Article 1: 2018 Presidential Address: Chasing the Elusive Muse in the History of Education

Many of us here today became interested in the history of education through our early studies in history. I studied history in college and then went on to do a master’s degree in history. I was not sure what I was going to do afterwards so I went to law school. I tried law school for one semester, hated it, dropped out, and decided I wanted to be a high school teacher. So, I enrolled at Northwestern University’s Master in teaching program. It was here I took my first foundations in education course in the philosophy of education.

My professor in the course was the famed educational philosopher, Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon. Dr. Sophie as we called her at that time had us read Plato, Rousseau, Alfred Whitehead, W.E.B. Dubois and Dewey. Most of these philosophers were unknown to me except for Plato. What Dr. Sophie taught me was to read these works out of context, which feels counterintuitive if you are a historian. To do this, Dr. Sophie developed a method called interpretive discussion. She would come up with a basic question. It could be for example: Why does Rousseau believe that it is better to learn by oneself than learn from others? When we got back to class the following week we would have prepared more questions tied to the basic question. This would help us better understand the text.