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that ancient Greece made…to the human species as a whole…For most of the last
2400 years, the essence of history has continued to be that it should try to tell the
truth, to describe as best as possible what really happened. (1996, p. ix)
E.H. Carr takes a view of this type of positivist history, one that seeks to show how it really
was, as unobtainable, writing:
The empirical theory of knowledge presupposes a complete separation between
subject and object. Facts, like sense-impressions, impinge on the observer from
outside and are independent of his consciousness. The process of reception is
passive: having received the data, he (sic) then acts on them…This is what may be
called the commonsense view of history. History consists of a corpus of ascertained
facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on,
like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. (1990, p. 9, emphasis added)
This view of commonsense is evident across a variety of constructs and concepts covered in
this project, ranging from content of school curriculum, philosophies and ideological
approaches to education to research more broadly and, as seen above, to discipline-specific
methodological approaches. At all times, a commonsense view is attributed to a Whig-like
conservative perspective that seeks to establish and maintain a positivist view of knowledge,
a call for the general populace to agree with this perspective as it is presented as being
natural and the ‘right thing’, “implicit and self-evident” (E.H. Carr, 1990, p. 20).
Furthermore, as E.H. Carr succinctly describes of this approach, “…get your facts straight,
then plunge at your peril into the shifting sands of interpretation – that is the ultimate wisdom
of the empirical, commonsense school of history” (1990, p. 10). Not following this so-named
commonsense approach to the discipline; history, then, for this project is viewed as a
methodological approach to research, contextualised within its own historical context of the
direction the discipline has taken over the past two to three decades. Furthermore, as
appropriate for a bricolage approach:
…critical historians often start their research with a basic question: what groups and
individuals are advantaged and what groups and individuals are disadvantaged by
particular historical educational plans and organizations? Here critical historians
begin to identify the power relations that shape educational issues. In this context a
literacy of power becomes especially important. Such a literacy involves a complex
understanding of a variety of the ways power operates to marginalize and oppress…
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