This volume considers history as a foundational discipline in education. It shows how history is a means for exploring what it means to be human by considering those stories, sources, forces, and contexts that shape the way we construct narratives. History is more than content, no matter what we might recall from our experiences in schools. The volume shows how studying history is one means of uncovering why institutions, beliefs, policies, and practices are as they are. Educational structures are, like all things, mutable. History empowers the individual to be an actor in this process of change and to act judiciously.

About the Educational Foundations series:

Education, as an academic field taught at universities around the world, emerged from a range of older foundational disciplines. The Educational Foundations series comprises six volumes, each covering one of the foundational disciplines of philosophy, history, sociology, policy studies, economics and law. This is the first reference work to provide an authoritative and up-to-date account of all six disciplines, showing how each field’s ideas, methods, theories and approaches can contribute to research and practice in education today. The six volumes cover the same set of key topics within education, which also form the chapter titles:

- Mapping the Field
- Purposes of Education
- Curriculum
- Schools and Education Systems
- Learning and Human Development
- Teaching and Teacher Education
- Assessment and Evaluation

This structure allows readers to study the volumes in isolation, by discipline, or laterally, by topic, and facilitates a comparative, thematic reading of chapters across the volumes. Throughout the series, attention is paid to how the disciplines comprising the educational foundations speak to social justice concerns such as gender and racial equality.