Consequences of the Past and Responsible Histories of Education for the Future

Histories and legacies of colonialism, capitalist extraction of natural resources, damage and disruption to ecosystems balance, anthropocentric concepts of human freedom, sovereignty and growth and their impacts on shared planetary life, have, together, prompted reflection on the fraught, contested, and changing responsibilities of the historian to the past, present, and future. Responsibility towards the past does not only imply engaging with intergenerational and inherited guilt, but also a different kind of responsibility that seeks to generate fresh answers and relations towards people and situations of the past, present and potential futures. This special issue aims to address a gap in history of education research that has not yet deeply engaged its entanglement in anthropocentric and modernist reasoning and its responsibilities to produce a future-oriented, non-anthropocentric knowledge of the past.