The English Examining Boards: Their route from independence to government outsourcing agencies

31

views of writers such as the American Ellwood Patterson Cubberley. Then in the last
quarter of the 20^th century, teacher training in specialist colleges evolved into teacher
education within universities. Once opened to the wider intellectual community,
education history attracted severe criticism.

In America, Bernard Bailyn attacked - in elegant but devastating prose - the work of
earlier education historians as tainted with “presentism”, which he defined as “seeing
the past as the present writ small” (Bailyn, 1960 quoted in Lowe 2000: vol 1, 3).
Bailyn’s moderate revisionism was followed by Michael Katz’s radical critique,
focused on the flawed analysis of high school attendance in 19^th-century Boston,
which omitted to mention “the non-presence of rural pupils or urban immigrants ...at
high schools paid for by taxes on all” (Katz 1970: 31). In England, Harold Silver
articulated similar concerns with education historiography:

...the great majority of what had been written about popular education in the
Victorian period offered few or no real clues as to relationships in schools....
The canon ofpublished literature ...recognized only limited areas of ‘education’
as being suitable for investigation.

(Silver 1977: 198)

There had been no development of a theoretical position to justify a particular focus.
This is no longer acceptable within serious scholarship. Two decades on, the debate
had cooled to the point where Carl F Kaestle was able to contend that most historians’
involvement with theory was not as producers but as users, ranging in type from the
systematic through the eclectic to the incidental or heuristic. (Kaestle 1992: 116)
Nevertheless, the criticisms have tainted the reputation of much early education
history, relegating it to the status of a ‘field of study’ rather than a fully-fledged
discipline.

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