History’s purged textbooks

The 6th-grade History was just the most recent in a series of History textbooks which aroused such furious clashes that the Ministry of Education ultimately conceded and withdrew them in an effort to calm the waters. Now that the majority of these instances are now ‘safely’ in the past, the time may well have come to examine the purged textbooks one by one, to discuss the reasons underlying the decision to withdraw them, and to ask ourselves—with academic clear-headedness and objectivity—both what sort of History we want to teach our children, and why this particular field of knowledge can arouse such intense reactions from society at large.

The “History as a historical phenomenon and the teaching of History” cycle seeks to shed light on such critical issues as the moulding of the collective consciousness through the way History is taught in schools and through public debate on historical matters, and the oft-noted disparity between the History of specialist historians on the one hand, and the ‘official’ version of history taught in schools, and public history in general, on the other. It will also address how political goals and social trends can impact on the teaching of History.