Reflections during the Histories of Education Summer School

Next week I still have two online sessions of the 5th Summer School "Histories of educations," which conclude the series of discussions and talks in Leuven last week. This post will be not a synthesis of the talks and discussions that had taken place, but I will attempt to articulate some of my thoughts and experiences from the past two weeks, in two bullet points. 

• The added value of the summer school is the essay discussions. I have never come across a format in which attendants exchange small essays that connect their research project to the main themes and partake in moderated discussions regarding their projects. As somebody who has no formal training in historical research and is basically new-ish to the field, the discussions give me a peek into the "human aspect" of research projects that you can't get from reading articles, and help to contextualize part of my experiences, especially in the context of engaging wuith historical sources. It is also nice that my group is a mix of people at different stages in their projects. So, I could see the diversity and range of challenges and problem-solving researchers could have.
• What caught me off guard is the question of what it means to receive education and to be educated. So, before I apply to the summer school, the main idea of attending is to think about the different ways to write history beyond the nation states. What I did not expect is the implication that 'writing against the national boundaries' has in regard to the concept of education. So far, I have followed this persistent narrative that there is one form of education — learning in an institutionalized setting — and that nation states are the primary agents in the story of education, but I realize now that formal schooling only covers a part of the educational notions and experiences that were 'out there' in the past, especially for China in the Republican Era. An example I can give is the 1993 memoir of Su Xuelin 苏雪林 (1897—1999), one of the first women who studied at the Institut Franco-Chinois in Lyon of early 1920s. In the memoir, Sue Xuelin did not start her educational journey from the first school she ever attended, but from the home, where she and her sisters learned how to read classical texts under the tutelage of her relatives. This episode reveals that there are various forms of organized learning as well as the multiple "yardsticks" of valuing knowledge. This means that in my research I have to be more careful with the term education, that I need to be more overt in my assumptions of what that word entails and how that might differ from the historical views at the time.
• The most memorable part of 'histories in flux' is the visit at the KADOC. There was a collection of posters produced by the CICM missionaries to teach Christian concepts in China. The posters contain colorful illustrations with annotations here and there and focus on one question (What is the fifth command? What are the seven sins?). The posters were printed in Paris and they seemed to be numbered by content, not by volume. Although mission-led education is not my research focus, these posters are very intriguing to me. I am wondering how they are even used (Are they hung up in a fixed setting or are they carried around from village to village? Who comes up with the designs? To what extent do they look at local visual cultures, etc).