European Association of History Educators

Source: The Budapest Report; 17 June 2010

By adapting the scientific understanding of teenagers, how they think, learn, and are moved to action, a successful program of history teaching, called Facing History and Ourselves, has gained prominence internationally. Adaptable to all regions, a basis for this method is to draw on the parallels with clearest modern tragedy from Holocaust Education. The focus of Holocaust Education in Hungary, and for Genocide Studies elsewhere, is different and in many ways more complex than in the US. For Facing this is not news.
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Source: The Daily Times, February 17th 2010

It is singularly interesting to take a look at history textbooks in countries that are considered hostile. Palestine and Israel for example, or Pakistan and India. In each case, the versions presented of the very same events are so spectacularly different that an alien would think they took place on altogether different planets

“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind,” Albert Einstein famously said. Somehow, though, it is a disease many nations like to instil in their citizens, unaware of how ugly these little red mental zits look — and how dangerous they are. A key element in the contamination process lies, unsurprisingly, in the creation of an idealised narrative on the homeland, taught in schoolbooks from the earliest age. Then the infantile disease is indeed caught at infancy: armed with the fallacious idea that nationalists will be better citizens (they are not), the state embarks on a widespread effort to mould children’s minds, at the expense of objectivity, critical analysis, justice, tolerance, and historical truth.
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Source: Today's Zaman, 10th February 2010

Nationalist Turks working for international organizations is an interesting phenomenon which has not attracted the attention it deserves. This phenomenon first attracted my attention during a hearing before the European Court of Human Rights in 1999. 

It was a weeklong session of a fact-finding hearing during which we learned that Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), was captured in Kenya and was being transferred to Turkey by plane. A Turkish gentleman working at the Turkish section of the court who seemed particularly disinterested in the content of the hearing became very excited with the news that reached our courtroom.

Source: EUROCLIO on the BBC World Service, February 3rd, 2010
On february 3rd, the BBC world service, with over 30 million global listeners, focused the disputed role of history textbooks in the process of European Integration. The documentary offered a multiperspective insight on the role of history teaching and the significance of history textbooks in the establishment of a balance between integration and nationalism on the path towards a common European Past. In this context, EUROCLIO Executive-Director Joke van der Leeuw-Roord underlines the need for raising historical awareness among the youth while she suggests that the current rather narrow and nationalistic-oriented teaching of history in most European countries impedes the maintenance and development of a democratic and peaceful community. To that extent, she urges the need for the development of common approaches for the formation of a shared European history based on mutual understanding and close collaboration among the relevant actors. The program concludes with a reference to EUROCLIO’s upcoming Annual Conference, entitled, “A Bridge Too Far? Teaching Common European History  Themes, Perspectives and Levels” with Mark Whitaker asking whether a common European textbook would be ever possible. Joke van der Leeuw-Roord then explained the EUROCLIO Historiana initiative, the web-based learning and teaching resource for history teachers across Europe.
The full documentary can be downloaded as a podcast and you can listen here

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Source: The Guardian, Friday 8 January 2010

Britons who are proud of a parent or grandparent who fought in the second world war, proud of the Allies' defeat of Hitler, of Britain's valiant defence of freedom when Europe buckled and crumbled, have ample reason to be wary now. Wary, and disappointed, that one of this country's major political parties has entered into a rash alliance with the new far right of eastern Europe.

One of the eastern far right's priorities, notwithstanding the current economic challenges, is to rubbish the Allies' triumph, and rewrite the history of the war to suit local ultranationalism. It boggles the mind that those who lead the party of Churchill and, yes, of Thatcher, would be duped into joining the far-right European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), led by the controversial Polish MEP Michal Kaminski. If Cameron's Conservatives want your vote, they need to show the minimum courage required to exit rapidly from the ECR, and to utter the words that politicians in general have so much trouble with: "We made an honest mistake, we realise it, and we are today setting things right."

Source: Itar-Tass, December 1 2009

MOSCOW, December 1 (Itar-Tass) - School textbooks in CIS countries miss or distort key events in common Soviet history. This conclusion is recorded in a report by a group of experts on the situation with teaching history in the former Soviet republics, which was presented on Tuesday at a news conference in Itar-Tass. "If this trend persists, a very negative image of Russia as a sinister colonial empire will be moulded in the minds of the rising generation in the post-Soviet countries," the document runs. "The research work on such a scale has been carried out in Russia for the first time: 187 school textbooks and educational aids in 12 former republics of the Soviet Union - Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Moldova, Uzbekistan, Ukraine and Estonia - were collected, partially translated from national languages and examined during the report's preparation," said board chairwoman of the State Club Fund Ksenia Kostina. "The examined textbooks were printed in mass editions or are even the only ones at schools of an appropriate state," she noted. "At the same time, polls were conducted in the above countries, helping to understand what images of the past exist in public opinion of each of the states." For instance, according to the research, 50 percent of young people in Armenia, 45 percent in Uzbekistan, 30 percent in Azerbaijan and 24 percent of Georgian youth know nothing of the 1917 February revolution in Russia.

At the same time, 39 percent of young citizens in Estonia and 46 percent of Georgian young people replied that they had never heard of Marshal Georgy Zhukov or Felix Dzerzhinsky. One of the report's authors, Prof. Alexander Vdovin of Moscow State University said that "given the present trends persist, the basic events of the 20th century will be completely forgotten by population in former Soviet republics in 15-20 years". The report's authors stated with regret that "apart from Belarus and to a less extent Armenia, all other countries started teaching the rising generation history in nationalist interpretation, based on myths of ancient origin of their peoples, high cultural mission of their ancestors and 'the deadly enemy' - Russia. "A desire to present contacts with Russians and Russia as a source of calamities is the common feature of textbooks of the newly-formed states (apart from Belarus and Armenia)," Vdovin emphasised. Another author of the report, Associate Professor Andrei Shadrin of Moscow State University, noted that a logical conclusion is drawn on the basis of the above provision: national liberation struggle was the main content of the national history of these peoples during their existence in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. For instance, examples of this struggle include an event when volunteers of an All-Union Komsomol and youth construction site expressed a protest against bad every-day conditions of life. Textbooks in Georgia, Ukraine and the Baltic states contain interpretations, pointing to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as instigators of the Second World War. The report was prepared by a group of authors and co-edited by head of the history chair at the Moscow Teachers' Training University Alexander Danilov and historian Alexander Filippov. The research work was done with support from the national foreign policy laboratory and with the grant of the State Club Fund.

Source:  New Scotsman, 26 November 2009

During a debate on how history is taught in schools, all the opposition parties expressed fears it would be from an anti-English viewpoint because the Scottish Government subsidises trips to Bannockburn and Culloden.

Ken Macintosh, Labour's schools spokesman, said: "It's difficult not to worry about implicit politicisation, about nationalism creeping into the curriculum."

And the Liberal Democrats' education spokeswoman Margaret Smith asked education secretary Fiona Hyslop why children were not sent to industrial museums to learn about economic history.

Conservative education spokesman Murdo Fraser said: "The suspicion must be that this is about pursuing a narrow nationalist agenda."

Ms Hyslop said the government did not dictate the content of lessons and pointed out that teachers decided what history topics to cover. She called on Mr Fraser to apologise to teachers for accusing them of being political.

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Source: The Hankyoreh, Monday 30th November

The three-day “Forum on Recognition of History and East Asian Peace” concluded on Monday in Tokyo. Civic groups, including South Korea’s Asia Peace & History Education Network, have held the annual forum alternately in South Korea, China and Japan. This was the eighth forum. The first was held in Nanjing, China, prompted by the 2002 appearance of a distorted history textbook compiled in Japan by the far-right group Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform. In 2005, researchers and professors from all three nations formed a joint history compilation committee and released a book on modern and contemporary East Asian history entitled, “History for the Future.” This was a case of private citizens guiding along an effort to support the formation of an East Asian community of peace and reconciliation.