How can History Education Change the World of Today
In the last part of the Hague Recommendations, devoted to curriculum development, states are encouraged to ensure that the histories, cultures and traditions of their national minorities are taught in their schools. Already since 1992, promoting exactly that has been the mission of Joke van der Leeuw-Roord and the organization she founded, the European Association of History Educators (EUROCLIO).
What is the purpose of EUROCLIO?
EUROCLIO brings together people who deal with the transfer of history and heritage to a younger generation. We work in many countries in Europe and beyond, especially in those that have experienced inter-ethnic tensions or recent violent conflicts. We create networks dedicated to promoting an inclusive approach to history. In some countries we work mainly with history teachers, in others with academics and museum people. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, for instance, it is quite a mixed group of people, most of them trained historians, who after the war were young and shared the desire to prevent that terrible past from becoming part of the present. What is impressive is how they have been able to connect their personal sorrow with a solid, professional approach.
In addition to creating networks, we provide opportunities for professional development and try to install in educators a commitment to lifelong learning. Thirdly, we address the matter of teaching tools. As history teachers we ask ourselves: how can we teach history in a responsible way, not overemphasizing certain things and neglecting others? And how can we make the learning of history attractive? Our goal is to make history a subject about which students say: “this has given me something for the rest of my life.”
How did EUROCLIO get started?
In 1991 the Council of Europe organized the first pan-European meeting on history education after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was the president of the Dutch History Teachers Association at the time and had been asked to attend by my government. On the first evening I was sitting next to the Council of Europe’s Director for Education and he turned to me and said: “You know, we’ve worked with governments already such a long time, since the late 1940s, but so little has really happened on the ground. Can you try to set up an organization that works with the people actually doing history education?” I grew up very much in the shadow of the Second World War and the Cold War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall was an important personal experience for me. So this request really resonated with me and I thought, OK, I will try. I started already during the conference to approach people and ask them: “are you representing an association?” You have to remember that those were pre-Internet times, so it was really a matter of gathering addresses on bits of paper. But, surprisingly, within a year we had 17 organizations who were saying, “yes, we want to work together.”
What new insights have you gained from this co-operation?
Already in that first year, there was an important learning moment. In the beginning it was all about these “poor people from the East” and how we really have to have to help them to do history well. But then we started to realize that it was not only our colleagues from the former East-bloc countries who had been subject to political prejudice. The moment that dawned on us was when one of our first members, the president of a Belgian-Flemish organization, was addressed by the communists saying, “oh, you had those big revolutionary days in 1918,” and he said, “no, that’s not true.” Three weeks later, he called me. “Joke,” he said, “it really is true - and we never heard about it. This is totally silenced in our history!”
So we realized that, in fact, we are all operating under a political umbrella, and that there is a pattern of prejudice to be found in every country, every community. In working together, we learned to recognize this pattern and it became a challenge for us to prevent it from being misused. The first element in this pattern is pride. You are proud of your history. A British person, for instance, would tell you that in Britain, pride in one’s national history comes first. The second element is the sense of being the victim. And if you are a country like Estonia, you will always bring that out first. So the first two elements depend a bit on how your country is placed in the larger historical context. The third element is: “what we did wrong to others is always swept under the carpet; it's very difficult to address.” And the last one is: “anything not connected to our own history is none of our business.” So if you live in the Netherlands, you don’t know anything about Norway, or about Africa, except if there was a colonial connection.
What are some of the practical challenges you have faced?
One difficulty we have encountered almost everywhere is finding the right mix of expertise when setting up a project. You ask for good people, and you get good people, but… It begins with gender balance. Very often when experts come together one has the problem that it’s only men, but in education it’s quite often only women! Furthermore, in countries with a strong sense of independence, like Georgia, Ukraine, Latvia and Estonia, you often get a titular group that is not really representative of the total population. In Latvia or Estonia, for instance, a large part of the population is Russian-speaking, and we want them, too. Immediately, the language problem comes in. For instance, in the late 1990s we had a working group in Estonia who said they didn’t want to communicate among themselves in Russian. So a choice was made to look for an English-speaking person from the Russian-speaking community. But it turned out that being able to speak English does not necessarily mean being a good history educator. Eventually, after a great deal of emotional resistance, the group was able to put the need for quality material above its desire for communicating in the national language.
Another challenge is accommodating donor preferences. Many of our projects are in former East-bloc countries, because that is where funding is available, even though there is important work to be done in Western Europe, too, as is becoming all too obvious in the present day. Donors do not always see the bigger picture. Also, project specifications often require that a certain combination of countries be included, even in cases where, in our opinion, it might be more beneficial to start with a local project to first build up basic expertise in history and citizen heritage education.
What have been EUROCLIO’s main achievements?
The real strength of our organization has been building civil society organizations: we now have more than 70 in 55 different countries. We have trained thousands of colleagues and many of them have ended up in crucial positions in their political and educational systems. They have become educators, thinkers and historians who are really able to question history, far more than they were ever taught in school or in university ten or twenty years ago.
History is always a matter of perspective. Especially in the Balkans, the frontier lines drawn by nationalists are very much overlapping. There is always a moment in history where you can draw a line and say: “this is all ours”. We try to let people reflect on that. But it is not only the Balkans. They are always depicted as the bad guys. The German, Belgian or Dutch perceptions of their borders have also shifted, just not in the same period in history. It is very important for us in Western Europe not to present ourselves as the civilized countries taming the wilderness – it is too primitive to think like that.
A lot of the research that we need to do in order to be able to see things from the point of view of the other has not yet been done. I always tell young historians: look for areas of research that are important and perhaps not so fashionable. We need really solid facts. History is interpretation, but it has to be based on facts.
Joke van der Leeuw-Roord, a prominent expert on education, innovative methodology and transnational history, is the founder and Special Advisor of the European Association of History Educators (EUROCLIO).
Read more about EUROCLIO at: http://euroclio.eu