History Education and the Claims of Society: An Historical Approach

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 signifi cant 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. 1 Considering history education as a fi eld “at the mercy of politics” is therefore characteristic of historiographical practice within history education in at least two respects. First, the concern, engagement, and—in this case—negative judgment that come from such an approach refl ect the active involvement of its authors, often history didacticians who participate in actual debates on history teaching. Presuppositions about what history education should be quite often seem to inform historical narratives on what history education has been (and hence turn into narratives on what it has failed to be). It is a tension characterizing the history of education as a fi eld. 2 Second, the historiography of history education has a sharp eye for the many ways in which history education and “the political” are intertwined. Several strands of research can be distinguished within this fi eld. First of all, studies on the history of how signifi cant and polarizing political events such as the French Revolution are represented have been a popular translation of this interest in history education as a school subject dealing with politics in ways evolving over time. 3 Analyses of the impact of more recent regime changes on the representation of past political events in countries of the former Soviet Union or in Eastern Europe continue in this vein. 4 A second strand of research deals with the history of educational policies, the role of pressure groups, the public debate they generate, and their impact on the content and didactics of what is taught. The