History of Education is today a flourishing field of research, underpinned by national and international societies, conferences and an increasing number of journals. Although critically minded scholars such as Jurgen Herbst (1999) have lamented historians of education for endlessly repeating the old mantras of class, race and gender, the field has nevertheless exhibited great ingenuity in developing research dealing with topics such as the educational history of the body, material culture, lived experience, social networks, and international and transnational processes of transfer, circulation and diffusion.
The purpose of this paper is to pay tribute to one of the most promising strands of recent historiographical trends, namely the renewed interest in the social and economic history of education. In this paper, I will trace the development of this strand of research among educationalists, historians and economic historians back to the 1960s, celebrating the seminal work of scholars such as Carl Kaestle, William Marsden, Brian Simon and E. P. Thompson. I will thereafter discuss the theoretical and methodological characteristics of this social and economic history of education, and the opportunities that it presents to both formulate new questions and shed new light on fundamental issues in the historiography of education. To conclude, this paper will honour these pasts efforts by presenting examples of how theoretical perspectives from family history, history of work and wages, and the econometrics of educational expenditure might contribute to a shift towards the social and economic aspects of schooling in, what may be termed, a materialist turn in the field of educational history.