Historical Pageants and the History of Education
I come to the study of pageants as an historian of education, among other things. I now work at the Institute of Education, University of London, and co-edit the journal History of Education.
On the face of it, historical pageants might not seem an obvious
subject for an historian of education, but, as I emphasised in a poster presentation
at the History of Education Society annual conference in 2012, pageants
were one aspect of the wide range of informal educational activities
that formed an important part of British associational life in the
twentieth century. They often involved local schools and adult education
organisations – indeed, the Liverpool pageant of 1907 was supported by
the education committee of the local authority. Some pageants were
accompanied by educational activities in museums. The government even
exempted pageants from the entertainments tax, on the grounds that they
were ‘wholly educational’.
The story of the history of education has involved a gradual broadening of focus, not always uncontroversially. In Britain, America and elsewhere in the first half of the twentieth century, the history of education often focused on the development of formal schooling, focused on ‘acts and facts’, telling a whiggish story of progress and development. But a more critical and wide-ranging historiography emerged in the 1960s, epitomised by the American scholar Lawrence Cremin, who argued that historians of education should:
project our concerns beyond the schools to a host of other institutions that educate: families, churches, libraries, museums, publishers, benevolent societies, youth group, agricultural fairs, radio networks, military organisations, and research institutes. (Lawrence Cremin, The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley (1965), p. 48.)
By and large, historians have heeded Cremin’s advice, and the history of education is now a rich field of research, sophisticated in method and usually concerned with examining the relationship between education and wider social, economic, cultural and political processes. Although schooling remains an important area of research, many other subjects are now also fully embraced by the history of education sub-discipline. History of Education, for example, has recently published articles on controversies about history textbooks in 1920s Canada, ‘service learning’ and interwar British unemployed camps, literacy and business in sixteenth-century Bristol, and the transmission of ‘messages’ about industrialisation through poetry in the eighteenth century.
The changing patterns of educational history are traced in Gary
McCulloch’s recent book, The Struggle for the History of Education
(2011), which also offers some suggestions for the future. McCulloch
argues that we should continue to explore beyond the boundaries of
informal education, and also to engage with a popular audience, using
new media, as many other historians have done in recent years. I hope
that ‘The Redress of the Past’ will do these things, and contribute to
the flourishing sub-discipline of history of education.
Mark Freeman