History is an eminently human quest to recover human experiences and stories. Far from theoretical, the history of education can be seen as vital to the study and practice of teaching if anchored in the cultures and contexts of stories. In university Faculties of Education, the reading of stories and memoirs can lead to open-ended discussion in which points of controversy can encourage engagement with personal or professional questions about teaching and learning and can become hinges to critical thinking about educational contexts and spaces. These stories can reach beyond the limits of individual teacher candidates' personal experiences and connect them to past and lost traditions, places, and faces. They can help dispel the fallacy that the chaos of classroom pedagogy somehow happens in isolation, unique from all other experience. (Contains 4 endnotes.)