“The struggle for the child's soul”: managing history through school education in Europe

Abstract

The article examines the transformation of school history education in Western European countries, which is influenced by political and supranational factors. This framing appears particularly relevant amid the growing role of historical scholarship as a tool of political legitimation and self-identification amid mounting informational instability and intensifying debates around historical memory. The authors proceed from the assumption that the European Union deliberately employs the historical myth of a unified “European process” (with the EU at its helm) to strengthen its own position in the architecture of global governance, including through education, while simultaneously instilling favorable narratives throughout the education system. The aim of the work is to provide a systematic overview of disparate narratives of history education in Western Europe in order to demonstrate the patterns of the EU's distorting interference in the governance of educational processes. The theoretical and methodological foundation of the research comprises the concepts of postnational memory, Europeanisation, as well as the logic of structural approaches to the participation of individual actors in international interaction. The authors posit that since the 1990s the European Union has been consistently implementing a strategy of “Europeanisation” of history education, expressed in a shift in emphasis from a narrative-chronological approach to a problem-based one, the imposition of specific value parameters oriented precisely toward the achievements of the “European process” (as framed by the EU), and the formation of pan-European inclusive narratives. Using the examples of Greece's and France's school textbooks, those of Benelux countries, and post-socialist states, the authors demonstrate the substitution of a coherent national historical narrative with a teleological vision of a “united Europe” as the culmination of historical development. The activities of specific regional organizations, bilateral commissions, and EU educational platforms are presented as instruments of structural power aimed at disseminating the mythologized image of the Union. At the same time, through the spread of this educational discourse, the political presence of the European Union itself is also reinforced. Overall, it can be argued that the ultimately imposed postmodernist relativism, individualism, and general fragmentation of historical knowledge in schoolcurricula reduce the educational potential of the discipline and instill in students a distorted perception of the place of the individual in history.