How might historians of education bring joy to their work and make our scholarship of use to the world? This article suggests returning to Welland Hendrick's 1909 "A Joysome History of Education." This minor but well-circulated text uses humour and irony to poke fun at some of the more obtuse, sacrosanct, and self-righteous aspects of education as seen from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century vantage point of a mid-level and little-known American educator. With apologies to Jonathan Swift, this article advances the modest proposal of taking lessons from Hendrick's project and considering how satire could be a productive form of critical fabulation for historians of education today.