A Modest Proposal to Recuperate a Joysome History of Education

2024/09/27 by Noah W. Sobe
Social Sciences · #Australian History and Society #Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy #Race, History, and American Society

paper · doi:10.1080/0046760x.2024.2403077

openalex publication_date 2024/09/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22

Abstract

How might historians of education bring joy to their work and make our scholarship of use to the world? This article suggests returning to Welland Hendrick’s 1909 A Joysome History of Education. This minor but well-circulated text uses humour and irony to poke fun at some of the more obtuse, sacrosanct, and self-righteous aspects of education as seen from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century vantage point of a mid-level and little-known American educator. With apologies to Jonathan Swift, this article advances the modest proposal of taking lessons from Hendrick’s project and considering how satire could be a productive form of critical fabulation for historians of education today.

Citations

• Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern
• Venus in Two Acts

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• History rather than a social science: on the importance of intellectual history for the history of education
• Rethinking the history of education: considerations for a new social history of education
• The history of education in Britain and Ireland: changing perspectives and continuing themes
• History of Education in Europe