Introduction to the Special Section: Peripathetic Journey of Education in a Globalizing and “Educationalized” World

In this special international issue, Pensamiento Educativo critically addresses core themes underlying our current discourse on education and conveys alternative ways of thinking about them. Our contributors historicize the issues by addressing contemporary problems and assumptions from a historical perspective. To historicize does not imply to narrate a past detached from the present, but to enlighten the genesis of the present ideologies, aspirations, and (sometimes) fooleries that have become commonplace in educational discourse and practice. Nonetheless, the purpose is not only deconstruction, but the freeing of oneself from the burden of unconscious effects of the past and tradition. As Quentin Skinner (2002a) puts it, we have to use the opportunity “that historical study [has] the power to transform us, to help us think more effectively about our society and its possible need for reform and reformation” (p. 26), because “to learn from the past... is to learn one of the keys to self-awareness itself” (Skinner, 2002b, p. 89).