Journal of Educational Memory, Media, and Society

The political use and instrumentalization of history is a central theme within the historiography of history education. Neither history nor education is a politically neutral domain; history education is and has always been a highly politicized phenomenon. For his recent article on the development of history education in England, Germany, and the Netherlands throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Dutch history didactician Arie Wilschut chose the significant title, “History at the Mercy of Politicians and Ideologies.” History education, Wilschut argues, has, in all three countries, continually—with a short break in the 1960s and 1970s—been instrumentalized by national politics to the detriment of unbiased interpretations of the past.

Scrutiny of the statements of UK politicians about the nature and purposes of teaching history in schools shows a strong desire to return to the “traditional“ form of history education which was dominant in the UK until the 1970s, with its strong emphasis on a positive and heroic rendering of the national past and movement away from the idea of history education to develop intellectual autonomy and provide historical perspectives on contemporary issues and problems. The concluding section of the paper considers the implications of this attempt to “turn back the clock“ and argues that it is intensifying the polarization between policymakers and history education professionals, perhaps ultimately leading to a form of school history which many young people consider to be irrelevant and implausible.

After several decades of political conflict and turbulence, in 1815 the Netherlands became a constitutional monarchy. In the ensuing process of nation-building, history education was considered an important means to instill feelings of national unity and concord into the hearts of children. This article seeks to investigate how this was possible in view of the recent revolutionary past. It analyzes accounts in history textbooks for primary education of the Patriot Revolt against Stadholder William V that took place in the 1780s and was suppressed in 1787, and of the Batavian Revolution that took place in 1795 and put an end to his rule. Although in many cases the historical narratives of these politically controversial events were adapted to suit the purpose of nation-building, the revolutionary past was by no means forgotten.

In 2010, a proposal for a new history syllabus was criticized in the Swedish media for emphasizing contemporary history at the expense of ancient history. This study shows how contemporary history has increasingly been the focus of the guidelines developed by UNESCO and the Council of Europe, the national curricula, and students' work since the 1950s, while graduating students had generally rather chosen to focus on the early modern era up until the 1930s. Although history and civics were given status as separate school subjects in 1961, students' work in history continued to focus on contemporary subject matter. This study shows that the dominance of contemporary history in students' history is by no means a new phenomenon.

This article analyzes textbooks and curricula for primary schools in Poland published between 1944 and 1989 to show how the communist regime attempted to influence Polish history education via political change and educational reform. The article focuses on five aspects of this influence: Marxist methodology of history, portrayals of political parties, promotion of a “scientific“ worldview, justification of new boundaries and alliances of the People's Poland, and a new pantheon of national heroes. In conclusion, the article investigates the effectiveness of history education in shaping Polish collective memory under the communist regime.

The Cold War had a variety of impacts on Swiss schools. This article focuses on how schools, and especially their history curricula, became the vehicle with which to launch a “National Spiritual Defense“ (Geistige Landesverteidigung) against Communism. During the Cold War era, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, teachers' journals and textbooks analyses revealed tendencies connected to a heroic, teleological master narrative of Switzerland's national history. The “cultural memory“ (Assmann) was seemingly designed to strengthen the “Swiss spirit.“ It also provided patterns from which to explain the ongoing Cold War conflict. In the 1970s, educators and politicians assigned the schools the new task of assisting in national military defense efforts.

History education inevitably is a thing of the present. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it has always answered to problems that were urgent at the time of discussion. This has mostly taken the form of explaining and thus smoothing over painful ruptures in the past. Although nowadays we generally acknowledge this contemporary character of history education, the professional ideal of doing proper, authentic history remains—a desire that is understandable, but compatible neither with epistemological standards nor with public expectations. While teaching instrumental history is not an option, history education cannot live on criticism and deconstruction alone, we need a reflexive presentism that self-consciously confronts the present day—“difficult“ rather than “easy“ histories.