Democratic Transition in Croatia: Value Transformation, Education, and Media

8.THE USE AND MISUSE OF HISTORY TEACHING IN 1990S CROATIA

8 THE USE AND MISUSE OF HISTORY TEACHING IN 1990S CROATIA Magdalena Najbar-Agičić and Damir Agičić O riginally this chapter was intended to deal with misuse of history in textbooks. However, we realized that this problem could not be comprehended within the framework of such a limited topic. It made us expand our presentation to some other fields that can be broadly defined as “history teaching,” including not only textbooks but also the national educational policy—that is, the legal framework, especially but not exclusively the history syllabus—and teaching practice. Unfortunately, teaching practice can hardly be observed as a uniform image, partly because of different approaches by different teachers and different conditions of teaching and partly because of the lack of a systematic analysis of the problem. Individual experiences, rich as they may be, make every conclusion relative. Therefore the results of the survey of students’ historical consciousness are used as one of the basic sources. One must bear in mind that students’ historical consciousness must not be regarded exclusively as a product of history teaching in schools. History teaching is definitely one of the factors shaping it, and rationalizing historical consciousness could rightfully be regarded as one of the objectives of history teaching in schools. However, it is not the sole factor, since students gather information about the past at home, from their family and peers, and from the media, especially television but recently to a large extent from the Internet , too. 194 MAGDALENA NAJBAR-AGIČIĆ AND DAMIR AGIČIĆ CHALLENGES OF TEACHING HISTORY The level of discussion of history in schools differs greatly from the level of an academic historiographical discussion. Due to its nature, school history is full of simplifications, generalizations, and exaggerations. One must not expect to learn “everything” during history lessons. It is impossible because of limited time and the age of students. Within the context of this presentation one should ask if it is possible at all to avoid these imperfections? This seems to be one of the fundamental issues of history teaching, and the quest for its solution is one of the greatest challenges. This is not the place to deal with that issue. However, it can be said that one should strive to create a situation in which students, during history lessons, acquire the least distorted image of the past and gain skills and abilities that will help them understand the interpretations of history they will encounter in their lives. Apart from the issue of transfer/transformation of academic knowledge to school history, there is a significant issue related to the danger of school history being used and misused by the current political power and the institutions representing it or even by the society as a whole. It is a general opinion that this situation is common to undemocratic systems of government . Such an opinion is justified; the aspiration to use history teaching for propaganda purposes is—generally speaking—stronger if the system is less democratic. However, this does not imply that it does not happen in a democracy. It is a consequence of the fact that not only can school history transfer ideological propaganda; it can also strengthen the integration of the target community, which in a national state marks the strengthening of national cohesion.1 One could say that states will always use history teaching to create a collective consciousness favoring current politics and that this is the first step toward its misuse. We could cite a number of examples. This chapter deals with such distortions of historical images; we monitor the misuse of history teaching for the purposes of political propaganda aimed at legitimating the contemporary political power and strengthening national unity. Not only history teaching, but historiography as well, has been nationalistic and has been used in such manner since the end of the nineteenth century and throughout most of the twentieth. While transferring historic knowledge, national myths have played a great role for students. RESEARCHING THE TEXTBOOKS A similar pattern was repeated in the countries of the former Yugoslavia at the end of 1980s and particularly during the wars of the 1990s. The war that shocked Europe brought about a renewed focus on the role of education, HISTORY TEACHING IN 1990S CROATIA 195 especially history teaching, in preventing conflicts and in establishing an atmosphere of mutual understanding. The horrors of the war that followed...