Sociology for the Future Historian

Abstract

Imagine it is 2050, and you are nearing retirement. You are a historian, mostly interested in the history of education generally and public schools specifically. You finally feel enough distance from the passions of the first two decades of the twenty-first century to consider writing about it. You have waited this long for good reasons. Your mentors in graduate school always insisted that you should never write about your own time and place. Let journalists and social scientists, concerned with the here-and-now, do their job and you do yours. A historian’s job is to understand the past, not the present. The passing of time will provide perspective.