Reflections on History, Education, and Social Theories

Author(s): V. P. Franklin
Source: History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 2 (May 2011), pp. 264-271
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41303875
Accessed: 27-08-2017 15:00 UTC

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41303875?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to History of Education Quarterly

This content downloaded from 5.31.15.180 on Sun, 27 Aug 2017 15:00:10 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Response
Reflections on History, Education, and Social
Theories

V P. Franklin

Historians need social theories to conduct their research whether they are
acknowledged or not. Positivist social theories underpinned the
professionalization of the writing of history as well as the establishment
of the social sciences as "disciplines," in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.1 August Comte's "science of society" and theories of
evolution were attractive to U.S. historians and other researchers dealing
with rapid social and economic changes taking place under the banner of
American and Western "progress."2 Progressive and "pragmatic"
approaches were taken in dealing with the social wreckage created by
the expanding industrialization, increasing urbanization, and huge influx
of southern and eastern European immigrants. In addition, social theories
and philosophical trends also served as the ideological underpinning for
historians writing about the "white man's burden" that was said to have
brought European and American "civilization" to the indigenous peoples
in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the islands of the Pacific who came to be
dominated by military might with collaboration from local elites.3
In the United States and several European nations there were many
individuals and groups who emerged in the late nineteenth century

V. P. Franklin holds a University of California Presidential Chair and is Distinguished

Professor of History and Education at the University of California, Riverside. He is the
editor of The Journal of African American History.

!Mary O. Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of

American Social Science , 1865-1905 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1975);
Thomas L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science
Association and the Crisis of Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977).
Paul F. Boiler, American Thought in Transition: The Impact of Evolutionary
Naturalism , 1865-1900 (Chicago, IL: Rand McNally, 1969); Herbert Butterfield, The
Whig Interpretation of History (1931; reprinted New York, 1965); Georg G. Iggers,
Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern
Challenge , 2nd ed. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 36-47.
James Olsen, ed. Historical Dictionary of European Imperialism (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1991); Andrew Porter, European Imperialism , 1860-1914 (New York:
Macmillan Publishers, 1994); Thomas Parkenham, The Scramble for Africa: The White
Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912 (London: Avon Books, 1992);
William Esterley, The White Man ys Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have D&ne
So Little Good (N ew York: Penguin Books, 2006); Willard Gatewood, Black Americans and
the White Man's Burden, 1898-1903 (Urbana; University of Illinois Press, 1975).

History of Education Quarterly Vol. 5 1 No. 2 May 201 1 Copyright 201 1 by the History of Education Society

This content downloaded from 5.31.15.180 on Sun, 27 Aug 2017 15:00:10 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
History , Education , Social Theories 265

espousing "progressive" social change. Applying the "r

man" to social problems resulted in major improveme
sanitation practices, and in the regulation of food, dru
conditions, especially for women and children.4 Prog
public education followed the lead of philosopher Joh
social theories emphasizing "pragmatism" and "in
resulted in major changes in the nature of the pu
experience for the vast majority of American children
school administrators sought to implement activities
student government, sports, and other extra-curricula
reflected "the school in society."5
For U.S. historians, positivist social theory and pr
general came to be associated with the "School
Historians," who offered interpretations of U
emphasized social and economic advancement as Amer
formidable internal and external obstacles; and wh
renditions of the American story the emphasis ha
political elites, the Progressive historians added work
movements and focused on the contributions of o
movements to social change. These newer historica
challenged earlier perspectives, but adhered to the
notion of "objectivity," suggesting an absence
interpretations of the past. Historians who ident
farmers, workers, or left-wing movements and or
tically were still clinging to "that noble dream" ab
within the profession. This was particularly th
"counterprogressive" or consensus historians of the
such as Louis Hartz, Forrest McDonald, and Danie
promoted conservatism and traditionalism in the inter
history. As historian Peter Novick noted, "the progres
social conflict was rejected not just as overdrawn, but

4Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Pr

in the United States , 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford Universi
McNeese, The Progressive Movement: Advocating Social Change
House Publications, 2007); Stephen Stromquist, Reinventing
Progressive Movement , the Class Problem , and the Origins of Moder
University of Illinois Press, 2006).
John Dewey, School and Society (1901; reprinted Chicago: Univ
Press, 1915); Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the Scho
American Education, 1 876-1 95 7 (New York: Knopf, 1 96 1 ); Patricia A
Education from Arcady to Academe: A History of the Progressive Educ
York: Teachers College Press, 1967).
Richard Hofstader, The Progressive Historians: Turner ; Beard , a
York: Knopf, 1968).

This content downloaded from 5.31.15.180 on Sun, 27 Aug 2017 15:00:10 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
2 66 History of Education Quarterly

wrong-headed; historians' focus shifted from

consensual culture."7
The conservative consensus about the nonid
social progress since the end of the divisive ci
historiography into the 1960s when social mo
change ushered in an emphasis on social histor
bottom up" - that would document the historie
ethnic, and other social groupings in the Unite
were often closely aligned with or were members
the groups about which they wrote; and be
distinct cultural traditions and practices, som
cultural histories of African Americans, women
indigenous Native peoples, Puerto Ricans, Cub
Hispanic groups, Asian Americans, and LGBT A
theories implicitly or explicitly underpinning
histories ranged from positivist to Marxian o
Thompson's The Making of the English Workin
Laboring Men, Antonio Gramsci's prison letter
Harris and Raymond Williams's "cultural mate
ways of approaching the history of cultures an
In addition to being informed by th
intellectuals" to expose the "cultural heg
capitalist class, historians trained in the 197
likely introduced to the new theories and to h
coming from th e, Annates School and associate
Braudel and Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie.10 Th
theorists that Eileen Tamura listed in "Narrat
- Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Hans G
Ricoeur - were introduced into the training of

7Peter Novick, Than Noble Dream: The " Objectivity Q

Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Pr
Ibid., 440-44; Jim Sharpe, "History from Below," in Ne
Writing , ed. Peter Burke (University Park: Pennsylvania
24-41.
9E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; reprinted New
York: Pantheon, 1964); and The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1 97 8); Eric Hobsbaum, Laboring Men (London: Weidenman and Nicolson,
1964); and Bandits (New York: Delacorte Press, 1969); and The Age of Capital , 1 848-1 815
(London: Weidenman and Nicolson, 1975); Antonio Gramsci, Letters from Prison (New
York: Harper and Row, 1973); and Joseph Buttigeig, ed., Antonio Cramsci Prison Notebooks
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism: The
Struggle for a Science of Culture (New York: Random House, 1979); Raymond Williams,
Culture and Materialism (London: Verso Books, 2006).
For an introduction to the French Annales School, see Peter Burke, The French
Historical Revolution: The Annales School (Cambridge, UK; Cambridge University Press,
1990).

This content downloaded from 5.31.15.180 on Sun, 27 Aug 2017 15:00:10 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
History , Education , Social Theories 267

the late 1980s and 1990s. While the suggestion that

in history in the 1990s did not require th
works by Foucault, Derrida, Umberto Eco, Paul
poststructuralists and postmodernists is without su
theorists did not achieve the same hegemony among
literary critics.11
While postmodern literary critics and propo
"cultural studies" may have dominated the M
Association in the 1990s, those researchers who con
"narrative historians," as Tamura points out, respo
narrative flowed from the research and document
acknowledged or unacknowledged social theorie
instances the result of literary critique rese
sociological analysis in that the theory guide
documents to be examined in an attempt to su
hypothesis. In those instances, concepts and framew
by the social or cultural theorist were then applied to a
social organization, looking for spaces and places to
structures or interpret social actions. In pursuing his o
historian has to be willing to challenge or dismiss
do not seem to address the documentation une
research process. Tamura 's suggestion that histori
departments of history are closer to educational his
education than their other colleagues in history pr
case, but the conscious foregrounding of soc
educational historians have in common. At the
historian, the narrative flowing from the documen
to the people and events under examination, even
the social theory. To Foucault's somewhat exaggera
does not exist, that only language exists," Georg G
that "most historians would agree with Carroll Sm
'while linguistic differences structure society,
structure language.'"13

11 For a study examining the ways historians can profit fro

Derrida, Gadamer, and other poststructuralists' theoretical i
Clark, History , Theory , Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn
University Press, 2004).
The reason we know that Foucault, Derrida, Eco, and oth
were taught in graduate programs in history is because their in
political historians; see J. H. Hexter, On Historians: Reappraisal
Makers of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Pres
Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Gu
University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century , 133.

This content downloaded from 5.31.15.180 on Sun, 27 Aug 2017 15:00:10 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 268 History of Education Quarterly

When the documentation is oral testimonies and one is interested

in the degree of integration among teenage students' cliques and social
groupings in a newly desegregated comprehensive high school, theory
becomes quite important. Oral testimonies and "life writings" have
similar limitations in that their "truth value" is over-determined. The
interventions by the autobiographer and the interviewer allow one
to question the trustworthiness of the statements transcribed.14
Theoretically, however, one can write educational "history" using
oral testimonies as primary sources when the objective is what
Caroline Eick refers to as a "relational history of education."
What impact did the size and the institutionalized racism at the
desegregated Miller High School have on the development of peer
relations across racial, gender, class, and ethnic groupings from
the 1950s to the end of the 1990s? Theories of intersectionality
addressing the various elements - race, class, gender, sexual
orientation, ethnicity, or immigrant status - that go into identity
formation become helpful in making sense of the multiple issues
broached in the oral interviews. By approaching the information
communicated in the language, as well as in the "meta-data," from a
variety of situated positions, including that of the interviewer/
researcher, we are able to describe "the graduates' subjective
interpretations of school relationships," and compare them with those
of others across time periods. Even when the objective is to interpret
meanings from oral testimonies, there is historical information that
would need to be gathered about the "broader social context" for each
time period, and that would contribute to the study's "truth value."
As a posts tructural social theorist, Michel Foucault has greatly
influenced the evolution of cultural studies and trends in literary
criticism, but seems to have had a limited impact on what was
published in the History of Education Quarterly , History of Education, and
Canadian Historical Studies of Education between 1999 and 2008,
according to the tabulations compiled by Roland Sintos Coloma.
But it is probably not just these three historical journals that
published few articles during that period using Foucauldian
discourse analysis. But we must keep in mind, Coloma reminds us,
that there are certain topics such as gender studies and women's
history, and certain fields such as penology and disability studies,
where Foucault's theories and practices have been put to good use.
I am forced to look at the scholarly publication I edited during much

14Political autobiographies can be used productively as ideological statements

from social actors reflecting on intellectual camps and social actions, see V. P. Franklin,
Living Our Stories , Telling Our Truths: Autobiography and the Making of the African American
Intellectual Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

This content downloaded from 5.31.15.180 on Sun, 27 Aug 2017 15:00:10 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
History, Education , and Social Theories 269

of that time period, The Journal of African American H

articles I published that explicitly cited Foucault's conc
were in the areas of gender studies, disability studies,
sexuality.15 There were, of course, many new and influ
publications in cultural studies that served as the prim
studies in Foucauldian discourse analysis and it is likely that
sociologists, and philosophers of education who utilized
their social analysis published their studies there. Editors ca
what they receive, and what they are looking for.
Important insights are generated in offering the gen
"racialized curriculum" imposed on colonized Filipi
colonial administrators and teachers employed by U.S.
well as "the inscriptions and enactments of colonia
regulations" inside and outside the "American"
Philippines in the early twentieth century. The inscript
personality found in the texts and readers supplie
authorities can be compared with those produce
nationalists who constituted themselves as what Coloma t
agents" who recognized certain "moral obligations."
Foucauldian discourse analysis serves as the prompt for
analysis, there are other social theorists to whom histori
and other educational researchers have been turnin
interpretive, methodological, and pedagogical potential
major "analytical innovations." The embrace of socia
practitioners such as Paulo Freire and Pierre Bourd
historians who consider themselves participants in
parameters of the social history enterprise should not
"resistance to the social constructionist approach" beca
poststructuralism as a "challenge to the major tenets of
believe the "major tenets of social history" change fro
generation and it is often the scholar's location an
influence the "analytical innovations" that are appropria

15David J. Connor and Beth Ferri, "Integration and Inclusio

Nexus of Race, Disability, and Special Education," The Journal of Africa
90 (Winter/Spring 2005): 107-27; Kathy Anne Jordan, "Discourses of
Over-Representation of Black Students in Special Education," J
American History 90 (Winter/Spring 2005): 128^49; Melinda Chat
Issue: "Discourses on Race, Sex, and African American Citizenship," J
American History 93 (Spring 2008): 149-261; this issue included fi
topics and Amy Abugo Ongiri, "Prisoner of Love: Affiliation, Sexua
Panther Party," Journal of African American History 94 (Winter 200
Ana Maria Freire and Donaldo Macedo, ed., The Paulo Freire Rea
Continuum Publishing Group, 2000). For historians and other rese
of Freirian analysis, see Peter Leonard and Peter McLaren, ed., Paulo
Encounter (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Ira Shor and Carolin

This content downloaded from 5.31.15.180 on Sun, 27 Aug 2017 15:00:10 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 270 History of Education Quarterly

Historians should be eclectic and selective in the choice of the

social theory that best explains the social, political, and economic
processes under analysis. For example, applying Pierre Bourdieu's
notions of capital to the economics of African-American schooling in
the South revealed that impoverished black southerners supported
financially their own "public" and private educational institutions
utilizing collective "cultural capital."17 Moreover, the hidden
transcripts uncovered for students and teachers revealed that "the
curriculum for African Americans in the South" was much more than
the "racial template" found in curricular materials provided by southern
white school officials. While it was assumed that these materials,
according to Coloma, "structured what teachers taught, what students
learned, and what kinds of lived trajectories were ... possible," these
studies of all-black schools under segregation reported that these
institutions could be nurturing and well-disciplined educational
environments where academic excellence and competence beyond
basic literacy was prized. The teachers and principals' expectations
were high, and despite the financial and other disabilities of the parents
and community members, many students rose to the educational
challenges they confronted.18 It would appear that theories about the
mobilizations to create collective cultural capital will have relevance in

Literacy in Action: Writing Words/Changing Worlds - A Tribute to Paulo Freire (Portsmouth,

NH: Boynton Cook Publishers, 1999); and M. F. Shaughnessy, E. Galligan, A. Hurtado
De Vives, eds., Pioneers in Education: Essays in Honor of Paulo Friere (Hauppauge, NY: Nova
Science Publishers, 2008).
17Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Jacques Passeron, Reproduction in Education , Society , and
Culture (London: Sage Publications Ltd., 1977), 69-106; Pierre Bourdieu, "Outline of
the Theory of Practice: Structures and the Habitus," in Practicing History: New Directions
in Historical Writing After the Linguistic Turn , ed., Gabrielle M. Spiegel (New York:
Routledge, 2005), 179-98. For a detailed review of the literature in education examining
Bourdieu's influence in educational research, see Sandra L. Dika and Kusum Singh,
"Applications of Social Capital in Educational Literature: A Critical Synthesis," Review of
Educational Research 72 (Spring 2002): 3 1-60.
Thomas Sowell, "Black Excellence: The Case of Dunbar High School," Public
Interest^S (Spring 1974): 1-21; Faustinejones,// Traditional Model of Educational Excellence
(Washington, DC, 1984); David Cecelski, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County , North
Carolina , and the Fate of Black Schools in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1994); Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential: An African
American School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1996); V.P. Franklin, "Introduction - Cultural Capital and African
American Education," The Journal of African American History 88 (Spring 2002): 175-
82; V. P. Franklin and Carter Julian Savage, eds., Cultural Capital and Black Education:
African American Communities and the Funding of Black Schoolings 1865 to the Present
(Westport, NY: Information Age Press, 2004); Mary S. Hoffschwelle, The Rosenwald
Schools of the American South (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2006); Vanessa
Siddle Walker and Ulyssus Byas, Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional
Leadership in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

This content downloaded from 5.31.15.180 on Sun, 27 Aug 2017 15:00:10 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
History , Education , Social Theories 271

the analysis of support for the nationalist texts of Cam

activities of the Filipinization movement.
Coloma calls our attention to Michel Foucault's commitment to
"theory as practice" by engaging in the "struggle against the forms of
power that transform [the intellectual] into its object and instrument in
the sphere of knowledge, truth, consciousness, and discourse." The role
of the intellectual "is not to shape others' political will," but "to disturb
people's mental habits, the way they do and think things"; and in this
"struggle against power," the intellectual must expose "the techniques
through which we become subjects within the nexus of power and
knowledge." Given the researcher's situated position, the network of
racial, gender, class, and other relations in that location, power
differentials and theories of intersectionality also become relevant
when trying to explain how social and political actors construct
meaning from their memories of experiences and social practices in
schools.

This content downloaded from 5.31.15.180 on Sun, 27 Aug 2017 15:00:10 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms