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We live in a polyphonic world, yet we are far from being dialogic communities. Contested and seemingly irreconcilable narratives dominate the public conversation over present controversies and easily find themselves projected onto unresolved past conflicts and historical disputes, triggering prejudices over the past that in turn permeate view of these present-day issues. The public and educational communication of history has the potential to either promote or defuse this process of reinforced antagonism. Traditionally, history education, in the broadest sense, has served one or the other of two parallel objectives, which we might term ‘enlightened’ and ‘romantic’ (Carretero, 2011); the former related to the emergence of a critical understanding of the past and the latter to fostering in citizens an emotional identification with and attachment to their own national or cultural community. The beginnings of history as a curricular subject in schools were very much in the service of this second objective. As analyzed elsewhere (Carretero & Bermúdez, 2012), the ‘romantic’ goals held exclusive predominance in national education systems from their inception at the end of the nineteenth century until approximately the 1970s. Historiographical studies (Berger, 2012) have identified, as the central motivation behind this emphasis on patriotism and national identification, a need for the construction of national identities as a narrative support to nation states (Anderson, 1991; Hobsbawm, 2012). Since the 1970s, numerous countries have effected marked changes to their school history curricula, incorporating current approaches from the social sciences and particularly from contemporary historiography; in numerous societies, however, the content of school history remains fundamentally ‘romantic’ in the sense of being strongly nationalistic or indeed blindly patriotic. The last two decades have seen a degree of renaissance in nationalistically oriented history curricula. One striking example might be formerly Communist ... |