The article analyses the separation between cultural history and the history of education. It verifies the growing importance of cultural history and the almost complete absence of studies on the cultural history of education based on an examination of works starting in the 1970s. It deals with disciplinary, institutional and historiographic questions which contribute to the exclusion of determined subject areas like the history of education in the ambit of work of the historian. It detects a greater interest in the history of education during the 1980s, and in its insertion in historiographic perspectives. It focuses on some questions which are of interest to historians and historians of education: the relation between history and culture; the attempt to consider cultural history from two perspectives one which attributes to it the separation and analysis of cultural objects and the other which privileges methodological presuppositions dealing with both social practices and their representations, in accordance with conceptions from diverse social theories. It concludes that cultural history is a multi or interdisciplinary field, not simply a kind of approach nor a new space or dimension of reality and emphasizes the need for a more systematic reflection on education as a theme/object of investigation necessary for understanding the cultural formation of a society.
cultural history; history of education