opinions, Allen has set up an international and comparativeresearch. By presenting examples of different countries, Allen describes the majortrends about motherhood. She illustrates how, among others, law, war, patriotism,totalitarianism, science and economy, were and are important factors that contributeto different perceptions of motherhood in societies and particularly in feministmilieus. For example, Allen’s analysis of the social position of unmarried mothers andtheir children, makes the added value of a European comparison understood. ForAllen is able to prove that the status of unmarried women differed importantly incountries that had a legal code based upon the Napoleonic Code from those countrieswhere the legal code was based on Germanic legal traditions.

The book’s international scope is Allen’s biggest and most admirable contributionto the fields of gender history, women’s studies and the history of childhood. As Allendoes not only compare better-known large countries, as France, Germany and GreatBritain, but also includes less-studied and smaller nations as Austria, Belgium, Italy,the Netherlands, Portugal, the Scandinavian nations, Spain and Switzerland. Butwhat is even more exemplary is Allen’s use of primary sources for almost all of thesecountries. It is not that common that a rich body of secondary literature is comple-mented with research in different national archives and with different contemporarynational newspapers, periodicals, books, brochures and documents. Subsequently,Allen’s bibliography is remarkable.

The enormous quantity of information has some downsides. Allen obviously intro-duces many important feminists from all over Europe. But in the text the referencesto persons are often accompanied with small bibliographical explanations. These

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 443

descriptions become unnecessary repetitions as the same persons are cited frequently.A glossary of person would have solved this problem and would have done credit tothe book. Furthermore, Allen sometimes describes the national situations too consec-utively without comparing them profoundly enough. Allen proves that the majortrends have been relevant in the analysed countries, but she does not always fullydemonstrate how these trends differed locally. If Allen had concentrated more on theinternational networks that existed between feminists, women organizations, journalsand periodicals, she would have given the reader a better insight into the differentnational debates and the ways by which these debates were exported to other countriesand, most importantly, how they were imported and adapted to national situations.Such additions would have made The Maternal Dilemma into a reference work aboutWestern European feminism. But as this was not the ambition of the author, it wouldbe superfluos to develop these points any further. Surely the content of the book isinteresting, profound and valuable enough to call it a standard work about feminism.

Allen focuses on the period 1890–1970. But one can say that priority is given to theyears between 1918 and 1939 as four out of nine chapters are dedicated to the InterwarPeriod. This is a legitimate choice as Allen convincingly defines the interbellum periodas the major transition period. Two major trends, both elaborately scrutinized by Allenin previous chapters, were questioned in the Interwar Years. The exalted image of themother, coined as ‘the angle in the house’ was deconstructed and people no longeraccepted a governmental view on children as national resources and on maternity as‘a productive activity that manufactured the most important commodity of all,citizens’ (pp. 65–66).

The atrocities of World War I, political controversies, the start of European totali-tarianism and the financial crises of the interwar era, contributed to the dismissal ofany plan of child-care funded or organized by the government. Every notion of repro-duction as a service to society, despite the widespread feminist opinion that genderequality would be a reward for this service, went by the board. The Maternal Dilemmaargues that after World War I the state lost some of its credibility and was no longerthe major authority on maternity and child welfare. Family privacy became empha-sized. But the private sphere was also subjected to changes as the wartime experiencemade the mother-headed family to be ‘associated with the hardship and bereavementof wartime; by contrast, the restoration of the two parent household promised a returnto stability, harmony, and fertility’ (p. 133). The Victorian ideal mother, pure and altru-istic, was displaced from her pedestal. A two-parent household in which the man domi-nated and demanded the woman to live up to her maternal and feminine roles replacedher. The same process occurred after the Second World War, when the restoration ofthe father-headed family seemed the most logic step toward normality and stability.

Allan asserts that this twentieth-century preoccupation with the two-parent familyhad negative implications for women. This fixation affected the single mother in thefirst place. While a single mother used to be regarded with sympathy because her childwas a valuable citizen, she now had to live with the chance of losing state support.Benefits were distributed to the ‘normal’ family only. But the two-parent preferencealso affected the married woman, as motherhood became an intense obligation in this

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

444 Book Reviews

family constellation. Due to the fact that totalitarianism, with its harsh youth move-ments, had discredited stringent parenting, the conviction grew that, within thefather-dominated family, a mother should pay as much time, attention and love to herchild as possible. This idea clashed with the post-war feminist road to emancipation,namely out-of-house-employment. Unfortunately enough to achieve that, women gotthe double burden. In stead of men taking up more parts of fatherhood, women hadto take up an extra role in a male dominated work structure, next to their mother-role.The maternal dilemma was still the basis of gender inequality. ‘Even the renunciationof motherhood was an admission of inequality—for men did not experience the samepressure to choose between career success or other aspirations and parenthood. Andin the world of work that women now entered in great numbers, they would encounternew forms of discrimination, inequality, and marginalization’ (p. 233).

It is clear that Allen attaches great importance to World War I as a decisive factor.Especially the war’s influence on the perception of the child has changed mother-hood. The importance attributed to World War I in Allen’s profound cultural history,mirrors the recent interest in general historiography for this war. It is however surpris-ing that The Maternal Dilemma dedicates so little attention to religion. Certainly forcountries dominated by the catholic Church, more contemplation should have beengiven to, for example, the reinforcement of the ‘angel in the house’ or the two-parentfamily by the catholic Church.

In all, Ann Taylor Allen has carried out first-rate international research and wrotean impressive book. She discusses the thoughts of three generations of women. AsAllen frequently cites from the fictional works of writers as Henrik Ibsen, AldousHuxley, Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw, it is appropriate to compareAllen’s historical study with Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours (1998). InCunningham’s book three women of different times tell their story. As with TheMaternal Dilemma, the reader of The Hours understands that these three women livein different times, with changed societies, altered marriage status and different gradesof autonomy. Yet, despite these changes, the three women still live with the sameproblems, the maternal dilemma being one of the most important.

THOMAS BUERMAN

Ghent University, Belgium© 2007, Thomas Buerman

Luisteren naar Deskundigen. Opvoedingsadvies aan Nederlandse ouders1945–1999JANNEKE WUBS

Assen, Koninklijke Van Gorcum, 2004xi + 315 pp. ISBN 90-232-4028-6, €25

Janneke Wubs’s book is a well documented study on popular parental advice from theSecond World War to present. It is a praiseworthy initiative as it fills a gap in the

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 445

available literature since—as H. Cunningham (Children & Childhood in WesternSociety since 1500. London-New York: Longman, 1995) stated—changes in emphasisin the advice books may be a symptom and a reflection of changes in practice. Out ofa corpus of 511 educational books for parents, published in The Netherlands sincethe Second World War, Wubs selected the 109 most popular books, based on thenumber of re-editions they have known. She describes extensively some quantitativeaspects of her corpus of texts (chronological order, discipline of the authors, dissem-ination etc.), followed by a content analysis. This content analysis is broken down inseveral categories. A first chapter deals with how experts view themselves in relationto parents and how they legitimize their expertise. In the introduction to this partWubs acknowledges that the construction of the expert can only bee understood inrelation to the construction of the parent as lay person. In Wubs’ analysis however, itseems as if experts define themselves as such, while the work of Foucault on knowl-edge and power relations (e.g. G. Deleuze. Foucault. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit,1986) or of A. Giddens (‘Living in a Post-Traditional Society.’ In Reflexive modern-ization. Politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order, edited by Beck, U., A.Giddens and S. Lash. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994: 56-109) on expertise in latemodernity or even the historical research by M. De Winter (‘De veranderende relatiestussen ouders en deskundigen.’ In Ouderschap in veranderin, edited by Engelen, P.Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1986: 215–27) in The Netherlands, show more of the reci-procity and the socio-cultural embedding of this construction of ‘expertise’ as acontextually relative term. Nevertheless Wubs concludes that knowledge from devel-opmental psychology has gradually been viewed as indispensable for education, creat-ing a monopoly position for certain experts. After 1970, Wubs claims, the terms inwhich advice books were written changes substantially, including less prescriptivelanguage and more advice one may or may not follow, but this did not alter funda-mentally the gap between lay and expert knowledge.

In a following part, Wubs describes what advice was given on children and onparents and families, followed by a chapter analysing the advice on the specific topicof punishment. In all of these subfields, Wubs observes a dramatic change indiscourse in the 1970s. In her wording it is an ‘abrupt change’, a ‘sudden turn’. Usingthe books in which Thomas Gordon in the 1970’s vulgarized his Parent Effectivenesstraining as an example, she argues, for instance, that parents and children were fromthen on viewed as equal partners in a relationship of negotiation. Also in the advicebooks published after 1970 professional expertise is not valued higher than expertisefrom parental practice anymore, she claims, illustrating this with some authors whopresent themselves as parents (such as Bill Cosby) or with experts who explicitlyadvice parents to thrust on their own intuition (such as Benjamin Spock). Also, in thebooks that focus on problems in education, the old moralistic tone changes and after1970 these books do not talk about educational mistakes anymore. Before 1970,Wubs explains, attention was given to moralistic discourses on family size and familycomposition and the personality of the mother. After 1970 such statementscompletely disappeared and the focus then was more on problem-solving and parent-ing as support for the child rather than on moral and the shaping of the child. In short,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

446 Book Reviews

Wubs describes a dramatic shift in 1970 that she labels as individualisation andpsychologisation. Benjamin Spock is depicted as the precursor of this change.

In the introduction of his already mentioned study on children in western society,Cunningham stated: ‘Childhood cannot be studied in isolation from society as awhole. It is arguable that the factors which have had most impact on it, both as a setof ideas and as a phase of life, have been primarily economic and demographic, and,in second place, political’ (p. 3). In her introduction, Wubs briefly acknowledges thiswhen she says that international research on parental advice reveals that a specificpsychological theory prevails in a specific time, when this theory delivers argumentsthat are socially relevant in that time. In her concluding chapter Wubs comes shortlyback to this when writing about recent research revealing that science is also embed-ded in the same social and cultural context than the parental advice that scientistsgenerate. As an example she mentions the development of attachment theory and thecritics on this development by the Dutch researcher Ellie Singer, however onlyslightly touching on the major work Singer did in the field of feminist critique bydeconstructing links between developmental psychology in general and prevailingmale-centred economy and politics in general (‘Shared care for children.’ Theory andPsychology III, no. 4 (1993): 429–49). The work of other scholars in the feministtradition such as Burman (1994), Canella (1997) and others could have broadenedthis view. Probably this has to do with the major particularity of Wubs’ publication,the absence of a clear and explicit theoretical framework for her analyses. There is noexplicit use of theory on discourse analysis, textual analysis, sociology of childhood orreflexive sociology whatsoever. This choice leads to a more factual enunciation of thecontent of six decades of expert educational advice and leaves the interpretationsopen to the reader. However, the use of a theoretical framework would have enabledto deepen the now somewhat shallow analysis of the connections between expertadvice, science and its vulgarisations and social, cultural economical and politicalcontext, as Cunningham pleads for. Indeed many recent historical work form a post-structural development would for instance offer a much more nuanced analysis ofwhat Wubs sees as the turn of 1970 as well as the position of Dr. Spock. One of theinteresting examples is the history-of-the-present research looking at recent changesin constructions of childhood and parenthood that favour the image of autonomouschildren, described by Wubs as individualisation and psychologisation. This post-structural research has elaborated exactly on the interrelatedness of this newdiscourse with general changes such as globalisation/regionalisation and specificpolitical changes in how the welfare state is governed (e.g. B. Franklin et al. (eds.).Governing children, families and education. Restructuring the welfare state. New York:Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, or K. Bloch et al. (eds.). Educational Partnerships and theState. The paradoxes of governing schools, children and families. New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2003). Framing her work in an international tradition would have beenadvantageous to cross-cultural comparison. In her actual work it is very difficult tosee what trends occurred in Western Europe in general or in late modernity for thatmatter, and what specific elements in this story can be explained by the specificitiesof Dutch history. In this way, Wubs’ work can be seen as involuntarily throwing an

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 447

ironic shadow over the position of F. Cusset (French Theory. Foucault, Derrida,Deleuze & Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux Etats-Unis. Paris: La découverte,2003) where he claims the international and general spreading of what has beenlabeled as ‘French Theory’.

These remarks do not contradict what is mentioned in the first lines of this review,namely that Wubs’ work fills a gap in Dutch literature on the history of education andit is her merit to have looked closely at popular literature on education that surroundsus daily and undeniably influences the possibilities of parenting as well as it limitsthem. Having such a historicised look upon this stream of publications may help thecritical discussion on the role of pedagogy in present day society.

MICHEL VANDENBROECK

Ghent University, Belgium© 2007, Michel Vandenbroeck

Die Frühgeschichte des Philantropismus (1715–1771). Konstitutionsbedin-gungen, Praxisfelder und Wirkung eines Pädagogischen Reformprogrammsim Zeitalter der AufklärungJÜRGEN OVERHOFF

Tübingen, Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2004245 pp. [Hallesche Beiträge zur Europäischen Aufklärung] ISBN 3-484-81026-2€68.00

In his ‘Habilitation’ thesis, Jürgen Overhoff wants to examine the core of Basedowseducational ideas and evaluate his originality. At the same time he wants to refute anopinion which is general in historical literature on education, that Basedow’s theoryand practice got its impact when he published Vorstellungen an Menschenfreunde undvermögene Männer über Schulen und Studien und ihren Einfluss in die öffentliche Wohlfartin 1768 and when he established the ‘Philantropinum’ in Dessau in 1774. With anexpression from the German researcher of educational history, Hanno Schmitt, it isDer Philantropismus vor dem Philantropismus, that is the subject of the thesis.

The thesis shows how fruitful it is to connect the history of ideas and discourse withsocial history, and it represents an example of a new trend in German historicalresearch, inspired by Quentin Scinner. The thesis uncovers the discourse of Basedowsown education and offers new knowledge and new interpretations of his intentionsand pedagogical practice. With help from a lot of public and private archives inGermany and Denmark, Overhoff at the same time goes deeply into the near socialand scientific relations of Basedow and shows from the correspondence with nearfriends and critics, how his ideas and educational practice were received in his age. Inthis way Overhoff succeeds in giving the reader of his thesis not only a new knowledgeabout Basedow but also about the frontfigures of the philantropic movement and theirideas, and he can with Basedow as a central person uncover the growing influence thephilantropic movement had in parts of the German state and in Denmark.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

448 Book Reviews

The thesis is clearly built upon the intellectual environments of Basedow from hisyoung years until the beginning of the 1770s. In the first of three chronological chap-ters the reader meets with the educational reform efforts at the Latin school ofHamburg where Basedow appeared as a seven-year-old boy in 1731. The headper-sons are his teachers Michael Richey and Hermann Samuel Reimarus together withthe mental supporter of the school Friedrich von Hagedorn. Richey had been a co-founder of the German scientific society: Teutsch-übende Gesellschaft in 1715 and co-founder of another association in the beginning of the 1720s. Patriotische Gesellschaft,whose first purpose it was to influence the public opinion to better morality andcustoms. In the journal of the society, Der Patriot, it was expressed that bad educationwas the root to ‘unsers mannichfaltigen Unglücks loser Sitten sei’. The society and itsweekly magazine was greatly inspired by the English Spectator and Guardians and bythe educational writings of John Locke.

In the Latin school Basedow also met Reimarus, who some years later was an activemember of a society of the Latin language—Die Lateinische Gesellschaft in Jena—thatbesides a general interest in the German society also wanted to reform the instructionof Latin language by using a more verbal form of teaching instead of learning by heart.At the end of his schooling period, Basedow joined an intellectual team around theEnglish influenced lawyer Friedrich von Hagedorn. He ensured that Basedow got agrant to the University of Leipzig from a rich lawyer Wilckens. Both benefactors werein the following years continually corresponding with Basedow to secure, that heevolved in the right academic way—that is to say that he weighted studying classicsand modern languages and literature and took part in the journal writings at the time.Basedow’s letters to Richey, Reimarus and Hagedorn in the end of the 1750s show,how he valued their critical evaluations of his writings, and how kindred he felt withtheir ideas of moral philosophy, educational ideas and pedagogical methods.

According to Overhoff, Basedow’s development took another direction than hisbenefactors, teachers and friends intended. During his last days in Hamburg he hadbeen very uncomfortable with the Lutheran church’s teaching of revelation. In secrethe visited a private synagogue and he was convinced, that a real piety also could bedeveloped in another religious direction than the Christian one. Because of his newinterest in religious questions, his studies at the University of Leipzig were concen-trated on theology and philosophy. The philosopher and empirist Christian AugustCrusius assisted him through his religious crisis and convinced him that philosophyand theology were not opposite epistemologies. The mathematic-logic epistemologyfrom Christian Wolff’s system of thinking could not give true answers on moral ques-tions. In moral questions you have to build on human experience and have to be satis-fied with probabilities. It was also current for interpretation of the Holy Scriptures.

Basedow began to publish his new opinion on religion and moral in two weeklyjournals in Leipzig: Der Jüngling 1747–48 and Neuen Beyträge zum Vergnügen desVerstandes und Witzes. The questions discussed in Der Jüngling were much the samethat you can read later on in Basedow’s pedagogical–philosophical publications: loveof mankind, friendship, real piety, wish for being useful for society and the world—inother words; patriotism and piety. The other journal, called Bremer Beiträge, was a

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 449

broadly enlightened journal, occupied by literature, theatre, language and of coursepatriotism, piety and education. It was published by Basedow’s friend from his schoolyears, Johann Arnold Ebert and his new friend Johan Andreas Cramer, who later wasappointed Court Chaplain in Denmark. Among the writers were famous men asChristian Fürstegott Gellert and Friedrich Gootlieb Klopstock. In the 1740s BremerBeiträge seems to be a gathering point for social-minded intellectual persons, whowanted to reform the German society through education. In the journal Gellers wrotea comedy Die Betschwester where he attacked religious hypocrisy. In 1748 the firstpart of Klopstocks later so famous ballad opera Messias was published. Messias dealtwith religious tolerance and love of mankind. Sources of inspirations for the journaland its writers were English spectator literature and perhaps also the ethics ofHutcheson.

Overhoff sees the religious tolerance of Gellert as an obvious source of inspirationfor Basedow. After the years in Leipzig Basedow went on at the University of Kiel. Atthe same time he was engaged as a private teacher on the estate of Burghorst. Her hecould experiment with new pedagogical methods and the result was excellent. Theyoung man, von Qualen, had after three years of lessons learned so much of Latin,modern languages, mathematics, history, geography and so on, that as a ten-year-oldboy he was ‘als ein wohlgeübter Gymnasiast’. The pedagogical methods practised atBorghorst Basedow published in a thesis in the Latin language at the university of Kieland in 1752 he got his MA degree. In the same year he published a shortened versionof the paper in the German language. With these two publications he entered thepublic scene with a personal educational programme, and in the following years hewent on developing the programme as professor of ethics and the German languageat the Academy of Sorø in Denmark, and later in Altona.

The two next chapters in the thesis therefore deal with the years in Sorø; 1753–1758and in Altona; 1759–1771. It was his friendship with Klopstock that led Basedow toDenmark. But it was the leading officials in the Danish absolute monarchy, the primeminister, Adam Gottlieb von Moltke, and the minister for foreign policy, JohanHartvig Ernst Bernstorff, who gave Klopstock and Basedow the opportunity to beengaged by the Danish state. As long as Moltke and Bernstorff were in power theyprotected Basedow. In 1758 Basedow published the book: Praktische Philosophie füralle Stände, where he advocated a tolerant religious education. The book opened upan avalanche of critics from orthodox Lutheran church and curiously enough fromthe German literate Lessing. When the Academy got a new leader in autumn 1758who agreed with the critics, Basedow’s time at the Academy was over—and thatalready at Christmas time. But thanks to Bernstorff, Basedow could keep on his titleand salary and was relocated to the Latin school of Altona. Here Basedow was ableto go on practising and developing his educational ideas and could continue his scien-tific interactions with some of the most enlightened people in the Danish monarchy,Johan Andreas Cramer, Jens Schelderup Sneedorff and the educator Martin Ehlersat the Latin school in Segeberg and later on in Oldenburg. The opposition againstBasedow’s educational programme was not yet over. In 1766 Moltke and Bernstorffwent out of power. The new Danish executives would have given Basedow difficulties,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

450 Book Reviews

but at this time he had taken the decision to get out of the public school and to lookfor another protector to help him to establish a model school.

The well written thesis of Jürgen Overhoff gives a fascinating insight into the earlyenlightenment in Germany and Denmark, in at time where the first bullets were castto reform Society by use of a new education. In his book Overhoff convincinglysucceeds in arguing that Basedow already in his young age began developing hisphilosophical-theological and educational ideas, and that he did not work alone withhis ideas. The influence of Richey, Reimarus and Hagedorn in the 1730s was impor-tant and in the 1740s he got new inspiration from among others Gellert, Klopstockand Cramer. John Locke’s educational writings and the English spectator literaturehad a great impact on them all.

According to Overhoff the connection with Crusius made Basedow develop hisethical ideas, that is to say a tolerant religious education, which took its basis in thenear things, the concrete, the easily understood and letting the children wait to readdifficult texts of revelation until they were older—an obvious provocation for theorthodox Lutheran church in Germany and in Denmark. Overhoff’s conclusion isthat the core of Basedow’s educational ideas is the religious dimension. The religiousdimension was the incentive for his activity. This is in a way a correct conclusion, butit should perhaps be slightly modified; that his religious foundation gave him thestrength to fight against the dogmatic methods of the orthodox church’s dogmaticeducation—and that this is the core of his educational ideas.

With a good grasp of the history of ideas combined with a thorough research insocial history Overhoff succeeds in adding new knowledge and new perspectives notonly to Basedow but also to ‘der Philantropismus vor dem Philantropismus’.

INGRID MARKUSSEN

University of Oslo, Norway© 2007, Ingrid Markussen

‘Lerne Vernunft!’. Jüdische Erziehungsprogramme zwischen Tradition undModerne. Quellentexte aus der Zeit der Haskala, 1760–1811ULLA LOHMANN & INGRID LOHMANN (Hrsg.)Münster; New York; München; Berlin, 2005582 pp. [Jüdische Bildungsgeschichte in Deutschland, 6] ISBN 3-8309-1504-7€49.90

Die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland galt bis zum zwanzigsten Jahrhundert alsein besonders gelungenes Beispiel der Emanzipation dieser religiösen Minderheit. Dieso genannte Assimilation war vor allem in Hinblick auf die kulturelle Identität derdeutschsprachigen Juden besonders weit entwickelt, ja das Wort von der “deutsch-jüdischen Symbiose’ machte die Runde. Spätestens seit dem Siegeszug der antisemi-tischen rassistischen Politik des Nationalsozialismus nach 1933 und in seiner Folgeseit der Ermordung der europäischen Juden und der Vernichtung ihrer Kultur ist die

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 451

Vorstellung einer gelungenen Integration der jüdischen Minderheit in Deutschlandobsolet geworden. Zum Verständnis dieses Prozesses von Emanzipation, Assimilationund Ausgrenzung, Verfolgung und Vernichtung im Verlauf des 19. und frühen 20.Jahrhunderts ist die Bildungsgeschichte der Juden von besonderer Bedeutung. Mitden bereits erschienen ersten fünf Bänden zur jüdischen Bildungsgeschichte hat dieGruppe um Ingrid Lohmann bereits drei Monographien zur bildungsgeschichtlichenErforschung des Verhältnisses von Juden und Deutschen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundertvorgelegt, ergänzt durch einen Quellenband. Mit dem hier zu besprechenden Buchlegen Ulla und Ingrid Lohmann einen weiteren Quellenband zur so genannten‘Sattelzeit’ vor. War der erste Quellenband ‘Chevrath Chinuch Neavrim. Die jüdischeFreischule in Berlin (1778–1825) im Umfeld preußischer Bildungspolitik undjüdischer Kultusreform (2001)’ thematisch an der Geschichte einer Institution orien-tiert, so haben die beiden Herausgeberinnen sich in dem hier zu besprechenden Bandauf programmatische Debatten über das Bildungsverständnis der jüdischen Aufkläreraus dem gesamten deutschsprachigen Raum konzentriert. In acht Abschnitten wirddie Entwicklung des modernen Bildungsverständnisses der Juden in Mitteleuropadokumentiert. Damit gelingt es den Herausgeberinnen, entscheidende Schritte dieserreligiös und sozial abgeschlossenen Gruppe auf dem Weg in die christlich geprägteMehrheitsgesellschaft nachvollziehbar zu machen und Denkfiguren und Positionen zuverdeutlichen, die die innerjüdische Diskussion über das Verhältnis von Vernunft undReligion bis in die dreißiger Jahre des 20. Jahrhunderts geprägt haben. Dabei habendie Herausgeberinnen vor allem darauf geachtet, die Dokumente so auszuwählen,dass die Umwälzungen des Zeitalters widergespiegelt werden. Die FranzösischeRevolution und die in ihrem Umfeld stattfindende Debatte um die ‘Emancipation’oder ‘bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden’ sind die äußeren und politischenEreignisse, moderne Wissenschaft und damit einhergehende Veränderungen derAuffassung vom Menschen als Vernunftwesen jenseits religiöser Zuordnungenmarkieren die Veränderungen des Welt- und Menschenbildes. Als terminus postquem wählten die Herausgeberinnen wohlbegründet den Zeitpunkt des Erscheinensdes ersten zweisprachigen hebräisch-deutschen Bibellexikons als Datum für die durchdie Aufklärung initiierte Programmatik, die jüdische Kultur und Religion mit derSprache und Kultur des Aufenthaltslandes zu verknüpfen. Einen gewissen Abschlussbildet nach Meinung der Herausgeberinnen das königliche Dekret vom März 1812zur Einbürgerung der Juden in Preußen. Die aufklärerische Programmatik einerkulturellen Verknüpfung mit der umgebenden Gesellschaft wird unter verschiedenenAspekten systematisiert, die an inhaltlichen Themen, an literarischen Gattungen undan institutionell definierten Schriftgattungen orientiert sind.

Begonnen wird mit zwei Abschnitten, in denen Quellen zusammengestellt sind, diedie klassischen Themen der Aufklärung diskutieren: Zum einen geht es um dasVerhältnis von Tora und Vernunft, Talmud und Wissenschaft, zum anderen um dasvon Sittlichkeit und Religion. Komplizierter als für die deutsche Aufklärung stellt sichfür die jüdischen Aufklärer das Thema von Schreib- und Spracherwerb dar, ange-sichts der sprachlichen Situation der jüdischen Gemeinde zwischen Jiddisch,Hebräisch und Deutsch. Auch die Frage der Bildungspolitik im Prozess der Bildung

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

452 Book Reviews

des Nationalstaats, eingeläutet durch die Bildungspolitik der französischenRevolution, fortgeführt durch Napoleon und seine allfälligen Nachahmer in Europa,bedeutete für eine religiöse und kulturelle Minderheit etwas anderes als für diesprachlich und religiös homogenere Mehrheitsbevölkerung: Ob die Juden überhauptzu Patrioten erzogen werden können, wurde zunächst von Repräsentanten der christ-lichen Mehrheitsgesellschaft infrage gestellt, aber auch jüdische Traditionalistenstanden dem Projekt einer Nationalerziehung kritisch gegenüber. Insofern gilt fürdiese Frage mehr noch als für andere, dass die jüdischen Aufklärer einen Kampfan zwei Fronten führten: einen nach innen und einen nach außen. Im siebten undachten Teil stellen die Herausgeberinnen mit Schulreden und Einführungen inLehrbücher Texte zusammen, die das Projekt der Emanzipation durch Bildung prak-tisch umsetzten.

Bei der Lektüre der Quellen fällt vor allem auf, wie stark viele der hier wiedergege-benen Texte der jüdischen Tradition verbunden sind: Die Rede in Bildern undGleichnissen, Bewahrung einer literarischen und argumentativen Tradition, in der dieSchreibenden ausgebildet sind, prägt auch ihre Beiträge zur ‘Modernisierung’ derjüdischen Religion und Kultur und vermittelt einen Eindruck von der bis ins 18.Jahrhundert viel schwächer durch Synkretismus, Amagalmierung und Reformation alsdie christlichen Kirchen bestimmten religiösen und kulturellen Welt der mitteleu-ropäischen Juden. Umso überraschender ist, wie schnell einzelne Gruppen derjüdischen Gemeinde in Deutschland und Teilen der Habsburger Monarchie das tradi-tionelle Lernverständnis an aufklärerisches Gedankengut adaptieren. Religion wirdvon diesen Autoren ähnlich wie bei den der Philanthropen zum Synonym von Sittli-chkeit. In dem titelgebenden Imperativ des Quellenbandes: ‘Lerne Vernunft!’ findetdiese Adaption ihren prägnanten Ausdruck. Die Vision eines aufgeklärten Zusammen-lebens der unterschiedlichen religiösen Gruppen in einem modernen Staatswesen,dessen Bürger gleiche politische Rechte genießen, wird zum tragenden Fundamentder jüdischen Aufklärung. Gleichzeitig weisen die Herausgeberinnen in ihrer Einlei-tung darauf hin, dass nach wenigen Jahrzehnten, in denen diese Ideen entwickeltwurden, bereits zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhundert aus dem Geist romantischerNationalerziehung Stimmen von führenden deutschen Intellektuellen mit antijü-dischem Tenor laut wurden. Die jüdischen Aufklärer setzten sich kritisch mit diesenEinwänden gegen eine Integration der jüdischen Minderheit auseinander. Gewonnenhaben in diesen Auseinandersetzung um eine Integration der Juden in die christlichgeprägte Gesellschaft und in den Nationalstaat des 19. Jahrhunderts, die sich im hierbetrachten Zeitraum noch im Stadium einer theoretischen Kontroverse befand, auflange Sicht die antijüdischen Ideologien. Bereits im zweiten Jahrzehnt des 19.Jahrhunderts führten diese vereinzelt zu politischer Bedrohung (sogenannte Hepp-Hepp—Unruhen 1819) und nach der Reichsgründung zu heftigem Antisemitismus.

Es ist den Herausgeberinnen mit diesem Quellenband gelungen, zum Verständnisdes Projekts einer Emanzipation durch Bildung beizutragen. Die Einleitung führt indie wichtigsten Publikationsmittel und den intellektuellen Diskurs innerhalb derjüdischen Aufklärer ein und ermöglich damit eine Einordnung der Dokumente. DerQuellenband ergänzt die oben erwähnten monographischen Studien zur jüdischen

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 453

Bildungsgeschichte und eröffnet einen Zugang auch für Leserinnen und Leser ohneSprachkenntnisse des Hebräischen und des Jüdisch-deutschen zu Texten, die diebesondere Ausgangslage dieser Minderheit dokumentieren. Die hervorragendeQualität der Übersetzungen soll deshalb noch einmal besonders hervorgehobenwerden. Ergänzt durch den etwas zeitgleich erschienenen Band des Handbuchs derdeutschen Bildungsgeschichte Bd. 2 für das 18. Jahrhundert, in dem die jüdischeAufklärung zur Darstellung kommt, ist zu hoffen, dass die Wahrnehmung derbildungsgeschichtlichen Dimension der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland durchdiesen Quellenband weiter geschärft wird.

JULIANE JACOBI

Universität Potsdam, Deutschland© 2007, Juliane Jacobi

Children of World War II. The hidden enemy legacyKJERSTI ERICSSON & EVA SIMONSEN (EDS.)Oxford; New York, Berg, 2005296 pp., ISBN 1-84520-207-4

Le volume précité constitue le résultat indirect d’un projet du ‘programme de recher-che Bien-être’ du Conseil norvégien de la recherche scientifique ayant pour objetd’étudier la discrimination subie par les enfants nés de mères norvégiennes et d’occu-pants allemands. Dans le courant de la recherche, un réseau européen d’historiens aété impliqué dans les travaux. En 2002–2003, deux workshops internationaux se sontréunis sur le thème plus large des enfants de guerre en Europe. Ce volume qui parlede silences publics et personnels, de honte et de faute, d’enfants en même temps visi-bles et invisibles en est le résultat.

Dans un contexte géographique sont abordés l’Europe du nord (Norvège etDanemark), de l’ouest (France, Espagne, Pays-Bas), de l’est (URSS et Bohème-Moravie) et l’Allemagne. L’Espagne est comprise dans la recherche en se référant auxenfants ‘républicains’ de la guerre civile, considérés comme dangereux et dépravéspar le régime de Franco, l’Allemagne d’après 1945 eu égard aux enfants de soldats(noirs) US. Dans les 14 articles rassemblés dans cet ouvrage, on peut discerner cinqproblématiques. La première s’intéresse au constat qu’après-guerre la manièred’appréhender les enfants appelés aux Pays-Bas ‘enfants de Boche’, avait un certainrapport avec les prémisses idéologiques nazies. Deux: il apparaît qu’à travers mères etenfants, corps et sexualité, les adversaires des nazis menaient aussi des politiquesdémographiques quantitatives et qualitatives. Une troisième problématique est cellede gender, nation et guerre. La façon de traiter les femmes accusées de ‘collaborationhorizontale’ avait clairement un rapport avec la façon d’appréhender la sexualitéféminine comme une ressource nationale qui devait être déniée à l’ennemi. Lequatrième thème qui traverse les contributions est celui des enfants vus par les expertset les scientifiques. Le regard ‘scientifique’ nazi sur les formes ‘inférieures’ de vie

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

454 Book Reviews

humaine est connu. Mais plusieurs auteurs s’intéressent aussi au rôle ‘politique’ demédecins, psychologues et autres experts pendant l’après-guerre, lesquelsconsidéraient les enfants ‘déviants’ comme sujets et objets de recherche sociale dansle contexte d’une éventuelle menace pour la stabilité sociale retrouvée. Et enfin, il ya évidemment le vécu même des enfants: ils étaient ‘autres’. C’est précisément laconstruction de l’‘autre’ qui est un des fils conducteurs de ce volume.

Ce bref survol permet de situer les différentes contributions dans un contexte pluslarge. Le constat de Kjersti Ericsson de la permanence de certaines prémissesidéologiques traverse en effet plusieures contributions. Diederichs pour les Pays-Baset Waring pour le Danemark montrent que les modèles quasi racistes et certainementsexistes appliqués aux femmes après la Libération sont plutôt caractéristiques d’unesociété fasciste que d’une société libérale. Par ailleurs, il semblerait qu’il n’y ait paseu de rapport direct entre les violences envers femmes et enfants après 1945 etla violence de guerre. En ce qui concerne les politiques démographiques Olsen,Diederichs, Mühlhäuser, Simunek, Virgili, Richards, Borgersrud et Drolshagen tour-nent leur attention vers le ‘Lebensborn’ et le ‘matériel humain’ aryen, mais aussi versle statut juridique inférieur de femmes des ‘territoires occupés à l’est’ en cas de violet encore vers la définition variable de ce qu’était un enfant aryen. C’était évidemmentle cas pour les enfants de père allemand et de mère scandinave et néerlandaise, maisles enfants de père allemand et d’une mère originaire des territoires de l’est n’étaientpas automatiquement (Mühlhäuser) considérés comme non-aryens.

A la Libération, nouveau jeu politique avec les enfants: dans certains pays, ils étaientperçus comme Allemands; d’autres par contre les intégraient de gré ou de force. C’étaitsurtout la Norvège (Borgersrud) qui faisait du sort des Wehrmachtskinder une questionofficielle.

Pour ce qui est de la problématique de gender et de nation, à travers plusieurscontributions, on en arrive au constat paradoxal d’une déstabilisation des pratiquestraditionnelles suite à la guerre mais couplée à un durcissement des normes tradition-nelles de gender. En effet, la sexualité semble plus que jamais une question de survieet d’honneur national.

En ce qui concerne le regard ‘scientifique’, l’après-guerre ouvre l’ère du psychiatre.Les Wehrmachtskinder sont considérés biologiquement et socialement en danger etdangereux, et sont donc objets de soins psychologiques et de contrôle. Ericssonremarque que des concepts eugéniques semblables qui, pendant la guerre, font que cesenfants sont considérés comme du matériel biologiquement précieux, aboutissent après1945 à une conception des enfants tenus pour porteurs de ‘chromosomes de mères demoeurs légères’. En effet, différents experts craignent une prédisposition des enfants àla criminalité et aux déviances anti-démocratiques. Dans l’Espagne de Franco (Rich-ards), le même raisonnement théorique de rapport (hypothétique) entre pathologiementale et attitudes politiques se retrouve en rapport avec les enfants de républicains.

Par ailleurs, l’eugénisme n’était pas un unicum allemand. Avant et après-guerre,presque tous les Etats mènent une politique sociale, instaurent une législation sur lastérilisation et une règlementation de l’immigration etc. Les auteurs auraient puajouter: pas de génocide juif sans les idées eugéniques du XIXe siècle.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 455

Pour conclure, on peut constater que ce volume est extrêmement riche maissurtout qu’il en finit une fois pour toutes avec les tabous et les silences qui pendantdes dizaines d’années, pesaient sur cette problématique douloureuse. Quelquesregrets quand même. Plusieurs pays manquent dans l’ouvrage; pour la Belgique parexemple une recherche initiée par Chantal Kesteloot n’est pas mentionnée. Du côtécomparatif pays ‘coupables’—pays ‘victimes’, l’on aurait aimé voir inclure l’Italie. Etl’aspect comparatif chronologique avec la Première Guerre mondiale est peut-êtrel’objet d’un prochain workshop…1

DIRK MARTIN

Centre d’Etudes et de Documentation Guerre et Sociétés Contemporaines, Belgique© 2007, Dirk Martin

Social Education in the Twentieth Century. Curriculum and Context forCitizenshipCHRISTINE WOYSHNER, JOSEPH WATRAS, & MARGARET SMITH (Eds)New York; Bern; Berlin, Peter Lang, 2004xxv+233 pp. [History of Schools and Schooling, 32], ISBN 0-8204-6247-0, €25

With Samuel Huntington’s highly dubious suggestions determining the course ofnations and vehement-tending-violent discussions of the merits and evils of multi-culturalism becoming daily fare in Europe, it is good to remember that these mattershave long been the subject of serious concern. A solution proposed long ago involvedthe inculcation of a sense of responsible world citizenship and mutual interculturalrespect. The obvious institution to perform this noble, humankind-saving task wasand is the school

As long as there have been schools, they have been assigned and accepted the taskof preparing their charges for adult life in the real world, of transmitting knowledgeand forming skills deemed useful or virtuous in one way or another. There, it seems,the agreement ends. The very nature of the ‘real world’, the content of the knowledge,the nature of the skills, the specification of the virtues, the methods used to impartthat knowledge, form those skills, and instil those virtues, and the ways of evaluatingthe results have always been disputed. Socrates was compelled to drink hemlockbecause of what he was teaching and there seems to be little sign that feelings havedampened or consensus reached on what and how the young should be taught.Education, institutionalized and otherwise, is a powerful tool and no society couldlong survive without it. It is, therefore, a matter well worth our attention and concern.

In the United States, the formation of citizens as an articulated political concerndates to the very foundation of the republic and the use of schools to meet the needsof democracy was an abiding concern throughout the nineteenth century. Social

1 A consulter: War and Children Identity Project (WCIP), Rafto Human Rights House,Menneskerettighetenes Plass 1, 5007 Bergen/Norwegen ⟨www.warandchildren.org⟩

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

456 Book Reviews

Education in the Twentieth Century takes up the story with the foundation of socialstudies proper out of the progressive education movement.

The authors of the 13 chapters of the book certainly cannot be charged with vague-ness or unwillingness to take positions on their topics. They are clearly and confi-dently in the line of John Dewey’s programmatic position cited at the outset: ‘I believethat education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social conscious-ness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this socialconsciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction’ (p. ix). The definingof the ‘social consciousness’ to be developed and the methods used to adjust the ‘indi-vidual activity’ have been at the core of sometimes bitter controversy ever since.

Social studies as a portion of the primary and secondary school curriculum, a mixof history, geography, economics, and political science with, on occasion, topics rele-vant to the personal lives of the students, seems particularly suited in the project ‘toincrease students’ affection for and understanding of democracy’ (p. xii). Assimilationand Americanization were constant concerns, the motto of the Veterans of ForeignWars in 1921: ‘One flag, one language, one country’, but concern for and appreciationof a multi-cultural America also developed, in and out of the schools. The authorshere track the controversies, successes, and failures into the post-9/11 era.

This is a fascinating and most informative book that tells how the ambitious social-engineering projects of the Interbellum collided with the conservative backlash of theCold War, how interculturalism rose, was challenged, declined, and survived, howpostmodernism and its associated topics like feminism and postcolonialism came andwent but now seem to be returning, how, indeed, the curricular ambitions of thereformers themselves have collided with the ‘grammar of schooling’ (Larry Cuban iscited once and elsewhere referred to once, although the term is not used). Indeed, thesocial studies curriculum has been more stable since the early 1900s than changing,as Stephen J. Thornton notes in his summary chapter at the end of the book. Anychanges that have occurred in either content or method have been incremental andgradual. The great educational projects of alleviating social ills or of maintaining theWASP conservative vision of society seem to have failed in their attempts to mobilizeteachers and students in the classroom. Attitudes on race and civil rights are difficultto change by the school and ‘contemporary living’ courses tend to gravitate towardsthe academic. Students study for the examination and teachers teach for evaluation.When the ultimate evaluation is success in college admission tests, time is not wastedon immeasurable, albeit praiseworthy, objectives like character formation. Ambitionsto change the curriculum by edict and new materials have met with little success.Teaching methods have proven to be particularly intractable.

In spite of the difficulty of measuring the success of social studies curricula and thefundamental divergences in the definition of that success, nobody seems to be willingto abandon the project. What happens in the school is universally held to be signifi-cant and there have never been any lack of projects to improve it. Throughout thehistory of social studies, everyone has always agreed that the situation is, at least,disastrous. Recalling my own experience of social studies in the late 1950s in theUnited States, I can only concur.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 457

Those responsible for coping with the cultural and intercultural conflicts now beset-ting Europe would do well to read this book. Some things have been tried and failed.Others have been successful. Certainly, it would prevent anyone from becoming over-ambitious about the role the school can play in resolving the social problems of a multi-cultural society. A role it certainly has and one that is certainly worth arguing about.

There seems to be little evidence that preaching and teaching goodness and thevirtues are particularly effective in actually generating good and virtuous people.Preaching and teaching the contrary, however, certainly has always been most effec-tive. Thus, we will continue to experiment with, and argue about, our schools and themethods used, attempting to enlist them on the side of virtue and wisdom. How weare to do it is a problem that is as old as education itself. Social Education in theTwentieth Century makes a valuable contribution to that discussion. Thornton’sconclusion is worth citing (p. 217):

The 9/11 attacks reminded everyone of how basic social studies education is. We ignore itat our peril. The attacks on New York and Washington have been followed by American-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Domestically, the federal government ahs assumednew, broad powers to protect ‘homeland’ security. The lines between domestic issues suchas civil liberties and international issues such a combating terrorism have become blurred.

Educating young people to be caring and competent citizens in such a nation and worldwill require far more than sporadic attention to current events or beefing up the treatmentof Islamic countries in a standard global history and geography course. A combination ofcurriculum change and retooling teacher education for the domestic and internationaldimensions of globalization is needed. It is too soon to say if such fundamental changeswill come about. But judging by social studies changes in response to past crises as docu-mented in this book, the most positive likely outcome may be incremental and additivechanges rather than fundamental reformulation of curriculum and instruction. Nonetheless,it is worth asking what we mean by one current mantra of educational reform—‘world class’standards—if we fail to adequately educate citizens for the world we live in.

EDWARD HAASL

KULeuven, Belgium© 2007, Edward Haasl

America’s Public Schools: From the Common School to ‘No Child LeftBehind’WILLIAM J. REESE

Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005355 pp., ISBN 0-8018-8195-1 (hard cover), $50; 0-8018-8196-X (Paperback),$21.95

Writing a new history of public education in the United States is a highly structuredundertaking, in many ways akin to composing a haiku or a villanelle. The basic archi-tecture of the composition is pre-set. For example, an historian of public schooling inthe U.S. can no more avoid writing about Horace Mann and common schools, the

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

458 Book Reviews

Report of the Committee of Ten, or the Brown vs. the Board of Education decision thana poet could add syllables to a haiku or change the rhyme scheme of a villanelle. Thegreat challenge of all three of these undertakings is accepting the limits of these struc-tures and, working within them, to produce something that is engaging, insightful,elegant, and new. William J. Reese’s book, America’s Public Schools: From the CommonSchool to ‘No Child Left Behind’, meets all of these criteria.

Within the constraints of the genre, Reese makes a number of novel and interestingmoves. First, as the title of the book indicates, he compresses the main story ofAmerican education into a shorter time span than most historians have used. Hebegins the story in the early nineteenth century, the period in which public educationin the United States became systematized. Sensitive to the genre, he does not ignoreimportant developments in the colonial or early federal era; indeed these develop-ments make regular appearances as part of the back-story for important issues andtrends. But Reese’s history is distinctive because it contains no sections or chaptersdedicated to such topics as the Puritans or the debates about education among themembers of the revolutionary generation.

Second, Reese innovatively expands the cast of characters beyond those who havetypically played substantial roles in this story. For example, Reese taps into the liter-ary heritage of the nineteenth century, highlighting such English and American poetsand writers as William Blake, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, and RalphWaldo Emerson whose influence on American education has been subtle butprofound. Reese finds in their writings a vision of children’s goodness and innocence;a sense that a new form of education could protect and nurture these traits throughhumane teaching; and the belief that such education would enable people to maintaintheir humanity in a world increasingly dominated by what Blake called the ‘dark,Satanic mills’ of the Industrial Revolution. These ideas contributed to such powerfulcritiques of traditional schooling as progressive education, the ‘romantic’ reforms ofthe 1960s, and constructivist pedagogy today.

Besides bringing these new writers and thinkers into the American educationalnarrative, Reese also spends much more time than other historians have on individu-als who challenged the educational ideas that these great literary figures helpedinspire, for example, William Torrey Harris, William Chandler Bagley, and ArthurBestor. Because they defended ‘traditional’, discipline-based education, other histo-rians have often characterized these scholars and teachers as crusty conservatives whostood in the way of educational progress. But Reese quickly dismisses such assess-ments and instead presents these individuals as representatives of a thoughtful, legit-imate, and often devastatingly accurate critical tradition. He shows that they providedan important counterpoint to the excesses that often characterized progressivereforms in the first half of the twentieth century.

These modifications of conventional educational history work in tandem with thethird change Reese introduces in this book, namely his argument that the origins ofthe great battles over subject matter content and pedagogical methods, which haveshaped most of American curricular history, began long before John Dewey first spec-ulated about schools and society, and children and curricula. Indeed, by tracing the

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 459

roots of that struggle deep in the nineteenth century Reese seems to be arguing thatclashes such as those between ‘progressive’ and ‘traditional’ reformers are merelymanifestations of a larger, dialectical struggle that historians and policy makers canrecognize but never resolve.

This theme may be the most important one that Reese traces through his book, but itis hardly the only one that he develops. For example, Reese also explores the Americanpenchant for using schools to solve any and often all the social problems that plaguethe nation. He carefully demonstrates how the mission of public schooling has gonefrom primarily teaching basic skills, along with a smattering of civics, geography,history, and literature in the Common School era, to an institution that, in additionto instructing students in an expansive array of academic and non-academic subjects,is also expected to assimilate immigrants, teach respect for cultural diversity, endpoverty, improve race relations, ensure that the United States maintains its economiccompetitiveness, reduce drug abuse, train teenage drivers to be safe on the road, andconvince adolescents to abstain from sex. This would be an absurd and untenablemission for any institution, but as Reese repeatedly observes, that fact has not deterredAmericans from insisting that schools solve whatever ills beset the nation, and just asquickly blaming them when the schools fail to live up to these lofty expectations.

In tracing these themes, Reese builds his arguments on a foundation of rich andthorough scholarship. Moreover, he draws from a range of new and different sources.Based on this research Reese’s reconstruction of American educational historyroutinely offers fresh insights, new quotes, and vivid details that support his claimsand enliven every chapter.

Yet because this book is so beautifully rendered, one wishes for more. For example,a section or chapter about Colonial America that emphasized the enormous role reli-gion played in the development of American education would have deepened hisdiscussion of events in the nineteenth century. Many of the ideas of the nineteenthcentury poets and writers that Reese introduces were rooted in their rebellion againstthe harsh and intemperate religious views of the period. For example, Wordsworth’svision of innocent children entering the world ‘trailing clouds of glory… / From God,who is our home’ directly challenged ideas about original sin that were common inthe seventeenth century, and were still influential in the United States and Britain inthe eighteenth century.

In addition to supporting and deepening Reese’s ideas about ‘romantic’ educa-tional reform in the nineteenth century, devoting more time to the long and complexrelationship between religion and education in the United States would havestrengthened the book’s insights into current debates about educational politics andpolicy in which ‘That Old Time Religion’ has made a powerful comeback. Wellbeyond the occasional outbursts over teaching evolution or permitting prayer inschools, two of the most important educational developments in the U.S. today arethe rise of private religious academies and the increasing number of religious peoplewho home-school their children. In both cases these movements were spurred bydesires to avoid the relativistic child-centered reforms that supposedly dominatemodern public schools. These developments, especially when coupled with demands

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

460 Book Reviews

for government supported school choice schemes, represent some of the most seriouschallenges to the idea of the common school in American educational history. Howthese trends relate to previous conflicts about religion are questions that needed addi-tional attention.

Yet even without attention to such questions, America’s Public Schools: From theCommon School to ‘No Child Left Behind’ is a brilliant contribution to the field. It is agracefully written, well-researched, and deeply engaging book that deserves a widereadership.

JEFFREY MIREL

University of Michigan, USA© 2007, Jeffrey Mirel

The Elusive Ideal: Equal Educational Opportunity and the Federal Role inBoston’s Public Schools, 1950–1985ADAM NELSON

Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005325 pp., ISBN 0-226-57190-4, 27.50 US$

In the Elusive Ideal, Adam Nelson offers a provocative intellectual history of the policyconflicts affecting the Boston public schools in the last half of the twentieth century.Nelson analyzes overlapping debates about special education, integration, and bilin-gual education, and how they changed across four decades. As he profiles majoractors in these debates—local superintendents, state and federal commissioners ofeducation, and federal judges—Nelson considers how they responded to, and helpedshape, a complex array of federal, state and local policy. At its core, The Elusive Idealinvestigates the contradictions among policies developed to meet the same goal—equal educational opportunity. For Nelson, the primary contradiction was betweenpolicies discouraging racial imbalance and policies supporting separate programs forthe disadvantaged, disabled, and non-English speaking. Nelson argues that thesecompeting approaches to equal opportunity were, on the whole, more subtractivethan additive, because it was not possible to implement one policy without detractingfrom the other. And, in the end, he questions whether either approach was meant toimprove academic achievement.

Nelson’s argument proceeds through his narrative of how successive Boston super-intendents and their school committees negotiated their way through court orders,fiscal incentives and disincentives, and changes in funding formulas. Superintendentsin the 1950s, 60s and 70s all contended with the imperative to provide equal educa-tion opportunities by improving racial balance. But, in some instances, courts, policymakers and even parents demanded equal education for special populations throughisolated, separate programs that exacerbated, rather than alleviated, racial imbalance.Nelson argues that sometimes the incompatibility between such policies was clearonly in retrospect. However, he also shows how superintendents made strategic

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 461

choices based on what would yield maximum resources and minimum public contro-versy. By the 1980s, Nelson argues, such choices were not as mediated because of theseismic shift in policy-makers’ belief that integration would inherently lead toacademic achievement. This shift changed the nature of the policy conflict that hadendured throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s. It also changed the way superintendentspursued reform.

Nelson nicely situates policy developments in appropriate historical contexts,giving the reader a clear sense of how the nation’s powerful intellectual currents influ-enced key directions in education reform. His chapter headings signal these shifts. Hischapter on the early 1960s, for example, is entitled ‘Defining Disadvantage asDisability.’ In tracing this link between poverty and disability, Nelson adds an impor-tant educational dimension to existing policy histories on this topic, such as DarylMichael Scott’s Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged BlackPsyche, 1880–1996.1 But though Nelson describes the way the Boston superintendentresponded to policies that conflated disadvantage with disability, his account providesless clarity about how politics shaped the origins of such policies. While Nelsonaddresses key political shifts in the White House, he dwells less on the politicaldynamics within the state legislature, Boston’s local school committee and diverseBoston grassroots movements.

Recent scholarship by Jeanne Theoharis, traces the trajectory of the Boston civilrights movement for equal educational opportunity from the 1940s through the1970s. Nelson might have drawn on Theoharis’ urban history to explore some of theorigins of the policies he describes. As Nelson acknowledges, education policies didnot simply emerge from Harvard’s commons, where many federal and state commis-sioners, as well as superintendents, developed their perspectives on education and theBoston school system. Equal opportunity policies were also driven and shaped bysocial movements. To be sure, Nelson follows Louisa Day Hicks, a controversial civicleader and elected official who opposed busing and racial balance measures. ButNelson’s treatment of other political and civic leaders such as Ruth Batson, a majorcivil rights figure in the Boston education movement, mostly serves as background forhis examination of the thoughts and actions of elite reformers and government offi-cials. Although it is not possible to cover everything, a social movement perspectiveof certain policy origins might have illuminated Nelson’s important examination ofthe state’s role in education policymaking in the 1960s and 70s. According to popularperception, the rise of state activism began in the late 1980s with the rise of the stan-dards and accountability movement. But Nelson’s narrative suggests that in the 1960sand 70s, at least in Massachusetts, the state was as active as the federal government.2

1 Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press,1997.2 Theoharis, Jeanne F. ‘I’d Rather Go to School in the South: How Boston’s School Desegregation

Complicates the Civil Rights Paradigm,’ in Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South,1940-1980, edited by Theoharis, Jeanne F. and Komozi Woodard. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,2003: 125–51.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

462 Book Reviews

The following example illustrates Nelson’s focus on the emergent state role.First, Nelson argues that Boston was sometimes ahead of the curve in relation toother cities, and sometimes even in relation to federal legislation. But apparentlythis was due in large part to the Massachusetts state legislature. Nelson shows howin 1965, Boston school administrators scrambled to qualify for new sources offederal funding to support compensatory programs for disadvantaged students aspart of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). As one administra-tor put it, ‘We’re not just picking up spare federal change - we’re in this game for along time’ (p. 43). But the federal government deferred the funds pending an inves-tigation into allegations by a national civil rights group of de facto segregation inthe Boston school system. This was the first time a Northern school system wascharged with discrimination based on de facto segregation. If the allegations wereproven accurate, the school system would not be eligible for federal funds underTitle VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited the use of federal dollarsto further racial discrimination. The question was whether de facto segregationconstituted discrimination.

The Boston school committee dug in its heels, denying that the school system inten-tionally practiced racial segregation. But the state legislature challenged the schoolcommittee’s position, passing its own racial imbalance law in 1965, which held thatno school could qualify for state funds if it was over 50% minority. The state’s supportfor a law that sustained a connection between racial imbalance and racial discrimina-tion was, according to Nelson, the first law of its kind in the country. However, Nelsoncarefully follows the ways in which these state policies did not produce their intendedresults, in part because racial balance and special-compensatory policies worked atcross purposes. Still, it would be interesting to know how, and why, state legislatorstook such a strong position on racial balance.

Similarly, Nelson describes how the state, in 1972, passed a landmark specialeducation law which required schools to provide a free and appropriate education inthe least restrictive environment. Once again, Nelson points out that this legislation,a result of legal action and local activism, was the first such law in the country. Suchaggressive state activism in educational policy in the 1960s and early 1970s suggeststhat the dominant interpretation of this period, as an era of federal activism, mightrequire revision. But it also suggests that scholars should be cautious about compart-mentalizing the history of education policy. This is one of Nelson’s lasting contribu-tions. By following the dynamic interrelationship of federal, state and local policy,Nelson’s conceptual map helps us understand the different ways in which policymakers thought they could enhance equal educational opportunity, and the reasonswhy they failed.

HEATHER LEWIS

Pratt Institute, New York, USA© 2007, Heather Lewis

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 463

Die neue Richtung der Erwachsenenbildung in Thüringen 1919–1933BETTINA IRINA REIMERS

Essen, Klartext Verlag, 2003792 pp. [Geschichte und Erwachsenenbildung, 16], ISBN 3-89861-237-6

Ein weiteres Buch über die “neue Richtung’ der Erwachsenenbildung, macht das Sinn?Ist diese nicht bereits genügend erforscht? Sind nicht vielmehr andere Bereiche derErwachsenenbildung der Weimarer Republik Forschungsdesiderate? Wer sich—durchaus mit diesen Fragen im Kopf—in die—im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes gewich-tige—Studie von Bettina Irina Reimers vertieft, wird eines Besseren belehrt. Inwiefern?Zum einen: Reimers Arbeit ist immens quellengesättigt; sie hat eine Vielzahl neuerQuellen für die Forschung erschlossen, z. B. Vereinsakten, Sitzungsprotokolle,Personalakten, Presseverlautbarungen, Korrespondenzen sowie Dokumentationenvon Veranstaltungsabläufen; hierfür hat sie eine eindrucksvolle Sucharbeit in Archivengeleistet sowie mit einer großen Zahl von Zeitzeugen bzw. deren NachkommenKontakt aufgenommen und auch private Nachlässe für ihre Forschung fruchtbargemacht. Zum zweiten: Bei Reimers Arbeit handelt es sich um eine historisch-deskriptive Regionalstudie. Ihre Untersuchung erstreckt sich auf ganz Thüringen,bezieht die Volkshochschulen in der Stadt und auf dem Land in ihre Analyse mit ein,davon ausgehend, dass jede der Volkshochschulen in Thüringen ihr spezifischesProfil hatte. Allerdings ‘nur’ die Volkshochschulen (in ihren unterschiedlichenErscheinungsformen)—der für die Studie gewählte Begriff der “Erwachsenenbildung’ist somit nicht ganz korrekt.

Auf der Basis reichen, häufig neu entdeckten bzw. erschlossenen Quellenmaterialssowie den Blick auf ganz Thüringen gerichtet, bringt auch der erste Teil ihrerStudie—Entstehung, Organisation und Entwicklung des Vereins Volkshochschule Thürin-gen—neue Erkenntnisse. Hier möchte ich vor allem die Kapitel über Mitarbeiter undHörer, über die Vielfalt der Organisationsformen, über das Verhältnis der ‘freien’ zur‘gebundenen’ Volksbildung sowie über das Ende des Vereins VolkshochschuleThüringen unter nationalsozialistischem Einfluss nennen. Gerade die akribischeAuswertung von Quellen für das letztgenannte Kapitel zeigt sehr plastisch denProzess der (Selbst-)Gleichschaltung; vor diesem Hintergrund hätte sich m. E. ange-boten, sich mit dem Neutralitätspostulat der neuen Richtung kritisch auseinander-zusetzen und die politischen Grundeinstellungen führender Vertreter derselben einerdifferenzierten Betrachtung zu unterziehen. Zu selbstverständlich charakterisiertReimers m. E. ihre Zielsetzung als demokratisch.

Aber es ist die pädagogische Praxis, die im Zentrum der vorliegenden Studiesteht (ausdrücklich im zweiten Teil)—das ist ihr drittes großes Verdienst. In seinerDarstellung über die Erwachsenenbildung der Weimarer Republik im Handbuch derdeutschen Bildungsgeschichte Bd. V (1989) beklagt Langewiesche zu Recht, dass dieVolkshochschulpraxis bis dato ein ‘weithin unerforschtes Feld’ sei (S. 338). In derStudie von Reimers wird die Praxis der Volkshochschule Thüringen detailliert undplastisch beschrieben, illustriert mit aufschlussreichem Bildmaterial, häufig ausPrivatbesitz. Lehrziele, -inhalte, -methoden und -materialien werden an vielen

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

464 Book Reviews

Beispielen aus der konkreten Volkshochschularbeit veranschaulicht, die Idee derArbeitsgemeinschaft bleibt nicht abstrakt, sondern wird ganz konkret vor Augengeführt. Deutlich wird auch, welch zentrale Rolle die Handlungsorientierung für dieVolkshochschularbeit in Thüringen spielte und wie sehr das Bestreben danachgerichtet war, aus Arbeitsgemeinschaften Lebensgemeinschaften werden zu lassen.Fest und Feier hatten in diesem Kontext einen hohen Stellenwert; die Praxis derJugendbewegung war in der Thüringer Volkshochschularbeit sehr präsent.

Ein sehr aufschlussreiches Kapitel stellt auch das über zielgruppenorientierteArbeit dar, wobei wiederum die Praxis im Detail eingefangen wird. In diesem Kapitelwerden die spezifischen Angebote für Frauen, für Jugendliche, für Arbeiter und fürErwerbslose dargestellt. Die Quellenbestände—darauf weist Reimers hin—ladenunter der Perspektive der Zielgruppenorientierung zu weiteren Studien ein; dieAnalyse von Lehrinhalten und Lehrmitteln lässt Rückschlüsse auf Mentalitäten inKontinuität und Wandel in der Weimarer Republik zu.

Die Praxis der Volkshochschule Thüringen ist vielseitig und beeindruckend—vordiesem Hintergrund ist es nicht verwunderlich, dass Bettina Irina Reimers für dieseAnerkennung, ja Sympathie zeigt. Die den Angeboten zugrunde liegende Gesell-schaftskritik und ihr Gegenmodell der Volksgemeinschaft geraten dabei allerdings(meist) nicht in den kritischen Blick, der auch im Resümee nur in wenigen Ansätzenspürbar ist.

Das schmälert allerdings nicht den durch die Studie gewonnenen Erkenntnis-gewinn—ich werde das Buch sicher in kommenden Lehrveranstaltungen über dieGeschichte der Erwachsenenbildung einsetzen—die kritischen Fragen können ja inder Arbeitsgemeinschaft Seminar entwickelt werden. Das Buch ist auch deshalbexzellent in der Lehre verwendbar, aber auch für jeden Forscher ein sehr gutesArbeitsmittel, da Reimers im Anhang zum einen Quellen zu ihren Ausführungenzusammengestellt hat, zum zweiten biographische Annotationen zu wichtigenVertretern und Mitarbeitern des Vereins Volkshochschule Thüringen gibt, zum drit-ten in ihrem Quellenverzeichnis zunächst eine Gesamtdokumentation der einschlägi-gen Archivbestände vorlegt, bevor sie die Akten nachweist, aus denen in ihrer Studiezitiert wird und zum vierten ein Personenregister angelegt hat. Für ihren immensenFleiß spricht auch ihr nahezu 50seitiges Literaturverzeichnis. Die Leistung wirdnochmals deutlicher, wenn man sich vergegenwärtigt, dass es sich bei der vorlie-genden Studie um das Ergebnis eines Dissertationsprojektes handelt.

EVA MATTHES

Universität Augsburg, Deutschland© 2007, Eva Matthes

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 465

Formation au travail, enseignement technique et apprentissageTHÉRÈSE CHARMASSON (Dir.)Paris, Editions du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2005304 pp., ISBN 2-7355-0563-4, €22

Le congrès national des sociétés historiques et scientifiques de Nancy en 2002 aconsacré l’une de ses sessions de travail à ce que l’on appellerait aujourd’hui la forma-tion professionnelle. Voici les actes de ces travaux sous la forme de vingt contribu-tions présentées par Thérèse Charmasson dont on sait le rôle en matière depublication contribuant à une élucidation de l’histoire de l’enseignement techniqueen France et de l’enseignement agricole en particulier. L’effort ingrat de productionde répertoires de textes officiels dont Thérèse Charmasson est à l’origine n’est pasvain puisqu’il permet aujourd’hui la publication de travaux argumentés sur desaspects variés de l’enseignement technique, mais également de la formation et del’apprentissage.

L’ouvrage est ordonné en quatre moments. Les deux premiers sont consacrés àl’enseignement technique, le troisième à l’apprentissage et au travail des enfants, ledernier à l’enseignement agricole. On s’efforcera, sans entrer dans le détail de cebouquet d’articles, aux horizons très variés, de repérer ce qui peut les rassembler, afind’établir un fil conducteur.

Une série d’articles s’intéressent aux structures. Il apparaît ainsi que les sociétésindustrielles ont joué un rôle souvent négligé et qui mériterait une exploration systé-matique (G. Bodé), du moins si les sources archivistiques le permettent: à côté decelle de Mulhouse bien documenté grâce aux travaux de F. Ott, que sait-on, parexemple de celle d’Amiens, de Saint-Quentin ou d’ailleurs? L’interaction entre le rôlejoué par les industriels et les municipalités (Ph. Marchand) est mise en évidence, laconcurrence entre les établissements relevés. C’est la raison pour laquelle, la partici-pation des établissements techniques, publics ou privés, aux expositions départemen-tales, régionales, nationales ou universelles sont fondamentales: elles permettent, eneffet, aux établissements de se faire connaître et de mettre en valeur leur activité deformation, bien plus que dans les foires expositions qui remplaceront les expositionsdépartementales (M. Mieussens).

Plusieurs articles soulignent l’interaction entre institutions et société: ainsi les écolesde travaux publics (H. Vacher) naissantes sont contemporaines de l’industrialisationdu bâtiment et ne peuvent se concevoir que de cette manière. Ce n’est pas sans diffi-culté: les professions constituées résistent. Les architectes provoquent l’échec de lanaissance de la profession d’ingénieur architecte, rejetant celle-ci du côté des beauxarts alors que justement elle tentait d’y échapper. C’est donc lentement que l’on passede l’architecte artiste à l’architecte technicien. Ainsi, à Nantes (V. Champeau), la loiAstier de 1919 a favorisé la mise en place d’une première école d’ingénieur, l’interac-tion avec le milieu socio-économique étant, en la matière essentielle: l’ingénieur estune sorte d’agent de liaison entre la science et l’industrie. En revanche, l’analyse despratiques de formation dans l’artisanat et le commerce (S. Ramé) souligne la complex-ité du modèle d’intégration par l’apprentissage, en fonction de la distance plus ou

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

466 Book Reviews

moins grande par rapport au métier, due à l’héritage familial. Toutefois, les limites dela formation entre pairs, chevronnés et apprentis, apparaît de façon manifeste dansl’analyse du cas des mineurs (J. L. Escudier): pour passer d’une formation élémentaireà un apprentissage professionnel, il est nécessaire d’échapper à l’analphabétisme. Cen’est plus au fond de la mine que l’instruction technique peut seulement se réaliser:l’école apparaît ainsi complémentaire. La situation des enfants au travail (Marie-Noelle Denis) à partir de cinq ans apparaît, au XIXe siècle comme particulièrementdramatique: manque d’instruction, mauvaise santé, mortalité précoce et élevée sontle lot commun. Ce constat entraîne des réactions, non seulement avec l’enquête bienconnu de Villermé, mais aussi d’industriels. On peut se rendre compte, d’ailleurs, quela France n’était pas particulièrement en avance en la matière, si on compare la situ-ation faite au enfants en Allemagne, en en particulier dans les territoires anciennementfrançais, après la guerre de 1870 (L. Michaux): l’introduction de l’instruction obliga-toire dans ce pays, plus rapidement qu’en France, entraîne une réduction considérablede jeunes enfants employés.

Beaucoup d’articles s’intéressent à des institutions particulières. Ce n’est quejustice lorsque l’on sait la carence en la matière, alors que beaucoup d’ouvrageséchappent encore difficilement au modèle hagiographique. Ce n’est évidemment pasle cas ici. On apprend ainsi à mesurer la continuité institutionnelle d’établissementsqui, nés au XVIIIe siècle, ont poursuivi leur existence dans le siècle qui suit, telles lesécoles de dessin (R. D’Enfert). Une description des pratiques de formation desouvriers des arsenaux à Toulon (Y. Le Gallo) permet de comprendre que ces écolestechniques ont joué un rôle important dans la promotion sociale des jeunes, alors queleur niveau d’instruction initiale était relativement faible. Les chambres decommerce, contrôlées certes par l’Etat, disposent d’une relative autonomie et l’ondécouvre ainsi les désaccords pouvant exister entre les projets ministériels et lesprojets locaux, les divergences d’objectifs étant patents, entraînant une concurrencemanifeste (B. Régaudiat).

Bien des articles soulignent le rôle capital joué par telle ou telle personnalité dansla définition d’une méthode pédagogique: pédagogie de l’imitation et de l’observa-tion, au cœur même de la pratique artisanale (H. Terral), pédagogie du travail avecla méthode préventive de Don Bosco qui croit à la vertu formative du travail et àl’éducabilité de toute personne (J. P. Gerfaud). Par ailleurs, les acteurs locaux ontrencontré ainsi bien des difficultés pour la mise en place d’établissements, tellel’école de chimie à Rouen (A. Bidois): leur obstination explique comment on estpassé d’une école municipale à une école d’envergure nationale. On retrouve lamême problématique à propos de la société industrielle de Mulhouse (F. Ott): lesécoles de chimie et de dessin sont dues à des initiatives individuelles, au sein de lasociété industrielle, en interrelation constante avec la municipalité, devant la carencede l’Etat, absent sur ce terrain. Les grands industriels ont joué ici un rôle nonnégligeable que les sources d’archives disponibles et bien conservées au centrerhénan d’archives et de recherches économiques, permettent de souligner. Al’inverse, lorsque le tissu industriel n’est pas suffisamment structuré, les notableslocaux, malgré leur influence, ne peuvent, comme le montre le cas de la Corrèze, se

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 467

passer du rôle de l’Etat (H. Venès). On découvre aussi le rôle joué par un certainnombre de personnages dans la création et le développement des écoles d’agricul-ture, nationales (Grignon, F. Delcour ou Massy, P. Vigreux ), régionales oupratiques (les anciennes fermes écoles) ou des personnages dont l’influence a été plusrégionale (E. Kocher-Marboeuf).

Ainsi tous ces articles contribuent, chacun avec leur entrée particulière, à dessinerles facettes de ces enseignements techniques extrêmement diversifiés et dont lacomplexité est à la mesure de notre ignorance. Ces contributions permettent enfin dene pas isoler les formations traditionnelles des structures scolaires, de l’apprentissageet de ce que les enfants apprenaient en se formant par le travail, hors d’un cadrescolaire.

BRUNO POUCET

CURSEP/IUFM de l’académie d’Amiens, France© 2007, Bruno Poucet

‘Tot Ciraet, Vermeerderinge ende Heerlyckmaeckinge der Universiteit.’Bestuur, Instellingen, Personeel en Financiën van de Leidse Universiteit,1575–1812RONALD SLUIJTER

Hilversum, Verloren, 2004344 pp. ISBN 90-6550-754-X, €32.00

The so-called structures of science and instruction are questions of the day in thehistory of universities, the history of science, and beyond. Nonetheless, relatively fewstudies have been dedicated to the management and the financing of universities inthe past. In the wake of the colloquium on the financing of universities and science inthe past and the present,1 a book exploring the material aspects of ‘the first universityof Europe’ in the Early Modern Period, Leiden, is consequently more than welcome.Sluijter does not only abord the university as a business company, he also proceeds ina businesslike manner, combining an accurate and well-structured account of hisresearch with a plain but pleasant style. The program of this book, which covers thetwo centuries between the foundation of the university in 1575 and its merging withthe Napoleontic imperial university in 1812, is set forth in the introduction and iscarefully carried out in the next chapters.

In the first chapter, Sluijter goes into the composition, the recruitment and profileof the Board of curators and burgomasters charged respectively by the States ofHolland and the city of Leiden with the administration of the university. The balanceof power within the board as well as its relationship with the city, the States, the

1 Schwinges, R. C., ed. Finanzierung von Universität und Wissenschaft in Verganigenheit undGegen wart (Veröffentlichungen der Gesellschaft für Universitäts-und Wissenschaftsgeschicte 6),2005.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

468 Book Reviews

stadholder and the academic senate are uncovered and illustrated with telling cases.The next chapters deal with the administrative field of action of this board, i.e. themanagement of academic infrastructure, the recruitment of academic personnel, and,last but not least, the finances which have to foot the bill for a university. The sectionsdealing with the development and the expansion of an academic infrastructure arefascinating, if we confront them with strategies of distinction displayed at otheruniversities in Europe. Sluijter demonstrates in a convincing way that the board’sconcern with the university’s national and international radiation stimulated invest-ments in a school which, thanks to its library, botanic garden, anatomical theater andthe like, had a lead on competitors in the Dutch Republic and abroad. An additionalchapter goes into the organisation and financing, through grants and otherwise, of theStaten College, an institution which had to mould the future pastors of the PublicChurch.

Competitiveness proved to be of crucial importance as a criterium in the recruit-ment and the financing of the teaching staff as well. It was financially not viable toattract more than one or two scholars of international renown in order to seducepotential students to attend Leiden auditoria. The ‘lesser gods’ of the teachingstaff had earned their spurs at other universities as well, however, or were drawnfrom a reservoir of promising private teachers at Leiden. Other features in theboard’s appointment policy are the limited weight of kinship ties in the recruit-ment of the teaching staff, and the concern to maintain an equilibrium betweenthe religious, political and scientific currents dividing the Dutch Republic and theRepublic of Letters. The international radiation of the university is furthermorereflected in the geographical origins of the teaching staff. The board of curatorsand burgomasters hoped to attract, via the appointment of foreign teachers,students from specific areas as well. A quantitative analysis reveals that untilthe 1650s, most of the foreign teachers were immigrants from the SouthernNetherlands and France, whereas the Germans would become predominant duringthe next hundred years. After 1750, few foreign teachers were called to Leiden.Sluijter does not stick to the negotiations which were successful and which resultedin an appointment, but he also involves the considerable amount of refusers in hisanalysis.

After a survey of the tasks and the recruitment of the supporting personnel on alllevels, in which Leiden surfaces as a big local employer, the author adresses, in his lasttwo chapters, the main question of his research, i.e. the question of whether or notthe rise and decline of Leiden university should be ascribed to fundamental changesin the management and financing of the institution. As for management, the intro-duction into early modern accounting practices is very helpful to understand thenature of the information the board of curators and burgomasters disposed off. Theuniversity’s bookkeeping was designed to report on the income and the expenses, andas a consequence did not allow for a calculation of credits or deficits at any givenmoment. A meticulous and convincing analysis of the financial situation of theuniversity in the Early Modern Period reveals that budgets and management rathercontributed to the radiation of the university before 1750 than that a lack of it would

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 469

have caused the dwindling of the university’s international attractiveness after thatyear. Leiden remained after 1750 a well-endowed university, to be compared onlywith Göttingen in the Dutch–German area. But growing competition from profilinginstitutions in Germany, as well as a decline of interest in an academic education ingeneral could only be compensated for by additional financial incentives. The Statesof Holland, the university’s main sponsor, could not and would not provide for thenecessary funds as soon as the Indian Summer of the Dutch Golden Age had cometo an end in the 1750s. Leiden’s international horizon shriveled to a regional andnational one. The author concludes that the university’s fortune was linked to the riseand fall of the Dutch Republic as a power of the first rank.

Tot ciraet … has to live up to many expectations. The book is, first, the outcome ofone of the collateral research projects filling up lacunae in available scholarship on theuniversity of Leiden. It has to be situated in a larger project that aims at charting the‘integral history’ of Leiden university, which in 2000 celebrated its 425th anniversary.Several volumes commemorating this impressive past have seen the daylight in thelast few years. Sluijter’s book fits well in this series, managing as it does to adress alarger public of non-historians without reducing the scientific character of the workor the professional skill with which it has been written. The analysis is based on soundarchival research, supplemented occasionally by a wide range of other written docu-ments, and draw recurrently on iconographical material. The reference lists are tooaustere (and confusing) to do justice to this painstaking scrutiny of the sources, butthe reader quickly realises that Leiden offers a very interesting case to explore thefinancial aspects of academic life. The highly centralised character of the university’smanagement and the resulting centralisation of its resources allow for a long-terminsight in a university’s financial situation which, due to the fragmentation and heter-ogeneity of management and resources characteristic for medieval and early modernuniversities, cannot be achieved everywhere. The author does not hesitate to confronthis findings with international scholarship on universities in the Republic and abroad.In this context, the choice for a long-term inquiry covering two centuries of adminis-trative and financial history, is a valid one.

Second, the work claims ‘to do more than filling up lacunae’ and presents itself asa dissertation focusing on a central problem. The merging of these two scientificstyles may be illustrative for the financing of scientific research today, but does notalways add to the quality of the book. The reader is occasionally under the impres-sion that the research question was rather designed to furnish a framework for anotherwise captivating book on university financing and management throughout theEarly Modern Period than that it would provide for an overarching definition of aproblem structuring the material and the analysis. This lead of synthesis and surveyover the problematic nature of the theme puts some of the author’s strategicalchoices and conclusions into perspective. In spite of the author’s claim that thepractices of management rather than institutions are at the centre of his attention,his long-term analysis privileges an institutional approach that tends to attribute tothe microstoria of decision-making a secondary, illustrative role. Thus, a classicaldichotomy between the powerful (the States of Holland and the Board of Curators)

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

470 Book Reviews

and the powerless (the academics) is constructed, which reinforces the omnipresentimage of Early Modern university men as passive victims of growing state power.

The underlying concept of power results in an overestimation of the explanatorystrength of institutional frameworks. References to appointment procedures in whichteachers had no formal say cannot account for the limited degree of academic incestat Leiden. The (overestimated) specificity of political culture in the Dutch Republiccannot explain the board’s concern to accommodate the interests of a wide range ofopinions and groups if one assumes that power is a collective fenomenon anyway,regardless the institutional frameworks in which it is wielded. Attention should shiftto the channels of communication and the way in which information was transformedin order to accommodate the stakes of all parties involved. Such an approach is likelyto substitute the reified image of fathers (the curators) and sons (the academics) byhybrid networks the members of which perform as benign rulers and obedientsubjects in order to accommodate their mutual interests. In this perspective, thepassages on the secretary of the board of curators, a member of the Leiden regentclass, are highly illustrative. This ‘employee’ is only (summarily) dealt with in thechapter on ‘assisting personnel’, that is, where he would belong in a university’s datasheet. Yet the reader wants to know more about this official, who might have bridgedthe institutional and social barrier between teachers and managers as a highly wantedtransmittor of information and as a manager of academic patronage. As a conse-quence, it does not come as a shock to learn, first, that the author indulges recurrentlyin irrelevant evaluations of the intrinsic quality of the board’s policy while referringonly casually to the lobbying preceding this policy. Second, the social and cognitiveuniversum of teachers and students at Leiden remains underexposed, excluded asthey are, in the author’s account, from the wielding of academic power and patron-age. A more systematical comparison with ‘the course of things’ at collegiate univer-sities, for instance, might have been particularly revealing in this perspective. Third,Sluijter does not confront his findings with challenging views developed in sciencestudies on the relation between structures and knowledge on the one hand, and thestability of academic elites and practices on the other hand. Instead, he seems tocreate in the introduction a barrier between ‘his subject’ (the structure of science) andscholarly activities (science itself). The ‘intrinsic quality’ of the teaching staff shouldaccount, from this point of view, for the complex intertwining between ‘material’ and‘intellectual’ aspects of academic life at Leiden. Such an approach will not convinceeverybody. However, considering the present state of the art, it is difficult to sailround the internalist rock if one decides to cover two centuries of university financingand management. Within his concerns, the author made a consistent set of decisionsas far as definition of a problem, approach, and scopes are concerned. Its result—avery interesting book providing a wealth of information, a startling insight in univer-sity life and many perspectives for comparative research—legitimises these choices.

BRUNO BOUTE

KULEUVEN, BELGIUM

© 2007, Bruno Boute

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 471

Humboldt auf Reisen? Die Rezeption des ‘Deutschen Universitätsmodells’ inden Französischen und Britischen Reformdiskursen (1810–1870)MARC SCHALENBERG

Basel, Schwabe & Co AG, 2003520 pp. [Veröffentlichungen der Gesellschaft für Universitäts- und Wissenschaftsge-schichte (VGUW), 6], ISBN 3-795-X, sFr72.00/€50.50

‘Many objections may be made to German Professors […]. They are buried in liter-ature and have therefore no judgement about things in general’, wrote the Oxfordprofessor Benjamin Jowett in 1849 (p. 280). The first reproach to German professorsof one of Schalenbergs principal characters applies definitely to the author of thissubstantial book, the second luckily not. Obviously the reproach is rather a compli-ment in this case. The amount of consulted literature and the way references are inte-grated in the text are absolutely impressive. Schalenbergs study joins extremely wellto current research on university history, e.g. R.C. Schwinges (ed), HumboldtInternational. Der Export des deutschen Universitätsmodells im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert(Basel, Schwabe & Co AG, 2001), and on so-called Kulturtransfer, e.g. the work ofthe Paris study group around Michel Espagne and Michael Werner.

The source material is just as extensive, but this multiplicity and diversity of thematerial does not prevent Schalenberg to build up a well-structured reasoning. Inthe introduction (the first chapter) the subject, the current research, the method andthe source material are clearly, but at the same time very defensively presented.Particularly the section on the selection of the examples and the periodization is writ-ten in a somewhat exaggerated justifying way. The concentration on the reception ofthe German university model in Paris and Oxford instead of France and Great Britainseems self-evident after examining the arguments and also the choice of 1810 and1870 as starting and finishing date seems convincing. Nevertheless, at the end of thebook one is somehow disappointed with 1870 as a finishing point. ‘ZunehmendeAttraktivität gewann das ‘deutsche Modell’ nach der hier bewusst mit 1870 beschlo-ssenen Epoche, als sowohl in Frankreich als auch in Großbritannien institutionelleVeränderungen greifbarer werden’, as Schalenberg puts it (p. 363). Therefore, asequel to this interesting study would be appropriate.

The second chapter considers the ‘German university model’, its genesis, standardand meaning. There are no new elements presented in this chapter, but it gives aclear picture on what contemporaries regarded as typical for German universities.Especially the actual consequences deduced from the German ‘idea’—which theuniversity system was, after all—keeps the reader enthralled: the continually expand-ing Philosophische Fakultät and, following, greater emphasis on the theoretic side ofstudies, the Forschungsimperativ, the increasing self-awareness of the German profes-sors and the growing consciousness of the paradox of one ‘German’ university modelin a territory with an immense amount of little independent nations.

The main part of Schalenbergs research deals with the attitude towards the‘German university model’ in France (chapter 3) and Great Britain (chapter 4), moreparticularly in Paris and Oxford. The following agents are discussed with regard to

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

472 Book Reviews

both countries successively: the institutions for higher education in Paris and Oxford,the key figures in the debates in both cities, das universitäre Umfeld (i.e. in France: theuniversities in Strasbourg and Toulouse and scientific societies; in Great Britain: theuniversities in Cambridge, London, Manchester, Scotland and Ireland) and finallythe channels of the public opinion in both countries like Salons, clubs and journals.Although the author makes no claim to be exhaustive (p. 47), he is very near to it.

In these chapters Schalenberg succeeds mostly in achieving the right balancebetween a dry enumeration of individual opinions and the advancing of general prop-ositions without paying attention to divergences of views. Only the sections on therole of German immigrants in the establishment of an image of German universitiesin Paris and Oxford, do not really exceed the level of a bare catalogue. NeverthelessSchalenberg shows how important these Germans were in the debates. Many Frenchand English professors and politicians passed judgements on a university system theynever experienced themselves. Their opinion was at least to some extent influencedby German scholars in their own environment.

The first part of both chapters is devoted to a description of the institutions forhigher education, in Paris and Oxford respectively. In Oxford the Deutschlandkartewas played rather rarely, according to Schalenberg (p. 214). References to theGerman university system were scarce and this part of the book becomes in that waynot much more than an, indeed excellent, survey of the existing teaching institutions(like the university, the colleges and the Taylorian Institution) and research facilities(like the Bodleian Library and the University Museum). Within Paris faculties andschools of higher education the German model was much more under discussion. Itis true, the amount of actual reforms after the German example, like the introductionof a less practically-oriented approach of education, remained very restricted. Thesection on Paris institutions is, because of this, much less descriptive than its Oxfordcounterpart. Besides, it is a merit in itself to provide such a good insight into thecomplex institutional landscape of the Sorbonne, the Ecole Normale (Supérieure), theEcole Polytechnique, the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, the Collège de France, the Ecoledes Chartes and other écoles spéciales.

Throughout chapters 3 and 4 the author justly finds it sometimes difficult to main-tain the distinction between the attitude of institutions, views of individual personsand opinions expressed in scientific or literary journals. Schalenberg is aware of thismethodological problem (pp. 31–32) and only in some places his choice can be crit-icised. It is not quite clear why, for example, some ideas of the Taylorian professorFriedrich Max Müller on the German university system are discussed in the sectionon the Taylorian Institution (pp. 212–213) and some other ideas in the section onindividual persons (pp. 264–269). The author struggles with another difficulty too,viz. his intention not to ignore the so-called Universitäres Umfeld on the one hand andself-imposed restrictions (limited research and a limited number of pages) on theother hand. Explaining the attitude of Scottish universities towards the Germansystem between 1810 and 1870 in only four pages is quite a challenge.

A (minor) challenge to the reader for his part is Schalenbergs typical German styleof writing. Lengthy sentences with five or more subordinate clauses are no exception.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 473

Fortunately literary or sometimes even poetic paragraphs often compensate for these,e.g. ‘[…] zogen die weitaus meisten französischen Gelehrten und Bildungspolitiker inder Restaurationszeit das Wasser der Pariser Oase den möglicherweise reicherenStrömen des Rheins, der Donau oder der Spree vor.’ (p. 122).

During reading the two main chapters the curiosity about the conclusion is increas-ing gradually. The arguments of reformers and conservatives for and against theintroduction of research at the universities are presented, as well as the pros and consof centralisation like in France or decentralisation like in Germany, or the advantagesand disadvantages of the Privatdozenten, but relatively soon the reader loses track ofthe overall picture.

Schalenberg meets this need of an overview in his conclusion, in which hesummarises in an excellent way the different views in Paris/France and Oxford/GreatBritain on German professors and students, the role of the government in education,academic freedom, the dichotomy between pure and applied science and the relationbetween religion and higher education. In this last part the comparison of the recep-tion of the ‘German university model’ between two countries with very diverseuniversity traditions shows to advantage. In France as well as in Great Britain refer-ences to German universities were often used in a completely different way, in a nega-tive or positive sense, but almost always exclusively to enforce the own arguments,e.g. by institutions who were pleading for better equipment or by scholars at the startof their career who tried to make their name by emphasising their knowledge of andsupport to the German model. All parties involved took their own university systemas point of departure and interpreted the German model as it suited them. TheGerman universities “wurden in den dortigen Reformdiskursen als Passfolie für einebemerkenswerte Vielzahl von verschiedenen Anliegen in Anspruch genommen, dienur selten dem entsprachen, was Humboldt und andere an den preußischen Bildung-sreformen Beteiligte einst animiert hatte.’ (p. 370). Schalenbergs final conclusion isprobably not very surprising, but his in-depth study is surely a great pleasure to read.

PIETER DHONDT

University of Helsinki, Finland© 2007, Pieter Dhondt

A History of American Higher EducationJOHN R. THELIN

Baltimore; London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004xxii + 421 pp., ISBN 0-8018-7855-1 (hard cover), US$ 55.00; 0-8018-8004-1(paperback), US$ 19.95

For over forty years, students interested in the history of higher education in theUnited States have turned for their first introduction to Frederick Rudolph, TheAmerican College and University: A History (1962). Scholarly yet accessible, Rudolphprovided the best synthesis of historical scholarship for his time, and his volume has

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

474 Book Reviews

been required reading in thousands of history courses since its publication. The fewsubsequent efforts to write a new synthesis have failed to capture the imagination ofhistorians and students as Rudolph did.

Inevitably, though, Rudolph has become more interesting as an artefact of mid-century historical scholarship in the United States than as a reliable history of hissubject matter. Reflecting the historical fashions of his generation, for instance, hewas concerned with demonstrating nineteenth–century American educational excep-tionalism. More remarkably, he devoted a mere three pages out of five hundred toblack higher education (two of those in the Epilogue), relegated women’s educationto a brief chapter, and betrayed no knowledge of the burgeoning junior college move-ment, nearly half a century old in 1962. He neglected the hundreds of small state andprivate colleges whose visions and histories bore little resemblance to those of theuniversities and elite New England colleges that dominated his narrative. Worst of all,he breathed not a word about the Red Scare and its repression of dissenting scholarsin the very decade during which he was writing.

Given those shortcomings, and the wealth of high quality, critical scholarshipamassed in the last four decades, a new synthesis is long overdue. John Thelin, AHistory of American Higher Education, is posed to fill this void. Thelin clearly had thatin mind as he wrote the book. He refers explicitly in his introduction to ‘FrederickRudolph’s classic work’ and the quantity of subsequent scholarship (pp. xix-xx). Thisstudy has few of Rudolph’s oversights and adds many new topics, but it achieves itslevel of comprehensiveness at a price; at nearly one hundred fifty fewer pages than itspredecessor, the book must deal with all of its issues briefly, sometimes cursorily.

Thelin will certainly replace Rudolph as the standard text in the history of highereducation in the United States, but brevity of coverage is among several problems thatdog his text. He strove for Rudolph’s accessible style by adopting a self-consciousinformality. The stylistic result is an uneven volume whose enormous grasp of therelevant literature, enviable presentation of quantitative data, and innovative use offiction, film, and photographs is diminished by a writing style that vacillates betweena thoughtful, scholarly voice and a trivializing, almost pandering, voice. Those mostirritated by Thelin’s uncomfortable stretch for the ‘common touch’ need only turn tohis ‘Essay on Sources’ to be assured they are confronting a fine mind; the ‘Essay,’written in the voice Thelin is best known for, is worth the price of admission.

The volume follows a chronological approach. Some of its periodization isawkward. The first two chapters, for example, take the narrative from the colonialcolleges through the frenetic college-building years in the first half of the nineteenthcentury, ending the second chapter in 1860. Yet there is no logic within the historyof higher education to break the narrative there. The emergence of the researchuniversity a couple decades later is a far more portentous watershed than the CivilWar. While the Morrill Land-Grant College Act dates from the Civil War years, it didnot achieve its full impact until the early 1880s. Still, the Civil War is the time-honoured watershed for U.S. historians, no matter the subject. The third chapter,presumably covering the years 1860 to 1890, ends up serving as a catch-all for variousinstitutional innovations, most of which date from the first half of the century, not

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 475

from the 1860s and after: women’s colleges, co-education, normal schools, agricul-tural and technical education, and so on.

Chapter four, focused on the emergence of the modern university under the influ-ence of monopoly capital, 1880–1910, is the least successful section of volume,though it should be the pivot. The capital-university nexus is, arguably, the salientissue in understanding higher education in the twentieth century, leading to whatscholars would characterize as the integration of higher education into the wage-labour system. Yet, despite Thelin’s familiarity with Clyde Barrow’s Universities andthe Capitalist State (1990), he spends much of the chapter ruminating on universityarchitecture, ‘university spirit,’ and the possibility that events in southern universitieshave been overlooked, to the neglect of a close study of overwhelming privateeconomic power on higher education. Given the plethora of work on the history ofmodern philanthropy and ideology, this chapter’s scattered and uncertain focus isunfortunate. Thelin allows us glimpses of rich men building graceful academiccentres, but he does not admit any insight into the interiors of those centres—the crit-ical construction of modern academic disciplines, often in thrall to capital (see, forexample, Schwendinger and Schwendinger, Sociologists of the Chair [1974]), thecomplex interplay of modern forces of class formation in populating the new univer-sities (see particularly Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism [1976]), or other facetsof the marriage of private power to knowledge construction and deployment. As aresult, he can gain little interpretive leverage to explain the crises and reforms scat-tered across the rest of his narrative.

Chapters five through eight cover the years from 1890 to 2000. Chapter five docu-ments the surprising ascendancy of college life in American popular culture at the turnof the twentieth century, when college-going was still limited to a small fraction of thepopulation. Chapter six carries the narrative through the 1920s, the Depression, andthe Second World War. For Thelin, the ‘golden age’ of higher education, his seventhchapter, occurred in the quarter century after the Second World War, a curiousjudgment on a period that bracketed McCarthyism and the dark years of the HouseUn-American Activities Committee’s campus witch-hunts. Even more curious, theinstitution that created and enjoyed that golden age became, in the final chapter, ‘atroubled giant.’

As that brief summary might suggest, there is a certain incoherence in Thelin’snarrative. Elements of his story fail to connect to one another. All the players are here,but he is uncertain of the parts they play and the trajectories of their actions. He ends,sure that modern higher education in the United States is adrift, uncertain of its soci-etal role. Yet throughout the volume, Thelin fails to grasp many of the contradictoryeconomic and ideological roles higher education has played, from legitimating colo-nialism and inequality through ameliorating processes of class formation to socializ-ing the costs of skilled labour production. If there is uncertainty today, it flows fromcontradictions rooted deeply in a failing empire.

The result is a text that many will read, and one with an admirable scholarly foun-dation and rich illustrations, but one whose point appears to be the ‘lively, enjoyablepast’ that Thelin’s introduction promises (p. xxii) rather than the illuminating,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

476 Book Reviews

critical, if not always so ‘enjoyable,’ past that students, scholars, and the public needto face the growing darkness.

RONALD E. BUTCHART

University of Georgia, USA© 2007, Ronald E. Butchart

Relatos de Escuela. Una Compilación de Textos Breves Sobre la ExperienciaEscolarPABLO PINEAU

Buenos Aires, Paidós, 2005332 pp., ISBN 950-12-6147-6

Relatos de escuela is an enjoyable opportunity for allowing oneself a contradictorylook at Argentinean school. It is a journey over which one can encounter memoriesthat, far from remaining fixed, are denied due to the strong criticism they involve.At the same time, it triggers reactions that oscillate between familiarity with experi-ences we have all gone through and incredulity towards the crudeness some gesturesimply.

The book consists of seventy short texts taken mostly from the fields of literatureand music; there are also quotations from thinkers and educators who tell about theirown school experiences. Extracts by Miguel Cané, Eugenio Cambaceres, ManuelGalvez, Roberto Arlt, Jennie Howard, Herminia Brumana, Olga Cossetini, LeopoldoMarechal, David Viñas, Eva Giverti, Juan José Saer, Haroldo Conti, Charly García,Isidora Blaistein, the music band ‘Attaque 77’, Graciela Montes, Beatriz Sarlo,among others, are included. At the end of the book, five ‘itineraries’ are suggested bythe compiler to interpret the selected texts on the basis of different topics, such as thecreation of genres or canons, the description of individuals, the repetition of subjectsin very different periods of time and the movement of genres and styles. These itin-eraries can be followed or ignored; like in hopscotch—metaphor we owe JulioCortázar—one can go round, hop over and hold dialogues among practices, periodsof time and individuals.

The experiences described open new pages to reveal grey areas—and very darkareas—of school life and other aspects much more pleasant than pedagogy booksdepict. In this sense, the book also shows the traces of school left in personalities thathave a lot to do with our culture. Curious is the story of the traumatic psychologicalexperience told by Eva Giverti, or the limitations on Osvaldo Soriano’s writing careerthat we learn about. We can trace the marks imprinted by school—in a non-linearway—and their subsequent course through life, in personalities that have largelycontributed to Argentinean society. These traces boosted, in hopes of proximity orin great need of distancing, cultural production, thanks to and in spite of school.Consequently, one of the suggested itineraries recovers the presence of school in theauthors’ identities and destinies.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 477

In such recognition of traces, it is important to note what the texts say about theorigins of Argentina and the constitution of the educative system. For example, a textby Juan O. Ramos says: ‘One of the Libros Capitulares of the old Cabildo in Catamarca(beginning of the nineteenth century) states that Ambosio Milicia, mulatto in the land“Nieva y Castillo”, was punished with twenty-five lashes, given to him at the publicsquare, for having been revealed that he could read and write’ (p. 37). Another textincites: ‘Whatever became of that Spanish teacher that introduced us to literature andsaid that Florencio Sanchez was a degenerate? She introduced us to boredom as well,with that strange ability to make Don Segundo Sombra or Cervantes tedious. There weremany teachers like this; they were the post office employees of literature’ (p. 135).

This book might contribute to rethink school, describing it and rediscoveringaspects of its constitution and historical display. Yet there is much more than that.Something in this work is really well-done: the thickness, complexity and shades givento the analysis of school features and the periods of time and their imaginaries.Beyond the simplifying perception of descriptive categories, the good and evil oppo-sition and untimely judgment making a period of time massive, means showing thatdifferent tensions existed not only among the different stances, but also within thesame stance, the same text, the same individual. It is known that a generation choosesthe remains of the past and sets them out according to its ideals to create a narration.The dense narration achieved in this book has this special characteristic of the contra-dictory bond which links us to a very well-known school format, and makes us displayits dreadful side and admit its condition of necessity.

The way of scanning, of discovering without simplifying, of finding and feeling, andalso of being surprised and realizing that it is difficult to place expressions within avery strict category is particularly interesting. It is a happy choice to take stories with-out a moral and show the shades that involve complexities, to recreate contemporarydiscussions, or the rituals or senselessness that go through different times.

The deepening of new ways to reflect on the characteristics of formative processesis suggested in this work. It is highly interesting to find place on the margin of someof the rules of the pedagogical discourse, or at least of those that present it as an expertdiscourse closed in itself, to find other ways of transmission. Working between liter-ature and pedagogy means standing on that ‘between’ to produce something new. Inthis sense, the stories of school experience in words that do not seek to prescribe, thatdo not pretend to discuss about the ‘truths’ of history and pedagogy, make it possibleto interrupt narrative ways and anticipate the courses derived from a word; they inter-rupt and, at the same time, enrich prevailing grammars.

A very interesting feature of this book is that the texts have different enunciationsituations. In some cases, the texts are clearly enunciated from a place of stateprescription; they are outlined with the certainty that their impact is related to a socialposition, a moral sanction or a model validation, with the conviction that the enunci-ation from a specific social position, or from the state, places its message as a responsefor the ‘whole’. In other cases, unlikely, the texts seem to have been articulated in awhispering tone, or as a personal reflection, transmitted in a more intimate commu-nication, without the intention to sketch a public prescription.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

478 Book Reviews

In that there is an unspoken controversy over cultural hierarchy and the struggle forsocial legitimization, for the possession of the legitimate word. Understanding thismakes Argentinean education more complex in achieving to include the fact thatcultural and educative struggle for authority and recognition is not due to exclusivelyepistemological or political motivations, but to a variable complementarity of the two.

This book challenges the establishment of some texts as the only possible means tohave a look at school, by gathering texts that have sought to prescribe a moral orderfor everybody, to monopolize inscribing a proper academic position, by includingschool experiences of musicians such as Charly García or music bands such as‘Ataque 77’. This book has given the chance to certain genres or ways of looking thatdid not use to have room in school.

MYRIAM SOUTHWELL

Universidad Nacional de La Plata/CONICET, FLACSO, Argentina© 2007, Myriam Southwell

Archives et Sources pour l’Histoire de l’EnseignementTHÉRÈSE CHARMASSON (Prés.)Paris, Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2005392 pp., ISBN 2-7355-0543-X, €25.00

Thérèse Charmasson, archiviste bien connu des milieux de la recherche en éducation,a eu l’heureuse idée de proposer une réédition de quinze articles parus dans de multi-ples revues ou ouvrages entre 1935 et 2000. Elle accompagne cette publication detextes réglementaires ou de rapports officiels se référant aux archives de l’enseigne-ment. Quatre textes seulement étant parus à partir de 1992, cet ensemble offre ainsiune manière d’archive de la recherche, dresse un état des lieux de ce quelle étaitessentiellement il y a une trentaine d’années, représente un état de la recherche, enpartie, passé et permet ainsi de dresser d’utiles comparaisons avec ce que la rechercheest aujourd’hui devenue. On remarquera ainsi que le titre même donné à ce recueilest, de fait, daté: l’histoire de l’enseignement ne se comprend aujourd’hui que commeun élément d’un ensemble beaucoup plus vaste qui inclut l’enfance, l’apprentissagede la vie en société, les activités parascolaires qui ont pris une importance très impor-tante, la formation professionnelle continue, les universités tous âges, etc. Bref, unehistoire de l’éducation prise dans son ensemble qui ne néglige pas, par ailleurs, ladimension européenne et internationale.

Toutefois, cette publication offre à l’apprentis chercheur, auquel elle est destinée,selon les intentions mêmes de l’auteur de la présentation, cinq ensembles de textes.En premier lieu, des sources pour l’histoire de l’enseignement de l’époque médiévalejusqu’à la période contemporaine, en portant une attention particulière à l’enseigne-ment agricole, domaine moins négligé qu’il y a une trentaine d’années, en particuliergrâce à l’auteur de ce recueil. Second ensemble de textes: l’introduction d’inventairesd’archives soit de la série F17 (Ministère de l’Instruction publique, puis de l’Éducation

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5

Paedagogica Historica 479

nationale au niveau des Archives nationales) ou de la série T des archives départe-mentales—l’inventaire de la Marne puisqu’il s’agit de ce dernier étant particulière-ment précieux pour la description qu’il donne des institutions d’enseignement à ceniveau. Un troisième ensemble présente les textes réglementaires qui, inlassablementdepuis 1932, prescrivent le versement, des fonds conservés dans les institutionsd’enseignement locales dans les services d’archives départementales. On sait, malheu-reusement, ce qu’il en est: peu de fonds d’établissements sont, en définitive conservés,de manière telle qu’ils puissent être réellement utiles aux chercheurs. La récente circu-laire de la direction des Archives de France en matière éducative rencontrera-t-elledavantage de succès? Acceptons-en l’augure!

Un quatrième ensemble d’articles donne une présentation bien utile des missionsdes Archives nationales auprès du ministère de l’Éducation nationale et de la missiondes archives au rectorat de Paris. Ces deux missions nées respectivement en 1954 et1958 permettent ainsi de maintenir à un rythme soutenu la collecte documentairepour des fonds qui sont parmi les plus importants en quantité, sinon en qualité, auxArchives nationales. La dernière partie de l’ouvrage réunit des articles qui dressent lebilan d’enquêtes effectuées dans les services d’archives afin de faire le point des verse-ments conservés dans les institutions de conservation. On le comprend, cet ouvrage,par le multiples indications dont il fourmille rendra bien des services aux chercheurset pas seulement aux débutants, pourvu qu’ils prennent acte qu’il s’agit bien d’uncertain état de la recherche.

Bruno PoucetCURSEP/IUFM de l’académie d’Amiens, France

© 2007, Bruno Poucet

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

elsi

nki]

at 0

1:16

24

Febr

uary

201

5