The Practical and Professional Relevance of Educational Research and Pedagogical Knowledge from the Perspective of History: Reflections on the Belgian Case in its International Background

Abstract

During the past 25 years, the author has set up several research projects in the history of education. A lot of them focus on the so-called ‘educationalisation’ or ‘pedagogisation’ process, that is the increasing importance of educational phenomena (educational conceptions, mentalities and practices and their legitimation in educational research and pedagogical knowledge) in society. On the basis of such studies it is possible to draw at least partial answers to the problem of the practical and professional relevance of educational research and pedagogical knowledge in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. Among other things, analyses of the inception of experimental research, of the change and continuity of in the ‘progressive’ area, of the social significance of the teaching profession, as well as of everyday life in ordinary schools, show an almost persistent tension between ‘rhetoric’ and ‘reality’ on the one hand, and between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ pedagogy on the other. Tackling these kind of paradoxes is not only very helpful in qualifying the enduring attempts to improve education by research, but also in demythologising the educational past — a task to which contemporary history of education has devoted itself.