Memory

It has crossed my mind several times the idea of teaching history as teaching to remember. This is a very recent concept, almost the official reason why history should be included in 21st century curricula. Administrations of different countries are of course interested in students remembering certain facts/processes. Nevertheless, as historians, we fight for objectivity and critical thinking and it is impossible for us to teach students one side of the story or, worse than that, one story (unless we do not seek to build historical thinking skills, which would mean that we lack them and our work as teachers would completely counterproductive).

I think that this issue is of utter importance and, at the same time, very dangerous. We history teachers are quite aware of the power that we have. We can teach a way of looking at world, a way of judging others, a way of fighting, of voting, of justifying. We cannot do either of these, we are at school to students to build their way of looking at the world, their way of judging, their way of fighting, voting, justifying, making decisions. 

Having said that, I should add that in the same way that we can become dangerous, the government may also undermine what schools attempt to build. I do not mind having an "official" list of things to be taught, I do not agree with the fact that only those should be taught and/or from only one point of view. From were I see it, the Argentine government promotes this by enhancing one memory (one side of the story of the last dictatorship, by no means the only de facto government we had). 

In spite of this, I believe that teaching to remember is to be done in our classrooms bearing in mind that we are helping students build their own individual and collective memory based on national identity. This is not a minor issue since technology, globalization and interactivity, as Graciela Rubio (Universidad de Valparaíso) put it her article, have dislocated time and turned it into absolute present tense therefore automatically forgetting the past and avoiding any possible future. On the other hand, in the information era it is much easier to build collective memories based on far more different individual ones, including a wide range of subjective memories. These concepts of pedagogy of memory, communicative memory and cultural memory were first developed in Germany to face the inheritance of past actions and planning a future taking into account this experience and collaborating with affected people. The tension lies, according to this author, on what we choose to remember, who to remember, how we remember and what for.  Sometimes, this tension is snowballed by politically correct topics. I do not think we should teach on some issues just because it is acceptable to do it or not acceptable not to do so. 

The last issue of Teaching History (n° 141) published by the Historical Association was devoted to the Holocaust. I think it is remarkable that British schools include this topic in their humanities curricula and, as the journal shows, that many teachers reflect on what they teach when they teach the Holocaust. In general, teachers are keen on enriching what happened (facts) with how people lived it. Many schools plan trips to camps and other German Nazi landmarks to make students face history. Others use original pictures/sources/interviews to bring history to the classroom. But I think the Holocaust should be an example of something, not an isolated episode in human history. There are other examples of torture and genocide (and I am not going to discuss the (mis)usage of these words) and what we should be teaching is that men are capable of those atrocities, including the Holocaust, and because of that it is important to remember. As we Argentines we put it: Nunca más (Never again). 


Joaquím Prats (University of Barcelona) argues that memory is not the same as history and that in the case of the teaching of history, memory should be a tool to learn history and build knowledge. Memory feeds history, it is its fuel, but it is not scientific comprehension of the past. I think this point is very important because some teachers forget their key role in the classroom and merely list a bunch of facts to be remembered by students for an exam. These teachers think that history is only memory. When teaching, Prats states, we are challenged by need to combine micro and macro spheres in a way that one cannnot be explained without the other. Individual memory cannot explain history, let alone build knowledge of historical processes/events. This is why the subject History is key in the school curriculum: because historical knowledge is by far more revolutionary than recreating memories. 


In Latinamerican context,  Diana Veneros Ruiz-Tagle and María Isabel Toledo Jofré  (Universidad Diego Portales, Chile) argue that guided visits to historical sites contribute to build relevance on the memory of a specific fact, affected, of course, by the interpretation of recent history. By means of these visits, they could bring about students' appreciation of history and their history. You can read all about this here.


For a view on Argentine teaching of memory, click here.

You can go to Readings to access some articles on teaching and memory. You can find some activities that worked here.

To round it up, here is a video on a group of Latinamericans that went to Germany to learn from their experience on historical memory: