Commemoration and remembrance are integral elements of postmodern western culture. Although academic historians are increasingly inclined to acknowledge that there is no hard and fast dividing line between collective memory and professional historiography, they do not always welcome the increasing pressure from national governments and international organizations to guide and even regulate collective memory through history education or through so-called ‘remembrance education’. The rationale of remembrance education is that modern nations have a certain responsibility for crimes or suffering that has been caused in the past, and that recognition of this forms a component of education in democratic citizenship. Remembrance education thus becomes a general umbrella for education about ‘dark chapters’ from the past, with the Holocaust as most evident example. This article focuses on a single (sub)national case. Within the Flemish Community, which is the body responsible for education in Flanders and the Dutch-speaking schools in the federal Belgian capital Brussels, remembrance education has, since 2010, been an official part of the cross-curricular final objectives of secondary education. Starting from the concrete context in which this initiative originated and is currently being developed, we examine the complex relationship between remembrance education and history teaching. The differences and affinities between both, we argue, become visible by comparing the position of the academic discipline of history in both fields, by comparing the position of the present, the role of empathy and of a pedagogy of activation and by analysing the way in which ethical questions are dealt with. The absolute moral standards and the present-centred character of remembrance education are, for instance, far removed from the ambitions to stimulate historical and contextual thinking that are central to history education. Many of the real tensions between both, however, reproduce in magnified form the equally real inter¬nal tensions that characterize contemporary history teaching, with its simultaneous scientific and civic ambitions. But unlike remembrance education, history education does not regard memory as the starting point for knowledge or attitudes, but as a subject of critical historical research in its own right.
Since the early nineteenth century, western governments have expected history education to play a vital role in the formation of a national identity and the pursuit of national cohesion, by fostering shared knowledge and a shared (master)narrative of the national past. This article reports on a qualitative study that examines which narratives young adults construct about their national past, to what extent those narratives are underpinned by existing narrative templates, whether they reflect on the fact that the national past can be narrated in different ways, and to what extent they share a common reference knowledge. The study addresses the Flemish region of Belgium, a case characterized by a specific context of a nation state in decline, wherein diverse and often conflicting historical narratives coexist in popular historical culture and where the national past is almost absent from history education. A total of 107 first-year undergraduate history students were asked to write an essay on how they saw the national past. The influence of both history education and popular historical culture was reflected in the reference knowledge as well as in the (absence of) templates that students used to build their essays. Templates were not critically deconstructed, although some students nevertheless were able to discern and criticize existing 'myths' in the national past.
The present plays an important part in history education, in particular in efforts to make the study of the past relevant for today. This contribution examines how the relationship between past and present is dealt with in current Flemish secondary history education by analyzing 190 written history exams for the 11th and 12th grade. Ten percent of the questions address the present in an autonomous way and 8% relate past and present to each other. A more fine-grained analysis of the present-related questions reveals a variety of ways to integrate the present in history education, including the study of recent interpretations of the past.Le présent joue un rôle important dans l’enseignement de l’histoire, dont celui de rendre pertinente l’étude du passé dans le contexte contemporain. Cette contribution explore de quelle manière l’enseignement de l’histoire, tel que prodigué au sein des écoles secondaires flamandes, traite les relations entre le passé et le présent. Pour ce faire, les auteurs ont analysé 190 examens écrits en histoire, complétés par des élèves de 11e et 12e année. 10 % des questions abordent le présent de façon autonome, alors que 8 % font un lien entre le passé et le présent. Une analyse plus poussée des questions traitant du présent dévoile une variété de pistes pour intégrer le présent dans l’enseignement de l’histoire, incluant l’étude des interprétations récentes du passé
Plus d'un demi-siècle après la dernière vague de décolonisation politique, le traitement des histoires coloniales « sombres » reste un thème d'actualité. Influencée par le tournant postcolonial, cette étude vise à examiner, dans une perspective historique et comparative inédite, l'évolution des représentations du colonialisme belge et son héritage dans l'enseignement de l'histoire belge et congolaise depuis 1945. Son analyse narrative diachronique et synchronique identifie des continuités et des changements, ainsi que des convergences et des divergences, dans les perspectives, les accents et les silences caractérisant les récits des manuels scolaires. En mettant en évidence l'influence du colonialisme et du discours postcolonial sur les pratiques éducatives de représentation, l'étude explore les influences parfois contradictoires sur ces pratiques venant de la politique, de l'historiographie académique, de la culture historique populaire, et des processus d'« éducationalisation ». L'analyse met en lumière les changements parallèles dans les deux pays, passant d'idéologies colonialistes triomphalistes à des perspectives postcoloniales plus critiques. En ce qui concerne les pratiques éducatives de représentation, qui visent souvent à socialiser les citoyens dans des visions du monde sanctionnées par le système politique de l'époque, les traces de ces changements ont reflété des discours sociaux dominants tout en étant largement en contradiction avec les avancées historiographiques. Ces dynamiques témoignent d'un lent processus de décolonisation des structures de pouvoir et des systèmes de connaissances existants qui n'ont cédé que progressivement la place à un monde postcolonial encore en devenir. MOTS CLÉSHistoire de l'enseignement de l'histoire ; analyse des manuels scolaires ; histoire coloniale de la Belgique et du Congo ; pratiques de la mémoire ; processus d'éducationalisation ; colonialisme et postcolonialisme.
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