Challenging Orthodoxies explores the implications of linguistics, literary criticism, and language theory in general for historians of education. This book introduces the core ideas of the "linguistic turn" and some of its major theorists. Hayden White, Richard Rorty, Michel Foucault and Clifford Geertz. By arguing for the primacy of language textuality and linguistic structures in historical narratives, this study revises conventional understanding of the writing and interpretation of histories of education.