Blockchain Papers

Fred Anderson

WHATEVER deficiencies Bernard Bailyn may have had, reticence about the practice of history, fortunately, was not one of them.1 During five decades as a teacher at Harvard, he devoted his research seminar in Early American history to introducing first-year graduate students to the discipline's essential skills and practices. Simultaneously he instructed scores of individual doctoral candidates in matters of research, argument, and writing whenever their drafts diverged from his acute sense of the relevant standards. Between 1951 and 2000, he performed a similar service for authors and scholarly readers in the incisive book reviews and review essays he published in learned journals, delivering thirty verdicts on works from La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II—a critical debut as auspicious as it was audacious—to the first two volumes of The Oxford History of the British Empire, the subject of his last review.2In seminars, thesis supervisions, and reviews Bailyn typically directed his comments to individual works and writers; that they reflected aspects of a larger, unified sense of historical standards and practice was often less clear to his students and readers than the deficiencies or merits of the specific case under discussion. Only in December 1981, as his professional career reached its zenith, did he speak publicly in general terms about the discipline of history in “The Challenge of Modern Historiography,” his presidential address to the American Historical Association.3 Thereafter he discussed aspects of the subject in invited lectures delivered in 1985 (on creative imagination in history), 1995 (on context in historical writing), and 1998 (a comment on history and memory that concluded a scholarly conference on the slave trade). He also spoke in personal terms on the teaching and writing of history in long retrospective interviews recorded in 1991 just before he retired, and in 1993 just after.4Becoming professor emeritus at age seventy did not end Bailyn's commitment to sharing his views on the practice of history with students. He remained engaged as advisor and co-advisor of history doctoral dissertations until his eightieth year, while returning from retirement to offer an introductory methods course to first-year graduate students.5 He first taught that seminar, History 2910: The Practice of History, in the fall term of 1993 when he was seventy-one. If its twenty students imagined that the pass/fail grading format foretold a ramble through historiography under the guidance of a genial emeritus, rigorous weekly discussions based on hundreds of pages of readings soon disabused them of the illusion. In fact, the course was an expansion and generalization of the Early American research seminar he had taught for decades and nothing less than the summa of Bailyn's thinking on historical method.6 Even when that seminar was last offered, in the fall term of 1999, he had not uttered his final word: he last commented publicly on historical writing in Illuminating History, the intellectual memoir that appeared in the final year of his life.These activities and writings trace an extraordinary effort to explain a discipline that Bailyn maintained “can be an art, is never a science,” but “is always a craft.”7 At one level this dictum paid homage to Marc Bloch, who prefaced his unfinished manuscript on the historical method by disclaiming any philosophical intention. “I submit it for what it is,” he wrote in the introduction to The Historian's Craft: “the memorandum of a craftsman who has always liked to reflect over his daily task, the notebook of a journeyman who has long handled the rule and the level, without imagining himself to be a mathematician.”8 There was, however, much more to the claim than self-effacement, for to call history a craft was to declare disciplinary independence from the social sciences and their orientation toward building general systems, models, and theories. Construing historical writing as craftwork put in brackets a number of philosophical issues—the strength or weakness of history's claims to represent objective truth, the definition of what qualifies as a historical fact, and so on—which, while important in themselves, tend to emphasize the epistemology of history rather than the investigation, analysis, and narration of the past. To define history as a craft also had important practical consequences by implying that its skills are better taught by example and practice than by precept, and that standards of historical scholarship and writing are best transmitted not as rules but as understandings shared among acknowledged practitioners. Professional training in history-as-craft therefore required students not merely to command a body of knowledge but to be acculturated to the community of working scholars. The claim of craft, in this sense, embraced medieval guild traditions as an analogue for modern graduate education even as it attempted to describe the lived reality of historians’ practice.9But what, specifically, did Bailyn believe could be gained by construing historical work as a kind of craft production? What basic skills were needed, and how were they best nurtured in students and scholars? What knowledge of rhetoric and traditions, what grasp of the standards by which historical writings could be understood as successful or deficient, were essential? Where did the boundary lie between ordinary scholarship and historical works of art? Tracing Bailyn's own trajectory—from acquiring the discipline's fundamental skills as a graduate student to imparting them to his own students as a teacher and mentor, to expounding his views on the character and practice of history to professional and lay audiences—allows us to address these questions. In answering them it becomes possible to understand Bailyn's writings, from the mid-1960s onward, as the work of a master craftsman determined to create literary art.Two indispensable steps in the long march to learning any craft depend upon emulation: developing the habit of analyzing excellent work to understand its essential features and finding a mentor whose practice exemplifies qualities the student most admires. That Bailyn achieved both during his first two years in graduate school was not a foregone conclusion. An incomplete undergraduate education in English literature, interrupted by military service in World War II, meant that he entered Harvard's History graduate program in 1946 with “a general orientation to social and economic history” for which his previous academic work offered minimal preparation. During the first year he succeeded in identifying a potential focus for study—the intersections “between mental, interior states and socioeconomic conditions and forces” in the lives of people who lived and worked at the “intersection between Europe and America” during the long transition between the early modern period and the modern era—without securing a mentor who could help him translate that inchoate ambition into a dissertation project.10 Bailyn's assigned advisor, Samuel Eliot Morison, was personally aloof and professionally dismissive of analytical history “as a betrayal of the historian's obligation to tell the human story of what has happened,” and it was only during his second year that he gravitated to Oscar Handlin as an alternative.11 Handlin was only recently tenured, but Bailyn admired his lectures as “tightly woven analyses of the structures of events and circumstances that explained how things came to be the way they were” and was drawn to his understanding of history as “a form of intellection, a cognitive process.” When Morison took a leave of absence to write The History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Bailyn switched advisors.12Late in life he described a crucial encounter with Handlin, probably in 1948, as an awakening to history “essentially as a craft with rigorous demands and standards”: As a largely unsupervised graduate student, I was struggling with a dissertation on religion and economic development and had got myself tangled up in the theories of Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, and others, and was told that the person to see was young Professor Handlin, who knew about such things. When he asked me what the problem was, I explained at length, exhaustively, with every twist and detail. Then I waited for his response. I can still recall it. He said “ECH,” and waved his hand dismissively. I got the message, and it was liberating. I never again got caught up in theoretical issues in approaching a historical problem.13Whether mere seconds or whole weeks elapsed before Bailyn deciphered Handlin's ECH, in the end its meaning was unmistakable: he needed to ask his own questions and make his own arguments to answer them. This did not mean he could disregard Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism (1905), much less R.H. Tawney's challenge to Weber's general arguments in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926). Far from it—in 1994, Bailyn noted that he chose to study the New England merchants because “Weber and Tawney had made clear that the one pure case of the influence of Protestant ideology on capitalist development … was in early New England.”14 Handlin's gesture and grunt had, however, relieved Bailyn of any imagined obligation to confirm or challenge Weber's—or anyone's—theory. History was its own discipline, in no sense bound by the system-building imperatives of the social sciences. What historians needed to do was simply to ask the right questions of the sources that intrigued them.This liberating insight, Bailyn realized, converged with a quality he had found compelling in Marc Bloch's masterpiece La Société féodale, which he had read for a medieval field in his General Examination: Everything in Bloch's writing impressed me: the scope and detail and organization, the tightness and clarity of the language, but above all—what I remember most clearly—the sense of movement, change, loss, evanescence, in everything he wrote. He was a master in tracing changes in the meaning and uses of words—the way the expression, the language, persists but the meanings are transformed.15Those “apparent anomalies—things that don't explain themselves, things that are puzzling—are entries into the peculiarities of the past.” Alertness to such surprises was a quality shared by the analytical historians whose work Bailyn most admired, those able to explain why it is that a word meant one thing at one time and another thing at another point. That kind of anomaly … leads you into areas you otherwise wouldn't think about. This is the basis of Handlin's article on the origins of chattel slavery. He observed the difference in the meaning of the word “slave” in the early seventeenth century and at the end of the seventeenth century. The word was used at both times, but it meant different things. To spot these apparently inexplicable developments is a way of entering rather deeply, I think, into the strangeness of a past situation, because they are anomalies only with respect to us, and therefore … distinctive of the past.16Crucial insights flowed from this realization. To recognize anomalies—not just linguistic shifts, but all surprising departures from an expected course of development—required the researcher to imagine the “movement, change, loss, evanescence” reflected in primary sources, to be attuned to their contexts and nuances and inner logic, and hence to be open to discovery. This validated Bailyn's temperamental skepticism of abstraction and reinforced his commitment to investigating the colonial merchants whose daily pursuit of profit had created a treasure-trove of evidence. Like Handlin's investigation of thousands of individuals, families, and households in Boston's Immigrants, Bailyn's deeply contextualized analysis of commercial correspondence, notarial records, ledgers, and other business documents made it possible to understand the merchants not just as entrepreneurs, but as shapers of New England society and founders of a viable regional economy.Two pillars of the historian's craft as Bailyn understood and ultimately taught—relying on primary sources for questions to drive one's research and expecting the unexpected—were thus fixed in place by his early dissertation work and emulation of Handlin's approach. A third followed from Handlin's suggestion that he “read Sylvia Thrupp's book on the merchant class of medieval London.” Reflecting on her arguments brought into focus the theme with which he ended the dissertation: What I discovered, and then tested in the later statistical study of shipping, was that there was no such thing as a [merchant] “class” in any recognizable sense. The merchants were simply a group of people who participated in trade. The social and economic range of these people defies all class definition… So the book begins with one kind of problem and ends with another.17Handlin's seemingly tangential comment enabled Bailyn to see the relationship between his highly focused analysis and a much larger historiographical issue, the influence of social class on the development of eighteenth-century British North America. Handlin well understood the centrality to Progressive historiography of Arthur Meier Schlesinger's pioneering social history, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution: its argument that North American merchants resisted Parliamentary taxation to defend their class interest was regarded as validating Carl Becker's and Charles Beard's contention that from the Stamp Act crisis to the Constitution the leitmotif of American Revolutionary history was class conflict.18 Because social classes formed over generations and maintained structural coherence over time, the demonstration that New England merchants c. 1690 were an occupational group rather than a class had enormous implications for interpreting the political response of merchants, seventy-five years later, to changes in British trade policies.19 Understanding this, Bailyn staked a bold claim for the significance of his findings for “the decade after 1765” in his book's final sentence: “And this time, too, as in those distant days when Randolph and Andros had darkened the horizon, the New England merchants reacted not as a unit but as individuals whose social differences were at least as strong as their common interests.”20A decade after defending his thesis, Bailyn quipped that “one of the greatest values of the doctoral dissertation … is the almost universal experience … that one has given the right answers to the wrong questions.”21 His own questions, defined by the sources and refined by stages as the project progressed, were in fact excellent but narrowly drawn: their historiographical implications eluded him until Handlin's suggestion helped him recognize their larger significance and prodded him to make it clear to readers. The third great lesson in the craft of history that Bailyn took away from his dissertation, therefore, was that the final, hardest, most elusive question that the historian must answer is always “So what?”.Bailyn chose his words carefully in the Preface to The New England Merchants when he acknowledged Handlin's “wise counsel and the example of his remarkable scholarship,” his thorough reading of the manuscript “at every stage of its preparation,” and the critical remarks that “conveyed something of his own inspiration which makes of history a subtle, penetrating analysis of society.” They summed up his understanding, as a newly certified member of the historical guild, of the essential qualities of a master craftsman.22By the time Bailyn joined the Harvard faculty as an assistant professor in 1953, his understanding of the historian's craft rested on three pillars: the knowledge of how and where to find topics worthy of exploration in all kinds of sources; the recognition that research and rigorous analysis depended above all on asking the right questions; and the conviction that the historian's work is finished only when he or she can articulate its significance. Continued professional growth now required him both to produce scholarly work and to impart historical knowledge to undergraduate and graduate students, groups which he knew had fundamentally different needs. Undergraduate instruction, which dominated in his early teaching and until he retired, meant about the past in a and students, by needed above all to be to essential … tested through that them to a analysis, of is or To be attuned to these was because in history, as in other craft, standards of quality can be among those who practice it. That is why … the training in the graduate when it is handled makes sense. how craft skills have and tested through the the of undergraduate most of his time and because obligation is to at an level, a whole subject in an form for but Only a of those who in his classes or history but all of them needed to understand that the discipline of history an essential way of the is an of human a way of of the of one's own life and and of more of what human experience has it is the way of the so that you where you are and where have from and so you don't about the past and make up to you can make based … on what has on knowledge of of undergraduate were thus to to grasp the and the of the subject and at the time to their so that they can ask their own he also from Handlin work his in and that undergraduate teaching could scholarly as well as Handlin, who not to his was by their carefully to his lectures as a of scholarly arguments to lay The from he noted that everything published has in one form or in which are because you can it is a way of own because you can was crucial in teaching undergraduate that came to the than he the question was, What issues you for analysis and The for is that the … … to an understanding of critical in the by which a distant and different past toward these critical have to be without any sense of or they have to be in all their and with all the as I with no that or that his in this way was not merely a but the of how he understood the discipline and its History was not merely knowledge of the it was a way of the that was no less rigorous no less than the of was another did not the writing and of and Bailyn found them less to and more to Because students are to do what I he as he he on imparting “the discipline of the The is to them and to create and over the to make them that there are and important questions and that there are questions; to them to understand the difference and to what significance Bailyn meant building the to historical works from those that were merely To such he a Handlin used to seminar to such fundamental issues as how to and as historical and with over time in the meanings of the for Handlin a seemingly question a the students to answer with no more guidance than to tell them when they were on the wrong asked you what a not what waited until they then a answer is the of a or At that he the and leave the students to the meaning of what had just they achieved was but in sense the more and because of Handlin, who and analysis, Bailyn used the of to to how historians did their His to readings without any of his was graduate to all of creative by in works on the history of education what he to focus on and about had nothing to do with the history of but or literary or how not to a In this specific he had assigned two a modern book by a and modern and … a book about by an which as and I then in the course of to people to see that there is at least as a historical understanding in that book as in the professional and so by of the basic qualities of in at that of but leave … thinking about basic of historical the early discussions to leave the students “a a of creative that for time, not The time, they don't what to at the end of a number of weeks of this, their are open to all of and they read in That to be a way of them to of and and a way also of a sense of and practice the students they could be as it was for the from who three decades later Bailyn's and seminar as the intellectual that him into a student of early American for the did not so other and other Bailyn could as because introductory not just to students to the practice of history but to them His from Morison to Handlin had the critical in his own students to the in a he not have that the the he never from in introducing students to the craft during the years he taught the the over time, but the essential skills he to impart remained Bailyn in them in during a at New on and the to historians and in issues of common of historical the of historical and the of in Bailyn's was to comment on the an delivered in a on “The of the the to his own work of the philosophical of and about the to which who shared his could claim their findings were Bailyn the interest of these but their for historians their he three of less but more that they needed in to with their If of history to help historians think he they on those three areas before such as the of in Bailyn's of the they the skills and he was to his graduate students. In his Harvard seminar he expected students to their own understandings from the of at he the the effort by simply first crucial issue, “the of to for a scholarly of the of the American in the historical or the and The last intrigued him because historical from “the of … in primary sources that research and writing or from between and that required a of and because every project … is and every question is a it was possible imagine such a thing as a historical was in this he be more to the working historian than volumes of on it is to the or what is the of a the historian had found a the second task, “the of that “a of thinking through a body of that required the of the question to it with the evidence. thus needed to be to and which required them to focus on the with who remained attuned to the and their of the of their such that a project to “a as a can into a and end up as a the to which may be in a Because the and of “the problem of the or of Bailyn historians needed to research more than they than on the that their work is the confirm the historians needed to more carefully to logic, between the mere of and the of literary and to the of Bailyn historians must carefully how to their findings and the potential of this he two word and the of In he historians needed always to a critical between and the and they the and focused on the historical situation, not on even a or can the in to his by the and the to from the past to the historians needed to in “the of the of which “The way in which a historian … he to the of knowledge he has to the reality of the past as

John C. Weidman, Brian Yoder

This article describes the social, economic, and political processes that have influenced educational reform in two countries of Central Asia since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. It compares and contrasts the various educational reform initiatives that have occurred in each country, including legal and policy frameworks, curriculum change, decentralization, privatization, finance, structure, and emphasis of educational systems, and the fit between what is taught in educational institutions and demands of the labor market. A sector-wide framework for education reform is presented to facilitate understanding of the very complex set of processes involved.

Goran Puača

Abstract\nDecentralisation and deregulation in Swedish secondary education has put more responsibility on local school\norganization to manoeuvre in a competitive educational context. Political claims foregoing this form of quasimarket\ndevelopment in education stress enhanced opportunities for choices and stimulation of pluralistic\ninterests among students inside a more autonomous school organization. In this paper the issue of educational\nopportunities is underlined by discussing initial results from an ongoing fieldwork at a Swedish secondary\nschool. Shaped as a case study, the purpose is to investigate how students at both academic and vocational study\nprogrammes view their future opportunities in a wider socioeconomic context. More specifically the purpose is\nto examine how sociocultural conditions become decisive for evaluating possibilities and restraints of schooling.\nThe methodological approach uses multiple qualitative methods, and is inspired by theoretical perspectives that\nunderline the interconnection between individual, organization and society. Emphasis is in particular put on\nhow individual choices are shaped, mediated and channelled by institutional conditions. A theoretical\nelaboration will be tested by using Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of Habitus, as socially embodied structures, that\ncan be viewed upon as a mediating link between individual action and external power relations of the society.\nPreliminary results indicate that educational objectives set by the school in question are interpreted rather\ndifferently by the vocational and academic students. Individual perception of opportunities coincides with\nnorms and values in the local cultural environment, and results in individual strategies that overlap with local\ncollective beliefs. Both academic and vocational students pursue instrumental goals of material security and\nsocial establishment. However, the difference tends to lie in collectively tied practices of pursuing and defining\nthose aims. At the academic oriented programmes school objectives are commonly agreed upon, and are\nincorporated in the cultural environment. Conversely, mistrust and disagreement towards the goals of the\nvocational programme seems to prevail among the students. Organisational strategies are shifting in accordance\nto these different goals, respectively. From supportive and dialog-oriented conduct at the academic track, to\nconflict filled and disciplining relations at the vocational programme.\nThese early results indicate that students need to take an active part in the specific cultural setting with explicit\nnotions of consistency in order to allocate organizational resources to their favour. Moreover, this case study\ndemonstrate the increasing strong tendency that education is becoming a kind of quasi-market, which\npresupposes well-informed and ambitious students who seeks to utilise the gains in schooling. Hence, this\nilluminates the importance of further examination of how sociocultural structures condition students’ practical\nunderstanding of the possibilities and limitations of education.

Peter Pericles Trifonas

Postindustrial society exhibits signs of postmodern culture. Not only because the reality of a temporal disjunction between past and present engenders liminal perspectives on knowedge, but because the nature of episteme becomes redefined in accordance with the incommensurability between repositories of knowledge and their technologies of archiving information to secure its reproduction. To understand what is at stake for the future of education, must ask an overwhelming question: Does knowledge have to be reduced to an archive to make it a teachable certainty as the truth of curriculum? The answer is: yes. But is it possible not to limit truth to a single and finite trajectory of meaning within curriculum? Only, if bring the concept of curriculum to closure, not an end, to begin thinking about the goals and objectives of education again without a nostalgia for a future sans curriculum. The suggestion will be ludicrous for some and welcome for others, which is not surprising: considering all that has been invested in the concept of curriculum as a way to guide and make sense of the educational project. We in the West, have invested the curriculum with an ideological subtext that promotes an ethic of infinite progress and self-betterment called lifelong learning. In the process, we have been rendered teachers and educational institutions accountable for the future of society and the survival of the State because of the power of curriculum to influence the minds, hearts, and bodies of a new generation. I have placed we in brackets not to sterilize the cultural ethnocentrism associated with the pronoun, but to emphasize the self-mocking nature of any attempt to divest from it meanings related to the subjective rendering of a possible world. By referring to a we, a subject has already identified with a group and claimed participation despite the free will of independent action. As an archive of knowledge, a curriculum presupposes the possibility of reducing knowledge to a set of mental decoding operations and performative outcomes that are empirical and therefore measurable of the cognitive and habitual changes call education. Knowledge is nothing if it is not grounded upon the possibility of a permanent record of physical data that can then be used to establish laws of science as the demonstrable evidence of the self-certainty of the truth of research in the practice of transmission and reproduction. Culture depends upon the feasibility of referring to relatively stable archives of meaning to endow expressions of understanding with the evidence of empirical value and predictive power. The failings of conscious memory require the continuing, verifiable proof of a past and a future to secure the possibility of a genealogical rendering of human experience. To mourn the death of curriculum after deconstruction resonates as premature. For the work--or the economy of the internal emotional and psychic labor--that sustains the logic driving the motivational force of this hyperintellectualized (theoretical) act of grieving is inopportune. Its effectivity as the moment of a nostalgia that seeks to idealize the past in a moment of perfect and perfectible memory mistakenly presupposes a common and universal recognition of the end of an epistemic tradition rooted in the rise of the Occident as an archive of teaching and learning. The force of this mourning of curriculum mobilizes and is mobilized by a lamentation of the violence perpetrated against the Archeology of the Letter, its arkhe and telos, the beginning and the finale of the history of metaphysics. Regret for the pure loss, (1) as Jacques Derrida has called it, of an ideal consignment of knowledge leaves a space (kenosis) for the possibility of an assembling or gathering (Versammlung), a coming together, of that which would mark the scene of a new beginning onto the futures of thinking, teaching and learning, with no programmable end in sight. …

Michael Mertaugh

This article describes problems of education efficiency, finance, and management in the Kyrgyz Republic. It concentrates on the process of decentralization which has been used as a common tactic of central! authorities to offload many fiscal and managerial responsible onto local authorities. It describes how the diversification of finance has created many new problems and new distortions. And it describes the impact on equity from the managerial and governance changes.