Professor Tamura, in her paper “Narrative History and Theory,” poses an issue with which I have lately wrestled. She reviews, first of all, some of the challenges to the tradition of narrative history presented by “social-scientifically oriented historians” like Fernand Braudel and “analytic philosophers” like Hayden White in the 1960s and 1970s, and then goes on to note that more recently, a turn to narrative among social scientists and a use of theory by historians suggests the possibility of combining narrative and theory in historical work. Overall, Professor Tamura expresses a sanguine view of the prospects for such integration. While narrative “provides a causal account and allows us to relive events,” theory “allows us to analyze more effectively the forces that are beneath the surface.” My own efforts to write a history of education in the early Republican era that moves back and forth between telling the stories of ordinary people and using social capital theory to analyze the place of schooling in larger patterns of social, economic, and political change, lead me to share Professor Tamura's interest in the possibilities, and at the same time to identify some of the challenges, of such work.

The distinguished Africanist Robert Harms once observed that “we historians are a practical people who pride ourselves on our attention to facts and our painstaking attention to detail.” If this is the case in other parts of the world, it is certainly true of American historians, who have been periodically admonished for their disinterest in questions of theory and purpose related to their craft. In this issue we have an opportunity to discuss the question of theory as it may pertain to the history of education, with particular attention to the United States. Regardless of whether one believes that historians should be ardent students of social theory, after all, there is little question about whether they should be cognizant of it. Indeed, there is danger in ignoring it. Quoting John Maynard Keynes, Harms suggested that practical people who feel “exempt from any intellectual influences” run the risk of “becoming slaves to some defunct economist.”

I am pleased to respond to this series of essays, shortened versions of which were presented at the AERA meeting in San Diego in April 2009. When I heard Eileen Tamura, Carolyn Eick, and Roland Coloma talk about theory in educational history in San Diego, I responded positively to what I thought was serious work and an invitation to those of us who don't do that kind of work to consider its value. Reading the essays, seeing the arguments fleshed out, I am able here to react more extensively to each.

The three essays before us constitute an indictment of the field of the history of education for its neglect of theory. Read linearly, from the Introduction through Coloma, the indictment becomes increasingly strident, moving from a gentle call for greater consideration of the potential contributions of theory for historical writing to a condemnation of the field for its parochial “indifference, imperviousness, and perhaps even resistance” to theory. As one practitioner within the field who shares with these authors a keen relish for theory and philosophy of history, I regret that the challenge to the field to attend more carefully to the possibilities of theory has been presented in exactly this form. My regret flows from the indictment's incoherent form, from its misleading evidentiary base, from its curious move from a broad embrace of multiple theoretical stances to a narrow, crabbed insistence on only one deeply problematic theory as acceptable evidence of the field's theoretical sophistication, and from the stunning effort in the last essay to appropriate and deploy language as power in order to marginalize and exclude from historical inquiry all but the narrowest range of discourse traditions. I will take up each of those issues in turn.

Over two hundred years ago Rousseau commented, “The facts described in history never give an exact picture of what actually happened. They change form in the historian's head. They get molded by his interests and take on the hue of his prejudices.” This insight—that history is a human creation molded by the interests and prejudices of the historian—is one that is easy to forget, particularly in times enamored by the claims of empirical science. But in the past three decades, historians, like other scholars across the humanities and social sciences, have faced a number of theoretical challenges to the empiricism that had been in ascendency since the late nineteenth century. Both established academic disciplines such as anthropology, literary studies, and philosophy and emerging disciplines such as cultural studies and film studies have been profoundly affected by these critiques. The “cultural turn,” with its emphasis on the inherently artificial nature of scholarly narratives, has challenged traditional historians' unquestioning reliance on documentary evidence, scientific methodology, and empirical claims to truth. Numerous historians have debated these theoretical challenges to the discipline, but historians of education have been largely silent. The absence of this debate in the history of education is striking, given the engagement of other scholars with these concerns and the fact that these ideas appeared over three decades ago: both Hayden White's Metahistory and Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures were published in 1973, while Foucault's Discipline and Punish appeared in English translation in 1977.