Future histories of education, pedagogy, and cultural studies: An editorial introduction

In serious, critical intellectual work, there are no ‘absolute beginnings’ and few unbroken continuities. Neither the endless unwinding of ‘tradition’, so beloved on the History of Ideas, nor the absolutism of the ‘epistemological rupture’, punctuating Thought into its ‘false’ and ‘correct’ parts, once favoured by the Althussereans, will do. What we find, instead, is an untidy but characteristic unevenness of development. What is important are the significant breaks—where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes. Changes in a problematic do significantly transform the nature of the questions asked, the forms in which they are proposed, and the manner in which they can be adequately answered. Such shifts in perspective reflect, not only the results of an intellectual labor, but the manner in which real historical developments and transformations are appropriated in thought, and provide Thought, not with its guarantee of ‘correctness’ but with its fundamental orientations, its conditions of existence. It is because of this complex articulation between thinking and historical reality, reflected in the social categories of thought, and the continuous dialectic between ‘knowledge’ and ‘power’, that the breaks are worth recording. (p. 57)