The teaching of history in the unified middle school between tradition and innovation

Abstract

This paper reconstructs the debate that, from 1950s to the institution of the unified middle school, created a crisis of the traditional model of teaching history for the overcoming of a transmissive teaching and for a new laboratory didactic. The aim is to reflect on the reasons for some constant phenomena concerning the teaching of history: its subordinate position with respect to other literary subjects, its ideological and political exploitation, its autonomy with respect to historiographical research, an encyclopedic study, centrality of the lesson and of the manual, a mnemonic and uncritical learning, an inadequate teacher training. These are the problematic nodes that emerge from the comparison between the texts of the ministerial history programs, especially between the programs of 1963 and those of 1979, that testify to the presence in the unified middle school of a dialectic between tradition and innovation. In fact, if the 1979 programs expressed the urgency to insert innovative elements for a democratic society, that had been neglected in the previous programs, the 1963 text suggested to reconsider some indispensable elements both for the contents and for the methodology of a teaching of history that should have been declined as historical education.