Article 7: Archival Theory and The Shaping of Educational History: Utilizing New Sources and Reinterpreting Traditional Ones

Information technology has spawned new evidentiary sources, better retrieval systems for existing ones, and new tools for interpreting traditional source materials. These advances have contributed to a broadening of public participation in civil society (Blouin and Rosenberg 2006). In these culturally unsettled and economically fragile times historians of education have witnessed a fracturing of popular consensus of what constitutes the appropriate form, substance, and direction of civil society. Shrinking popular consensus on the meanings and purpose of education and the role of government as its guarantor is at the center of one important civil society debate. Newer constituencies, borne of the socio-economic and technological changes of the last thirty years, are less accepting of differential access to centers of influence and power and are better able to articulate alternative points of view. Who may claim and craft the interpretive meaning of our collective educational history?