What can we learn from the history of education? (Johannes Westberg)

“Historians remind us of what we might prefer to forget” Johannes Westberg (University of Groningen) is one of Europe’s rising historians of education. We talk about his recent paper: “What we can learn from studying the past: The wonderful usefulness of history in educational research”, and consider the benefits of thinking more critically about sources of evidence, drawing on historical comparisons, and how history provides a valuable ‘psychological distance’ from emotive debates.