Diane Ravitch and the History That "Reformers" Do Not Know
Diane Ravitch has again done the seemingly impossible. She prompted Education Sector's Kevin Carey to take a glance at the history of education. Even so, Carey's piece in The New Republic, "The Dissenter," indicates that he did not read carefully.
Carey wrote that Ravitch "left a polarized history profession in her wake," as if she did not enter the field at a time when traditional historians were under siege. During the sixties, history was dominated by class-based analyses of theories on the oppressiveness of various power structures. History was dominated by genres, ranging from the New Social History to the various Marxist schools of thought, that sought evidence for or against ideological orthodoxies. Too many fell under the umbrella of "history with the people left out."
Ravitch dissented and wrote richer, eclectic narratives on a broader canvass. Rather than claiming that history "proved" their theories, more balanced historians, like Ravitch, still practiced the approach that Carey condemns as using "historical narrative in illustrating various points." These historians also assumed that in the end, "there will be heroes, villains, naive collaborators, [and] rigid ideologues." They appreciated a world of contradictions.
Today's historians have largely embraced Ravitch's position that history does not tell us what