This paper is concerned with the creation of new forms of historical research in education which uses and reflects the changes in methodology and substantive concerns of other disciplines across the shifting boundaries of scholarly work on the social. It is based upon a practice developed out of a series of international seminars and an unfunded research proposal. It is an attempt to use contemporary theory in cultural studies, geography and the sociology of technology to assemble arguments for a new approach to urban education history in which the silences of the field and the method, the restlessness about its boundaries and practices and its contemporary possibilities are collated into a proposal of work. This is called the new archaeology of schooling.