Historiografska misao dana: Sarah Maza o međunarodnim ratovima oko kurikuluma povijesti i kompleksnom procesu balansiranja domoljubnog ponosa i tamnih aspekata vlastite prošlosti

„Similar “history wars” over curricula in schools have broken out in Britain and Australia, and other countries–Russia, South Africa, France–have faced the complex process of balancing patriotic pride with accounting for the darker aspects of their pasts.“

 

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Sarah Maza, Thinking About History, 2017, “Introduction”, str. 5.

http://historiografija.hr/?p=13104

 

“Disputes over heritage sites and museums are described (…), but the quintessential fights over history concern school curricula: what should children learn about their countryʽs past, and how should they learn it? In the United States the biggest dustup of this sort occurred in the early 1990s in the context of efforts to establish national standards for primary and secondary education. The 1994 National History Standards were drafted by a committee of academics, schoolteachers, and administrators, incorporating new scholarship on the history of women and minorities (…). Even before the document was published, Lynne Cheney, the conservative former director of the National Endowment for the Humanities (…) delivered a strident attack on it in the Wall Street Journal entitled “The End of History.“ She charged that the proposed curriculum foregrounded historical actors like the escaped slave Harriet Tubman at the expense of more important figures like George Washington (…) and that it offered a “grim and gloomy“ portrayal of American history focused on such subjects as the Ku Klux Klan and McCarthyism. Letters to the Journal chimed in, accusing drafters of using the National History Standards as a ploy to “indoctrinate“ children with liberal “hatred of America“ and to advance the multicultural “balkanization“ of the nation. The ruckus broke out at a charged moment of political transition: a Democrat, Bill Clinton, had taken office in 1993, and the right fretted that liberals would now have free rein to pursue this supposed agenda.

Similar “history wars” over curricula in schools have broken out in Britain and Australia, and other countries – Russia, South Africa, France – have faced the complex process of balancing patriotic pride with accounting for the darker aspects of their pasts.“  (usporedi: Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars, 2003)