From a Nordic and British perspective, the history of education is a vibrant field of knowledge production. It invites scholars from the humanities and social sciences to investigate the continuities and changes in education over time, as well as Bildung, nurturing, learning, and teaching. By underlining the breadth of the history of education and using Nordic and British examples, I argue that the field is not shrinking but growing. A broader definition of the field expands the field’s scope beyond historical studies of formal schooling. It also enhances the field’s significance and reveals how it has a meaningful role in research policy, and practice.

This article examines two venues where historians of education have in the past addressed serious, publicly significant questions: commissions of inquiry and courtrooms where education rights and educational injustices are litigated. The article argues that these two examples demonstrate historians’ particular skills and abilities as evidence-gatherers, clear communicators, strong generalists, and experts in making sense of change over time. The article also suggests that these particular skills and abilities can be the basis for historians’ continued contributions to answering questions of public significance.

In recent years, justices on the US Supreme Court have made explicit historical arguments about US schools in order to promote a broader role for religion in US public schools. For example, in Espinoza v. Montana (2020), Chief Justice Roberts cited the late historian Carl F. Kaestle to buttress his arguments, but did so in a way that misrepresented Kaestle’s nuanced account. This article compares the justices’ historical arguments to the best evidence from the historical record. The essay argues that historians of education—whatever their political beliefs—can and should guide policy by providing reliable, accurate historical information.

There are two different ways to seek relevance in the history of education field. One involves closely aligning with contemporary debates to offer a “ready-to-use” historical perspective to education system stakeholders. The other entails diverging from conventional problem frameworks to tackle commonly overlooked or unexplored questions. This requires drawing new perspectives, ideas and knowledge from other research fields.

Low and stagnant teacher pay has been a perennial issue in the United States public school system since the early decades of the nineteenth century. Women teachers, then as now, confronted the issue head-on by organizing together. For example, women primary school teachers in Boston, Massachusetts successfully petitioned for more pay in 1835, but an emerging policy to pay women less ensured that such victories would be few and far between. Nevertheless, we can draw two critical lessons from these women teachers and their petition. First, a broader understanding of historical context and gendered narratives about labor is necessary to confront the teacher pay crisis today. Second, sharing teachers’ stories from the past now can help shape policy debates on teacher pay, turning a crisis into a new vision for the teaching profession.

This essay considers the usefulness of history of education, first, through the history of Australian university-based teacher education and then through the history of how, in the postwar period of schooling expansion, the provision of public schooling was transformed discursively from a policy solution into a policy problem—with opposing viewpoints from “left” and “right” projected through the print media. With a particular focus on “conservative” critique, two contrasting snapshots are presented of public writing from the 1970s-1980s to illustrate how, by this period, the focus of public debate about education policy in Australia was no longer on the principles and logistics of widening access, but on questioning the trustworthiness of the schools themselves—what and how they were teaching the nation’s children. The essay concludes by proposing that history itself is constantly invoked in debates about schooling by people who are trying to explain what needs to be changed or preserved.

In this essay, we explore the concept of path dependence through the example of the long-standing issue of racialized exclusionary school discipline. We argue that historians of education can reduce policy makers’ tendency to continue down existing policy paths (especially unhelpful ones), a phenomenon known as path dependence. We use racialized school discipline as a case in point. We also argue, however, that path dependence as an analytical tool can be “too much of a good thing” because it discounts the viability of ever-present options to change course. The real challenge lies in creating processes of path alteration that impose costs on policymakers for readopting policies shown to have such deleterious effects.