Hazards in Spanish History Education: Essentialism, Oblivion and Memory. Lis Cercadillo

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: [email protected]

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.


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


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.


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


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


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


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,


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”


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


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


(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


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


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


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’


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


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


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.


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.

Álvarez Junco, J. (2001). Mater dolorosa: La idea de España en el siglo XIX [Mother of

Sorrows: The idea of Spain in the 19th century]. Madrid, Spain: Taurus.

Barca, I. (2003). A história é o estudo da vida [History is the study of life] (Interview by R. J.

Costa). A Página da Educação, 119, 35-37.

Berger, S. (2007). History and national identity: Why they should remain divorced. Retrieved

from http://www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-66.html

Bosworth, R. J. B. (1994). Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History writing and the Second

World War 1945-1990. London, England: Routledge.

Carretero, M. (2007). Documentos de identidad: La construcción de la memoria histórica en un

mundo global [Documents of identity: The building of historical memory in a global

world]. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Paidós.

Casanova, J. (1999). Rebelión y revolución [Rebellion and revolution]. In S. Juliá (Ed.), Víctimas

de la guerra civil [Victims from the civil war] (pp. 57-186). Madrid, Spain: Temas de Hoy.

Cercas, J. (2008, November 2). La tiranía de la memoria. [The tyranny of memory]. El País, p.

13.

Cuesta, R. (2002). El código disciplinar de la historia escolar en España: Algunas ideas para la

explicación de la sociogénesis de una materia de enseñanza [The disciplinary code of


school history in Spain: Some ideas for the explanation of the sociogenesis of a school

subject]. Encounters on Education, 3, 27-41.

Faulkner, W. C. (1951). Requiem for a nun. New York, NY: Random House.

Ferro, M. (1993). Cómo se cuenta la historia a los niños en el mundo entero [How history is told

to children in the different countries of the world] (S. Fernardez Bravo, Trans.). Buenos

Aires, Argentina: Fondo de Cultura Economica.

Ferro, M. (2007). Le ressentiment dans l’histoire: Comprendre notre temps [Resentment in

history: Understanding our era]. Paris, France: Odile Jacob.

Halbwachs, M. (1997). La mémoire collective [Collective memory]. Paris, France: Albin Michel.

Hein, L., & Selden, M. (Eds.) (2000). Censoring history: Citizenship and memory in Japan,

Germany and the United States. New York, NY: East Gate Books.

Hobsbawm, E. (2005, January 15). In defence of history. The Guardian, p. 32.

Instituto Nacional de Calidad y Evaluación. (1997). Diagnóstico del sistema educativo: La

escuela secundaria obligatoria [Diagnosis of the education system: Compulsory secondary

education] (Vols. 1-6). Madrid, Spain: Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia.

Jackson, G. (2007). Tras el año de la memoria histórica [After the year of historical memory]

(Interview by I. Rosa). Retrieved from http://www.circulobellasartes.com/ag_ediciones

-minerva-LeerMinervaCompleto.php?art= 133&pag=1#leer

Lee, P. (2005). Putting principles into practice: Understanding history. In M. S. Donovan & J.

Bransford (Eds.), How students learn: History, mathematics and science in the classroom

(pp. 31-78). Washington, DC: National Academies Press.

Ley 52/2007 por la que se reconocen y amplían derechos y se establecen medidas a favor de

quienes padecieron persecución o violencia durante la guerra civil y la dictadura [Law


52/2007 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]. (2007, December 27). Boletín Oficial del Estado, 310, 53410-53416.

Ley Orgánica 1/1990 de Ordenación General del Sistema Educativo [Organic law for General

Organization of the Education System]. (1990, October 4). Boletín Oficial del Estado, 238,

28927-28942.

Machado, A. (1973). Poesías [Poems]. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Losada. (Original work

published 1912)

Mattozzi, I. (2008). Memoria y formación histórica: La memoria en la clase de historia [Memory

and history education: Memory in the history classroom]. Íber, 55, 30-42.

Mummy, mummy… . (2008). Teaching History, 130, 56.

Novick, P. (2001). The Holocaust and collective memory: The American experience. London,

England: Bloomsbury.

Ocaña, J. C. (2003, June 7). Teaching history in Spain [Online forum comment]. Retrieved from

http://www.schoolhistory.co.uk/forum/index.php?showtopic= 1316

Pagés, J. (2008). El lugar de la memoria en la enseñanza de la historia [The place of memory in

history education]. Íber, 55, 43-53.

Prats, J. (2000). Dificultades para la enseñanza de la historia en la educación secundaria:

Reflexiones ante la situación española [Difficulties in secondary history teaching:

Reflections on the state of affairs in Spain]. Revista de Teoría y Didáctica de las Ciencias

Sociales, 5, 71-98.

Preston, P. (2007). Tras el año de la memoria histórica [After the year of historical memory]

(Interview by I. Rosa). Retrieved from http://www. circulobellasartes.com/ag_ediciones-


minerva-LeerMinervaCompleto.php?art= 133&pag=1#leer

Real Academia de la Historia. (2000). Informe sobre los textos y cursos de historia en los centros

de enseñanza media [Report on history textbooks and courses in secondary schools].

Madrid, Spain: Author.

Rojo, J. A. (2008, June 2). La historia oral de la guerra llega a juicio. [Oral history of civil war

goes to court]. El País, p. 43.

Rousso, H. (1991). The Vichy syndrome. History and memory in France since 1944 (A.

Goldhammer, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Rüsen, J. (2007). Memory, history and the quest for the future. In L. Cajani & A. Ross (Eds.),

European Issues in Children’s Identity and Citizenship: Vol. 7. History teaching, identities

and citizenship (pp. 13-34). Staffordshire, England: Trentham Books.

Sebald, W. G. (2003). On the natural history of destruction (A. Bell, Trans.). London, England:

Penguin.

Seixas, P., Fromowitz, D., & Hill, P. (2002). History, memory and learning to teach. Encounters

in Education, 3, 43-59. Retrieved from Queens University Library website: http://library

.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/encounters/article/view/1722/ 1847

Valls, R. (2007). La enseñanza de la historia en España: La compleja construcción de un saber

escolar (1846-2006) [History teaching in Spain: The complex building of school

knowledge (1846-2006)]. Bulletin d’Histoire Contemporaine de l’Espagne, 43, 161-181.

Varela, J. (2007): Las reformas educativas a debate (1982-2006) [Educational reforms under

debate (1982-2006)]. Madrid, Spain: Morata Ediciones.

Vidal-Quadras logra incluir una defensa de la nación y la tradición cristiana [Vidal-Quadras

achieves an amendment on the defense of nation and Christian tradition]. (2008, June 18).


El País, p. 32.

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.

Hazards in Spanish History Education: Essentialism, Oblivion and Memory. Lis Cercadillo

Documents

Transcript of Hazards in Spanish History Education: Essentialism, Oblivion and Memory. Lis Cercadillo