Famous and Exemplary Biographies

One genre which is particularly common in the history of education field is that of biography.

Biographies of pedagogical thinkers have always provided a valuable companion to texts dealing with the history of pedagogical ideas.

However, the sites which offer this kind of data are rarely constructed by pedagogues and rarely have students of pedagogy in mind. They therefore frequently pay little attention to the educational theories of their subjects.

The main resources available are to be found in dictionaries of national biography, most of which are at least partially available online.

This is true of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (available online as the Dictionary of National Biography)¹³, of the American National Biography Online¹⁴, of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online¹⁵, and of the ADB & NDB Register¹⁶.

Various other important resources of this kind have been specifically developed for the internet and various important educationalists and pedagogues appear in the midst of thousands of other biographies.

This is true of the World Biographical Information System Online (WBIS Online), the most extensive biographical database available to date¹⁷.

The few specialised electronic resources of this kind do not stand comparison with these immense resources.

The largest such collection available on line is managed by the Institut National de Recherche Pédagogique (INRP), a French organisation which undertakes research into and organises initiatives with regard to pedagogy, didactics and education.

Biographies of the French ministers of education from 1802 to 2004 feature among the resources developed by the Service d’Histoire de l’Éducation¹⁸.

This resource is both rich and reliable, inasmuch as it provides information specifically geared towards educational historians.

Otherwise, websites dedicated to the history and works of pedagogues and educationalists are usually based on individual subjects and derive from projects of a very different kind.

Most of the sites in question are didactic in function, having been developed to accompany university or secondary education courses.

They normally contain biographical information which is over-generalised, irrelevant imagery and no primary sources.

There are also biographical websites designed to celebrate the lives and works of famous individuals, which have the grave defect of being updated very rarely.

A number of new projects are now arising, however, which are concerned with reconstructing both the life and works o fan author online. One such example of particular value is the Pestalozzi-goes-Internet site, dedicated to the famous Swiss pedagogue¹⁹ .

The site in question, which is partially available in English translation, is run by a group of German academics, each of whom is personally responsible for an individual section.

¹³http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/info/.
¹⁴http://www.anb.org/.
¹⁵ http://www.biographi.ca/EN/index.html. The same dictionary is also can be consulted in French language: http://www.biographi.ca/FR/index.html.
¹⁶http://mdz1.bib-bvb.de/~ndb/. They are the index of the two must important Deuth biografic dictionaries, the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, ADB (1875-1912) and the Neue deutsche Biographie, NDB, (in corso di pubblicazione dal 1953). ADB can be consulted on line in fimage format; in the NDB they can be consulter by index only.
¹⁷http://www.saur-wbi.de/english/aboutthe/page01.htm.
¹⁸http://www.inrp.fr/she/ministres.htm.
¹⁹http://www.heinrich-pestalozzi.info/.

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