I am a narrative historian. By narrative, I mean the telling of a story to explain and analyze events and human agency in order to increase understanding. As a narrative historian, I have not made extensive use of theory in my analysis of past events. In fact, in the past I consistently rejected theory, considering it more of a hindrance than a help.

The historian Geoffrey Roberts stated, “History is frequently labelled an idiographical discipline as opposed to a nomothetic one, that is, a discipline whose knowledge objects are particular, individual, and specific rather than classes of phenomena which are abstracted and subsumed in generalisations about trends, patterns and causal determinations.” In this vein, it was my view—as Peter Burke noted—that history examines particulars and “attend to concrete detail,” while theory attends to “general rules and screen[s] out the exceptions.”

Almost forty years since the publication of Cutler's landmark “Oral history—its nature and uses for educational history,” growing numbers of historians of education have adopted oral interviews as the basis for historical analysis. Furthermore, questions about the objectivity of oral sources in view of memory's fallibility have been more productively redirected toward exploring, in light of credibility standards borrowed from the social sciences and literary theory, the many hues of subjectivity of oral historical testimonies, and their implications for understanding same past events from multiple perspectives. As Portelli aptly states, “the first thing that makes oral history different, is that it tells us less about events than about their meaning” He boldly asserts that “what informants believe is indeed a historical fact “that is, the fact that they believe it”, as much as what really happened.” Oral historians not only reproblematized memory for historians by focusing attention on understanding the subjectivity of memory as a manifestation of historical consciousness, but they also brought to our attention how memories are gendered, racialized, and class based. They brought to our attention the importance of examining why different individuals and groups experience the same event in very different ways. Today, oral sources, particularly since the 1990s when historians began investigating the construction of identities, are compared less pejoratively with documentary sources by academic disciplinarians. And oral historians continue to break down “boundaries between the educational institution and the world, between the [history] profession and ordinary people.” However, they also continue to be faced with the challenge of articulating “the connection between individual and social historical consciousness.”

According to historian-philosopher Michel Foucault, “Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics' of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.” If each society has a regime of truth, it can be inferred that each scholarly discipline or field of study has its own general politics of truth which regulates its intellectual conditions, boundaries, and memberships. Consequently, Foucault's assertion leads me to ask: What regime of truth operates in the field of history of education? What types of discourse does it accept as true and deem as false? How does it distinguish between and sanction true and false statements? What value and status are conferred upon those charged with saying what counts as true and those considered saying what counts as false or unacceptable? What are the effects of such a regime on the field's analytical and methodological development as well as on its practitioners?

Professor Tamura, in her paper “Narrative History and Theory,” poses an issue with which I have lately wrestled. She reviews, first of all, some of the challenges to the tradition of narrative history presented by “social-scientifically oriented historians” like Fernand Braudel and “analytic philosophers” like Hayden White in the 1960s and 1970s, and then goes on to note that more recently, a turn to narrative among social scientists and a use of theory by historians suggests the possibility of combining narrative and theory in historical work. Overall, Professor Tamura expresses a sanguine view of the prospects for such integration. While narrative “provides a causal account and allows us to relive events,” theory “allows us to analyze more effectively the forces that are beneath the surface.” My own efforts to write a history of education in the early Republican era that moves back and forth between telling the stories of ordinary people and using social capital theory to analyze the place of schooling in larger patterns of social, economic, and political change, lead me to share Professor Tamura's interest in the possibilities, and at the same time to identify some of the challenges, of such work.

The distinguished Africanist Robert Harms once observed that “we historians are a practical people who pride ourselves on our attention to facts and our painstaking attention to detail.” If this is the case in other parts of the world, it is certainly true of American historians, who have been periodically admonished for their disinterest in questions of theory and purpose related to their craft. In this issue we have an opportunity to discuss the question of theory as it may pertain to the history of education, with particular attention to the United States. Regardless of whether one believes that historians should be ardent students of social theory, after all, there is little question about whether they should be cognizant of it. Indeed, there is danger in ignoring it. Quoting John Maynard Keynes, Harms suggested that practical people who feel “exempt from any intellectual influences” run the risk of “becoming slaves to some defunct economist.”

I am pleased to respond to this series of essays, shortened versions of which were presented at the AERA meeting in San Diego in April 2009. When I heard Eileen Tamura, Carolyn Eick, and Roland Coloma talk about theory in educational history in San Diego, I responded positively to what I thought was serious work and an invitation to those of us who don't do that kind of work to consider its value. Reading the essays, seeing the arguments fleshed out, I am able here to react more extensively to each.

The three essays before us constitute an indictment of the field of the history of education for its neglect of theory. Read linearly, from the Introduction through Coloma, the indictment becomes increasingly strident, moving from a gentle call for greater consideration of the potential contributions of theory for historical writing to a condemnation of the field for its parochial “indifference, imperviousness, and perhaps even resistance” to theory. As one practitioner within the field who shares with these authors a keen relish for theory and philosophy of history, I regret that the challenge to the field to attend more carefully to the possibilities of theory has been presented in exactly this form. My regret flows from the indictment's incoherent form, from its misleading evidentiary base, from its curious move from a broad embrace of multiple theoretical stances to a narrow, crabbed insistence on only one deeply problematic theory as acceptable evidence of the field's theoretical sophistication, and from the stunning effort in the last essay to appropriate and deploy language as power in order to marginalize and exclude from historical inquiry all but the narrowest range of discourse traditions. I will take up each of those issues in turn.

Over two hundred years ago Rousseau commented, “The facts described in history never give an exact picture of what actually happened. They change form in the historian's head. They get molded by his interests and take on the hue of his prejudices.” This insight—that history is a human creation molded by the interests and prejudices of the historian—is one that is easy to forget, particularly in times enamored by the claims of empirical science. But in the past three decades, historians, like other scholars across the humanities and social sciences, have faced a number of theoretical challenges to the empiricism that had been in ascendency since the late nineteenth century. Both established academic disciplines such as anthropology, literary studies, and philosophy and emerging disciplines such as cultural studies and film studies have been profoundly affected by these critiques. The “cultural turn,” with its emphasis on the inherently artificial nature of scholarly narratives, has challenged traditional historians' unquestioning reliance on documentary evidence, scientific methodology, and empirical claims to truth. Numerous historians have debated these theoretical challenges to the discipline, but historians of education have been largely silent. The absence of this debate in the history of education is striking, given the engagement of other scholars with these concerns and the fact that these ideas appeared over three decades ago: both Hayden White's Metahistory and Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures were published in 1973, while Foucault's Discipline and Punish appeared in English translation in 1977.

In the introduction to this volume, Eileen Tamura, Caroline Eick, and Roland Sintos Coloma state that their essays “are followed by responses by educational historians, some of whom have delved into theory in their historical works, while others have not.” I would describe myself as someone who has questioned the role of theory since I first began studying educational history several decades ago, who has attempted to use theory, and who, thus, warmly welcomes this discussion.

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. 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.” 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.