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Classic Studies in Pedagogy
The sources most commonly drawn on when conducting research into the history of education are studies published by pedagogues and educationalists in the past. These texts hold an undeniable value for those interested in the history of ideas in general and of pedagogic theory in particular. However, as a consequence of the history of pedagogy having been aligned with and, at least partially, supplanted by, other types of research, these classic texts are increasingly going out of print. Indeed, in some case sit is difficult to find editions which are less than fifty years old, and re-prints are often issued in an unsatisfactory form, with low editorial standards.
E-books are now very widespread, although they vary a great deal in both scope of availability and quality. However, as far as electronic libraries and data bases are concerned classics in education studies continue to occupy a marginal position. There is no single international project dedicated to this kind of source material.
The texts on offer fall into three categories: educational and pedagogical texts in German dating from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, the key periodicals published in the field from 1760 to 2001 in German-speaking countries and, finally, encyclopedias and lemmatic texts on pedagogy published from 1797 to 1942. All of the documentation in question is available in the Scripta Paedagogica Online in PDF format and accompanied by an accurate introduction. The German initiative is so are unique. Elsewhere, no special sections or programmes dedicated to the history of pedagogy are available. It is the only pedagogical institution who has built a similar enterprise. At best, the texts in question may feature in enormous on-line databases. There are now numerous national and International projects involved in book digitalization. Texts on education-related fields frequently appear in large-scale projects such as Gutenberg3 and Liber-Liber4 . The main limitations of the editions available in these archives, which those wishing to use them should always bear in mind, is that they are not always prepared to acceptable standards.
A very small number of other invaluable texts, such as the éducation entry in the Encyclopédie are also available in Frantext 6, where it is possible to run a search for a particular word or phrase in a corpus of 3,737 works.
Texts of interest for the history of education and of pedagogy are available in PDF form in ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online7), in the two series of Early American Imprints, and in EEBO (Early English Books Online8) .
These tools enable users to search by author, publisher, place of publication or keyword, limiting the corpus of texts to be examined to those concerned with education or pedagogy.
I here refer to the pedagogical texts contained in the Biblioteca Italiana9, together with the small selection of periodicals available in the Biblioteca Italiana10 at the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense11.
2 http://www.bbf.dipf.de/index.html. |
