In the second half of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm Dilthey tried to counter the rapidly spreading cultural and societal acceptance of the natural sciences. Dilthey's interest was in study of the world of Geist, or human mind/spirit, which seemed opposite to investigation of nature and far more valuable. To do this he had to refute the argument of the natural sciences, namely, that only the natural sciences fulfilled scientific requirements, as they had methodology. This Dilthey succeeded in doing in good Protestant tradition (his father was a Calvinist pastor), in that he raised hermeneutics to the guiding methodological foundation of the sciences of the Geist, or human mind/spirit: The world of the human mind/spirit, the Geisteswissenschaften, or «human sciences» or «social sciences», appeared to be saved, and real history was given a counterpart, the history of the mind/spirit, or history of ideas. From then on, students had to take courses in hermeneutics, where they had to grapple with the «hermeneutic circle," the unsaid background of texts, and the claim to understand authors of a text better than the authors had understood themselves. The history of pedagogy became the history of great pedagogical ideas; this history began at some point in Antiquity, and after 1800 it was known mostly only to German authors.

The claim of hermeneutics to be able to grasp, through its methodological system, the mental/spiritual sense and meaning contents of a text, was later undermined by scientific developments like critical theory, gender research, and analytical philosophy. Especially the developments associated with the linguistic turn nourished doubts as to whether texts, or language, could depict Geist and whether, quite the contrary, mental/ spiritual sense and meaning contents were not linguistic constructions. The world of Geist became the world of discourse, and keywords like «discontinuities» or «breaks» replaced traditional ideas about the history of ideas. Consequently, instead of hermeneutics students now had to learn discourse analysis, which became the model methodology of the historically oriented humanities. Whereas the importance of scientific methods for generating scientific knowledge is no longer disputed, it is not always easy to see in the individual studies what yield discourse analysis brings for historiography. Often, methodological declaration of intent on the one side, and actual material investigation on the other, appear to be two separate spheres, whereby not infrequently, fundamental tools and standards fall into oblivion. Upon this background, in this issue, Marc Depaepe, who has contributed to the methodological discussion in educational historiography for many years, states «ten commandments» of good practices in history of education research and presents them for discussion by an international audience. The discussion shows that, as in Dilthey's time, methodological questions are decisive but must be viewed in a decisively more differentiated way. Pieter Verstraete's contribution in the «Research» column shows what an easy route was taken by the traditional historiography and what price it has to pay to tell linear (Geist-) histories.

Whereas German-language educational historiography was for a long time oriented towards the history of ideas or intellectual history, American educational historiography developed in close connection with the school. In the 1950s and 1960s a dispute was sparked over whether progressive education, which was nearing its end (John Dewey died in 1952), had had a «good» or a «harmful» influence on the school. The question as to whether school developments are at all the consequences of targeted reform initiatives was not even raised, not even until the 1980s and then mainly in Stanford, when Larry Cuban and David Tyack, based on historical analyses, began to ask some fundamental questions about reform and school and in this connection developed the concept of a «grammar of schooling". David Labaree considers the school again under that aspect extensively and considers how the school reacts to the diverse demands and reform initiatives to which it is exposed; he presents his central theses here for discussion. In this discussion there is a commentary from the American perspective and reflections from the point of view of various national experiences. The discussion revolves not only around Labaree's theses as such but also indirectly, raising the issue of whether these theses are themselves nationally idiosyncratic or global in character.