Post on 04-Feb-2023
Running head: HAZARDS IN SPANISH HISTORY EDUCATION
Hazards in Spanish History Education: Essentialism, Oblivion and Memory
Lis Cercadillo
Institute of Evaluation, Ministry of Education, Spain
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Lis Cercadillo, Advisor in
Education, Institute of Evaluation, Ministry of Education, C/San Fernando del Jarama 14, 28002
Madrid, Spain.
E-mail: lis.cercadillo@mecd.es
Running head: HAZARDS IN SPANISH HISTORY EDUCATION 2
Abstract
The breach between academic history and school history is a recurrent topic in the field of
history education. In the last decade, a research trend is being developed in Spain focused on the
emotional and affective aspects of history and interested in the role of collective memory and
national identity in the development of historical consciousness, in school and outside of it.
Different contradictions between academic and school discourses are considered: nation-building
narratives and essentialism, and the divergence between history as a rational endeavor and
historical memory. It is concluded that school history, though having an important responsibility
in the building of national identities, may be taught in an inclusive and multifaceted way from
“meta-national” and rational perspectives.
Running head: HAZARDS IN SPANISH HISTORY EDUCATION 3
Hazards in Spanish History Education: Essentialism, Oblivion and Memory
“The past is never dead. It's not even past”
—William Faulkner (1951, p. 92)
“It is time to re-establish the coalition of those who believe in history as rational enquiry
into the course of human transformations, against those who distort history for political
purposes”, Eric Hobsbawm (2005, p. 32) wrote. As the brilliant historian he is, nobody could
deny the pertinence of this assertion, but to what extent can this coalition be re-established at
school level without the alliance of politicians and citizens? Within the field (or rather
battlefield) of history education, one important issue should be tackled, which is not only
idiosyncratic from a Spanish perspective, but very much linked to current concerns in Greece,
Portugal and, certainly, in many other European, Western and Eastern countries (Argentina,
Chile, Japan, Mexico, former Soviet Republics, Turkey, U.S., former Yugoslavia, etc). This issue
is —again— the inner conflict fought by school history education between the need to ensure the
building of a common national identity fostered by political stakeholders, and the importance for
students (and citizens in general) to developing their critical historical thinking and knowledge.
While recognizing that the problem is not exclusive to Spain, Spanish particularities in history
education will be the focus of study in the following pages. Nevertheless, attention will be given
to broader and comparative approaches, to illustrate similarities and differences across countries.
Different contradictions —in the most pure Marxist style— are intertwined here. History
teachers and researchers need to take at least three contradictions into account, although they are
by their nature very difficult to teach explicitly at school, to children and adolescents. First, the
Running head: HAZARDS IN SPANISH HISTORY EDUCATION 4
opposition between the academic discourse of history as nation-building narratives and the
popular/school discourse of history as a means to instill a community’s essentials. Second, the
divergence between history as a rational endeavor and the individual/collective historical
memory; Third, the mismatch of nationalist traditions in the foreground against our current post-
colonial background. Next, we will try to explore these contradictions in the Spanish context,
bearing in mind that disentangling them is an almost impossible task.
Nation-building vs. Essentialism
History education in Spain has radically evolved in the last three decades. In the 1980s and
1990s, the main historiographical trends and influences on teachers’ training were Marxism or
historical materialism, and the French École des Annales. The new law for education (“Ley
Orgánica 1/1990”, 1990) tried to some degree to transfer the British New History approach to our
national curriculum: using primary sources, teaching the way how historians work, promoting
research activities, active learning, in-depth and developmental studies… At the same time, it
was intended to frame subjects like History and Geography (the latter focused rather on human
than physical aspects, following the French tradition) into a wider and ambiguous area called
“Social Sciences”. Practitioners, though, went on teaching Geography and History, regardless of
the new term. But, the important fact was that many secondary education students were taught
(at its best) an interpretive model in history, rather than learning that history is subject to
constant reinterpretation because of its nature. On the same line and more recently, A. G.
Santesmases, an educational reformist, asserts that “in the humanities debate, the Left lost their
chance to show their own idea of history” (as cited in Varela, 2007, p. 67). Those terms frame
very graphically the failure of school history reform in Spain: The important thing seemed to be
what is our idea of history, not how history contributes to rationality in students’ minds.
Running head: HAZARDS IN SPANISH HISTORY EDUCATION 5
One of the most widespread public discussions about history at school started in 1997, but
its echo lasted for more than a decade; it was called “The humanities debate” (Carretero, 2007;
Prats, 2000; Valls, 2007). It was a clear example of the public and political uses that history
suffers, and not only at school. After the implementation of the Law of Education (1990) during
the socialist government, a report was published —with a new government, this time
conservative— that showed poor results in students’ knowledge about historical events and dates
(Instituto Nacional de Calidad y Evaluación, 1997). The conservative Ministry of Education then
launched a bill that revised the history curriculum and tried to reduce the part over whose content
the regions had the right to decide. The debate in Parliament showed two opposed positions: the
Ministry, who supported school history as the study of the essences of the Spanish nation,1 and
the autonomous communities —particularly, Catalonia and the Basque Country— who backed
up the study of the essences of their Catalan or Basque nations. Some teachers showed their
disappointment:
Nowadays, there is a sort of backlash, supported by many teachers, trying to foster a more
traditional method of teaching in the sense of coming back to a chronological way of
organizing the subjects or highlighting the specific features of history. ... Although there is
a common framework all over Spain, regional governments have a lot of control over
educational matters. Curricula can slightly vary. For instance, nationalist regional
governments in Catalonia and the Basque Country try to promote a nationalist conception
of history, which, sometimes, is as ridiculous as the Spanish nationalist history that older
generations learnt under Franco’s dictatorship (Ocaña, 2003, para. 9, 12).
The Royal Academy of History (Real Academia de la Historia–RAH, 2000), taking sides,
wrote: “Sociologism, paedagogism and political circumstances are core problems in the teaching
Running head: HAZARDS IN SPANISH HISTORY EDUCATION 6
of history in Spain. ... The autonomous communities are trying to use history for spurious
purposes that are foreign to academic approaches” (RAH, 2000, p. 112).
In fact, what was at issue was the conflict between centre and periphery, but both positions
grounded their discourse on a common argument: nationalism understood as a political response
to the problem of collective identity. Politicians dared to make decisions about which history
content students should learn at an unbelievable level of detail, if we compare history with other
disciplines. Undermining its emotional side, it is what Carretero (2007) has ironically called
“viejas riñas familiars” (old family quarrels) more than discussing about history education; it
dealt with different conceptions of the future of Spain, all of them rooted in a romantic tradition
which gave a-historical significance to historical events and built teleological and essentialist
accounts for each identity. Sadly, the dispute was exclusively centered on the vision that should
be given of Spain, rather than on history’s educative potential (Prats, 2000). Beyond the collision
between national and regional nationalisms in Spain, history should be taught, if we looked at the
different curricula, from essentialist perspectives (e.g., what is the deep meaning of being a
“Spaniard”), not only as a nation-building narrative. The trouble is that identity refers to essences
whose origin is neither in the present nor in the future, but in an a-historical past; therefore,
history as a rational discipline becomes impossible.
As we pointed out above, most Spanish teachers have become tired —to say the least— of
the fact that history is used at school as an instrument of social engineering, and many have
given up to start heading one more time the fight for defense of well-founded debates about what
history teaching and learning implies, and not only what sort of content should be taught (and
from which perspective) to get good Basque, Catalonian or Spanish citizens.
Notwithstanding, history has been usually taught in Spain as a nation-building process, a
Running head: HAZARDS IN SPANISH HISTORY EDUCATION 7
legitimate contribution towards the development of a collective or national identity that is needed
for social and civic cohesion. But the clash between nationalisms within Spain still leads
sometimes to schizophrenic positions that illustrate the growing relevance of school history in
settling identity conflicts, especially in the confrontation between the central government and
regional authorities. Fortunately, it is not a curse restricted to our country. The process of
integration into the European Union has run in parallel with processes of (re)differentiation in
many other countries, such as Italy (Padania), United Kingdom (Scotland), Belgium (Flemish
and Walloons)… Old nations’ identities must readjust to the new European canon, the “supra-
nation”. And, in the case of Spain, an international perspective in the debate about school history
will certainly contribute to overcome fear and mistrust among European citizens whose main
feature could be the sense of pertaining to multiple historical identities, whatever the order be:
local, national, supranational, regional. In Spain, we need to study to what degree history
discourse at school is still essentialist or critical. At the same time, further research is needed to
determine the extent to which history is really taught differently, not only in its content but in its
methods and approaches, throughout diverse members of a family and diverse families within
Europe, paraphrasing Carretero’s (2007) metaphor.
But more recently, in the last three or four years in our country, new menaces —or, better,
gloomy ghosts— have stepped onto the history education stage. Again.
History vs. Memory
One of most recurrent topics in Spain lately is the issue of retrieving our historical
memory. The image that we have about other peoples, and about ourselves, is rooted in the way
history was told when we were children (Ferro, 1993), and for many years after the civil war
(1936-9) and during general Franco's dictatorship (1939-75), the historical account children
Running head: HAZARDS IN SPANISH HISTORY EDUCATION 8
learned was “the” only possible account. After the dictator’s death, times of transition came that
reached a more or less agreed consensus about closing war and post-war injuries, but the
problem of harmful memories in recent history is that they bring out significant omissions in the
accounts of the past, and injuries, if closed, are not healed. This process is not exclusively
Spanish; many countries are still struggling to overcome the damage of their recent past
(Bosworth, 1994; Novick, 2001; Rousso, 1991; Sebald, 2003), because an interconnection
between similar topics in history and memory exists in different countries that share the same
human experience. What is particular to Spain, is the lack of a common historical memory, at
least since 1936.
Although the topic of “collective memory” or “historical memory” has been overworked to
the point of boredom in recent years, according to some authors (Álvarez Junco, 1997; Cercas,
2008), analyses from the perspective of school history are relatively new. The dichotomy
between history and memory could be easily drawn, in principle: “Memory is the construction of
the past which is immediately available, deeply held, profoundly meaningful and therefore
impervious to critique. History is the product of evidence-based investigation, rational dialogue
and dispassionate scholarship … but this simple bifurcation fails on many counts” (Seixas,
Fromowitz, & Hill, 2002, p. 44).
Even now, many historians maintain a contemptuous attitude towards the uses of memory
within a respectful discipline such as academic or scientific history. A widespread position
argues that a distinction must be made between history as a science and memory as an
individual, biographical process: “Whose memory? Memory is personal, there is no historical
memory by which thousands of people remember the same things” (Jackson, 2007, para. 13).
The task of historians is to grind memories and sources to produce historical knowledge. But,
Running head: HAZARDS IN SPANISH HISTORY EDUCATION 9
when Halbwachs (1997) coined the term “collective memory”, he was referring to “the memory
of a national society that implies all particular societies and individuals” (p. 18). Accepting the
term is unfortunate, history at school cannot be understood without a clear awareness of the
importance of collective memory, which meddles in students’ minds and may hinder (or
deepen?) their rational comprehension. A relevant goal of school history should be the critical
capacity to discern and explain why historical memory is an ideological reconstruction of the
past in the service of the present's political purposes.
If debates around history and memory are heated in countries like the U.S. or Japan,
because different conflicting memories are disputed (Hein & Selden, 2000), and because the
pervasive narration on national identities is questioned, in Spain the problem is a different one,
because there is no one or the narration for the myth of our nation-building; There are several
accounts acting in parallel across regional territories and two opposed—but not equidistant—
narratives across ideologies. In 2006, the Spanish government (socialist, this time) tried to reach
a desired agreement among their fellow citizens: After 70 years since the beginning of the civil
war, 2006 was declared “the year of historical memory”. Some months later, a new law (“Ley
52/2007”, 2007) was passed by the Parliament. It is popularly known as the “Law for historical
memory”, by which “rights are acknowledged and extended, and measures are taken to favor
those who were subjected to persecution or violence during the civil war and the dictatorship”. It
was severely criticized by Leftists, who thought it was not enough, and by Rightists, who did not
want to recognize the need for reparations towards republican victims. All in all, it was ignored
by the majority of people who did not think a law could change the past. But, it must be
emphasized that this law means the first official and explicit condemnation of the Francoist
regime in the history of Spain. For the first time, a rupture could be seen of the “pact of oblivion”
Running head: HAZARDS IN SPANISH HISTORY EDUCATION 10
implicitly signed by politicians, army officials and citizens during the transition years after
Franco’s death.
In fact, the political agenda that guided the passing of the law for “historical memory”, if
not obvious, is easy to detect. As we discussed above, new supranational entities require a new
sense of consciousness and a reshape of its supranational identity. Europe —or, more precisely,
the European Union— in its enterprise of building a common European identity, has stressed the
importance of teaching in all European schools some particular topics of which all countries may
retain a universal memory. This is the case, for instance, of the Holocaust, and the date January
28, the day of Auschwitz liberation, has become symbolic in this identity-building process. Spain
struggles to link its recent and wretched history to Europe’s collective memory. The Spanish law
follows these policies and will function as a means of inserting Spain within this common
antifascist European history and memory.
However, controversy continues in Spain. A sociological Francoism remains alive in part
of our society, which rejects the legitimacy of the losers retrieving their memory (Jackson,
2007). Many non-professional books have been published, from a revisionist point of view, that
deny most widespread interpretations about the origins and course of the civil war and post-war.
Again, the Second Republic (1931-9) was blamed and charged with all evils; this forgery
returned and replaced the myth of equidistance between the conflicting sides, developed during
the transition years to achieve a peaceful political compromise: “Now you can hear that Franco’s
rule was not that bad after all, something that was unthinkable during transition times”
(Santesmases, as cited in Varela, 2007, p. 184). Symbols and monuments from the dictatorship
remain in many cities and villages. General Franco lies in the tomb, designed by himself, fifty
kilometers far from Madrid, in the Valle de los Caídos, where no account is given today about
Running head: HAZARDS IN SPANISH HISTORY EDUCATION 11
the republican prisoners who were forced to build the pharaonic site. Reaching a consensus in
history textbooks about the Spanish recent past, as it exists among professional historians, is still
an issue.
We should certainly not undervalue what history is taught at school. Ferro (2007, p. 29)
contextualized the pogrom of Jedwabne, a small Polish village, “where half of the population
murdered the other half” in 1941, as an example of inherited antisemitism, of a resentment
culture that pervades history and was aroused in those critical years all around Europe. “We have
learned that at school” (Ferro, 2007, p. 30), the accused murderers justified themselves.
For Spaniards, those words echo the tragic burden of the two Spains, as was expressed by
the poet Antonio Machado: “Españolito que vienes/ al mundo, te guarde Dios./ Una de las dos
Españas/ ha de helarte el corazón.” (Little Spaniard who comes/ into this world, may God protect
you./ One of the two Spains/ will freeze your heart.) (1912/1973, p. 171). We do not see that
breach in the new generations. It is rather about the legacy from two different memories, how
each Spaniard was told that story, and how we should handle that historical memory. The so-
called law for historical memory (“Ley 52/2007”, 2007) was allegedly born “to contribute to the
knowledge of our history and to encourage a democratic memory" (Casanova, as cited in Rojo,
2008, p. 43).
But can a law guide historians’ craft and define what citizens have to remember? In the
media, this matter has been presented in the following terms: Does the right to know the past
take precedence over the right of descendants to preserve their honor? For forty years, the civil
war’s winners could honor their fallen, but the losers are still striving to know about their dead
graves. “The situation is still far away from being ‘normal’ in this country”, one of the local
historians researching the Francoist repression during the war and post-war said in an interview
Running head: HAZARDS IN SPANISH HISTORY EDUCATION 12
(as cited in Rojo, 2008, p. 43). “Seventy years later, in small towns and villages the moral dignity
of victims has not been acknowledged yet” (Rojo, 2008, p. 43). Descendants of the repressors are
taking to court those who publicly denounce old crimes, purportedly to defend their reputation.
During the last decade, many studies on war and post-war repressions have brought to light new
findings, such as a more accurate dimension of the killing. But the pending issue is still there:
Saying that Franco was a criminal is one thing; saying that about your neighbor’s
grandfather, whose name everybody knows in a small village, is very difficult to live with.
... Anyway, in Spain we still have to explain why a civil war broke out, what happened
then and afterwards (Casanova, 1999, p. 180).
But with the passing of the years, fear has vanished and now we can talk about everything, even
about transitional justices, as other countries with a recent authoritarian tradition do, like
Argentina or Chile (Aguilar, 2008; Preston, 2007).
History: Meta-national and Rational Perspectives
Two main questions remain to be posed. The first one: Is it possible to teach a kind of
history at school that, taking into account the national component, rethinks other identity aspects
in an inclusive and multifaceted way? The second one: How can we, as teachers and researchers,
deal with the conflict/relationship between history and memory in the history classrooms of our
21st century?
In recent publications, authors interested in the field of history education, but with no
direct personal experience in everyday work at school, seem to become hopeless when
confronting the future of the discipline: “Why teach history if it is just mythology?” (Álvarez
Junco, 1997, p. 15). “Does it make any sense keeping history within the school curriculum, when
so often it is rather a patriotic training, at a time when the nation-state is experiencing deep
Running head: HAZARDS IN SPANISH HISTORY EDUCATION 13
changes?” (Carretero, 2007, p. 203).2 Those authors almost come to deny the possibility of
conciliation between school and academic history, because two adamant contradictions exist.
Firstly, history shows constant change as one basic feature of being human, whereas the priority
of history adapted to school is to create solid refuges through a stable collective identity.
Secondly, globalization has brought about new concepts of “nation”, which involve, in a
centrifugal movement, supranational entities like the European Union and minority nationalisms
within the “old” nations.3 But, more than contradictions, these are new realities and can be seen
as founding articulations between nation, school and history.
There is always the risk that historical analysis is replaced by propaganda, and the problem
comes when the critically conscious being becomes subordinate to the national being. As it has
often been said, school history is less and more than academic history. It joins up academic and
social goals that allow the growth of rationality and national identity: School is not only a place
for socialization within the nation framework, but also for cognitive development. For most
people, this double play with history in its cognitive and affective aspects will end up at school.
It is frequent to hear reflections made by former students as adults like the following: “When I
was taught history, it became at times so simplified that when you grow up you realize that
everything was a lie, e.g., the ‘Reconquista’ (with capital letter)”. Efforts should be made to help
our students to discern a historical construct from an event of the past before they leave school.
It could be effective for our history curricula to contrast, as Ferro (1993) so brilliantly did,
how history is told to children and adolescents throughout the European countries (the Duke of
Alba’s atrocities in the Netherlands, English sadism towards Jeanne of Arc, Austrian tyranny
towards the Italians, …) and regions (the authoritarian Count-Duke of Olivares’ fight against
Catalan rights, the failure of the Basque country to build up a nation-state because of Castilian
Running head: HAZARDS IN SPANISH HISTORY EDUCATION 14
imperialism, etc). Besides, pupils coming to Spain from different cultures and professing diverse
religions have new shared spaces in the classroom, to which history curriculum and practice have
to respond (Why is Abd al Rahman III, a caliph of Cordova, not included in the list of Spanish
kings? Obviously, because he was not Christian). Thus, we can explain the distance between
school and academic discourses and try to reduce it, giving a comprehensive picture of the
Spanish (or any) past, which neither implies a return to essentialist accounts, nor to an exclusive
nation-building narrative. From a Portuguese perspective, as Barca (2003) has very accurately
summarized, “there are aspects in our national and local identity that must be healthily kept.
Because we can work on our identity from an inclusive view, respecting ourselves and the
others, or from an exclusive view, respecting ourselves against the others” (p. 37).
Now we return to our second question about the relationship between history and memory
at school. For some scholars, the emotional-symbolic way to approach history at school that
issues of memory entails may be detrimental to historical thinking, and it will possibly contribute
to widening the gap between school history and academic history (Álvarez Junco, 2001;
Carretero, 2007; Cuesta, 2002; Prats, 2000). They remind us that presentism and stereotyped
thinking, boosted by a “light” teaching of social sciences (as it happens in the U.S.), hinder rather
than facilitate a genuine historical understanding, both in youngsters and adults. In Spain, this is
more prone to happen in primary education, where history teaching does not exist as such,
because it is diluted and simplified in an overarching area called “Knowledge of Natural and
Social Environment”. Among secondary students, the danger is that an increasing interest in
Current Affairs within the curriculum may push historical reasoning aside. If it is true that
history is still taught as it was in the 19th century, it is not an exclusive phenomenon in Spain,
although that should not comfort us. Carretero (2007), in his study on primary and secondary
Running head: HAZARDS IN SPANISH HISTORY EDUCATION 15
pupils’ perceptions of national commemorations (“efemérides”, as we say, from the Greek word)
in Argentina, asked himself to what extent they could be an obstacle for historical consciousness,
and how the objectives of school history and public tributes of this kind could be redesigned as
useful cultural tools.
Nevertheless, it is possible to trace more positive approaches to the use in the classrooms
of the (ab)uses of history. Mattozzi (2008) recognizes that collective memory can be a hindrance,
but also a helpful resource for historical training. From preprimary and primary education, pupils
may be asked to reconstruct their past experiences, helped by drawings, pictures and objects. An
interesting activity could be, for instance, asking them to tell when they started to learn how to
write; they may express diverse, contradictory and fragmented recollections, contrast and
compare with their peers, and progress in their consciousness that the past is reconstructed from
the present by means of sources transformed into historical evidence. At the end of primary,
pupils may reconstruct the biographical past of their “generation”; they notice that their memory
must be enriched with some other pieces of information and new evidence must be deployed. At
secondary, oral testimonies from their elders may become part of their history projects, making
possible the link between generations. Their representations of the past already integrate oral and
textual sources and are able to contrast shared and conflicting memories. Then, it is possible to
verify the process of memory transmission from one generation to the next. Mattozzi also
recommends drawing on teachers’ biographical memories, to analyze similarities and differences
between them and to insert them within their knowledge of events from recent history.
A further illustrative and encouraging approach to identity, memory and history teaching is
offered by Seixas Fromowitz and Hill (2002). They put forward examples of their student teachers
who learned to develop their critical historical consciousness after listening to their grandparents’
Running head: HAZARDS IN SPANISH HISTORY EDUCATION 16
memories and cherishing their family talk. Seixas et al. taught–or helped their students to learn–
how to give historical agents ample voice and value their viewpoints, appreciating that history’s
goal is to bridge the distance between memory of the past and consciousness of the present.
I can remember discussions at home about the Spanish civil war with one of my aunts, who
always cleared them up, paying little care towards my recently acquired knowledge at the college
by saying: “What are you telling me? I lived the war”. But, what did she know about what
president Azaña, or general Mola, were doing? I usually asked myself. As teachers, we know
that we need a global account to understand events and processes in the past, not only the
testimony of witnesses. But without those testimonies and sources, history could not be written.
Both elements are needed to deploy our students’ historical consciousness.
Rüsen (2007) studies the construction of collective memory and the use of history in order
to provide future orientation. Memory may be trapped in the past, but makes the past alive for
the future. In his words:
Memory presents the past as a force that puts in motion human thinking, guided by
principles of practical use. Historical consciousness represents the past interrelated with the
present, guided by time changing and evidence. Memory is an immediate relationship
whereas historical consciousness is a mediated relationship between past and present.
Memory is linked to imagination, and it is trapped in the past; historical consciousness is
linked to cognition, and opens up to the future (Rüsen, 2007, p. 14).
Giving children and adolescents a sense of the possibilities —and limits— of constructing
historical narratives that have deep personal connections is a first step. Then, explicit teaching of
the “cartography of memory” (Pagés, 2008, p. 50) will be needed. Only if memory is framed by
longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates, such as time, causal weighting, evidence and
Running head: HAZARDS IN SPANISH HISTORY EDUCATION 17
interpretation, will the development of students’ historical consciousness will be possible.
Conclusions
As has been said, the conflict between the development of a common national identity and
the development of critical historical thinking and knowledge continues to be crucial in our days.
Even in the United Kingdom, where the best tradition of rational history education exists, the
History and Policy movement recently made a call to propose that policy makers should avoid
using clichéd assumptions about the past (Berger, 2007). It is certainly laudable, but how might
historians try to expand those assumptions? Which version of the past will be the one on which
historians base their advice (“Mummy, Mummy”, 2008)? There is precisely the rub. It is not one
or the version of the past that should be contended by policy makers, but the development of
historical consciousness that is fed both by imagination and rational cognition.
In Spain, we still have to struggle for a reform of history education that is not focused on
regaining and reinforcing national identities; a reform that inserts the diverse memories of our
recent past into a comparative framework. National identities and historical memory are
constructions, as history is: If students could see that judgments and choices, which change with
changing circumstances over time, shape how we think about the past, then they would have
greater appreciation and wariness for how history is constructed, and what its limits and its
merits are. Teachers need to acknowledge political agendas as a possible consequence, as well as
a necessary persistence of issues of memory, but, in the end, what teachers have to demonstrate
is their work with critical historical competences.
History can be taught and learned, as any other science, taking into account students’ social
and cultural contexts but at the same time independently from them. Research done on students’
ideas and the progression of their ideas about structural concepts appears to point in a similar
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direction in very different countries (Lee, 2005). Studies focused on the emotional or affective
side of history (i.e., the uses of memory and national identities) may also contribute to bridge the
gap between school and scientific history. Building on these two sources of research, cognitive
and affective, we hope that teachers will find it easier to be aware of students’ socio-cultural
contexts and cognitive processes in their history lessons.
Pupils —both primary and secondary— in Spain may be offered more often opportunities not
only to relate different levels of historical content (local, regional, national and supranational),
but also to reflect on the ways historical accounts are written, on questions about evidence,
authorship, perspectivism and significance. History learning, more than any other curriculum
subject, may help students to become conscious of their plural identities, a feature that any
citizen in the 21st century is bound to endure and enjoy.
Beyond exclusive nation-building narratives, we must suggest learning tools to facilitate
reasoning from different views and to be curious about the various dimensions of human
experience, that is, thinking historically from a metanational perspective.
Some weeks ago, my mother reminded my father of a conversation held back in the early
1950s on their plans for the future as a Spanish young couple. “Don’t you remember? Your
greatest achievement, you said, would be having hot water at home and being able to put a clean
shirt every day”. We are a very historically conscious family, I have to admit, but as responsible
(even if it is to a small extent) for the historically oriented minds of our young citizens, we
should help our students and their families to be aware of the connection between past and
present, without which none of us would have come into existence.
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References
Aguilar, P. (2008). Políticas de la memoria y memorias de la política [Policies of memory and
memories of politics]. Madrid, Spain: Alianza.
Álvarez Junco, J. (1997, December 29). De historia y amnesia [About history and amnesia]. El
Pais, p. 13-14.
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Notes
1 In its last national congress, the Popular Party (Conservative) defined it as: “The Spanish nation, as a historical and
cultural reality, has its plural roots in the medieval Christian kingdoms, but is grounded on the inheritance of the Roman and Visigoth Hispania, and in the political union established 500 years ago by the integration of the kingdoms of Castile, Aragon and Navarre into the Spanish Monarchy” (“Vidal-Quadras”, 2008, p. 32).
2 It is not a new feeling. As Carretero (2007) reminds, in the context of the years after the First World War, school history was blamed for promoting retaliation, and experts proposed in 1923 that history teaching should be eliminated from classrooms.
3 Minorities that do not only respond to political reasons, such as the Basques or Catalans in Spain, but also to different ethnic or religious origins coming from immigration processes. The integration of these new identities within minority regions generates further relationship challenges.