turkish-greek civic dialogue - AEGEE Europe

60
an unfortunate period.
RD period starts in 1997 until 2002. The reason why a new period starts in
3 1997 is that there was a great reform of education materials in Greece.
Thus the new period is much more objective compared to the previous two
periods. Stereotypes and nationalist attitudes diminished. Times of peace in
the Ottoman period were also mentioned. An example is ‘The commercial
activities of the Greeks develop competitively towards the activities of the
domestic traders, …’
3 PERIODS OF GREEK TEXTBOOKS
PERIOD A PERIOD B PERIOD C
POSITIVE 4 8 20
NEGATIVE 61 78 179
NEUTRAL 66 133 235
REFERENCES 131 219 434
ELEMENTARY SECONDARY HIGH SCHOOL
POSITIVE 10 6 16
NEGATIVE 89 77 152
NEUTRAL 121 113 200
REFERENCES 222 197 365
As a general evaluation the nationalistic attitudes in Greek history books are
diminishing since the three periods as of 1980. The second presentation we
had on the second day of the workshop was from Recep Boztemur from the
Middle East Technical University History Department. According to Boztemur
it is possible to replace the word ‘Turkish’ in nationalistic Greek textbooks
with the word ‘Greek’ in Turkish textbooks ; the extent of stereotypes were
the same in both countries’ textbooks. He mentioned that the distinction of
‘we’ and ‘them’ occurred with the emerging of nation states at the end of
19th century. History is based on subjective and objective bases. The objective
bases are the territory and state, which makes us believe in history without
questioning. Whereas the subjective base is that we create our own citizenship
and histories. When we create a nation we define the ‘us’ and we write our
histories for the ‘us’ we create. He identified the reasons for the claims ahead
as following:
a) Centralization of text writing, definite curriculum of teacher
b) Authority of controlling the books
SUGGESTIONS FOR
A MORE OBJECTIVE HISTORY TEACHING
1) Global history vs. Local history (Establishing of micro histories of
individuals whereas at the same time broader global histories were
being written)
2) Regional histories (The differences between events and phenomena
should be grasped. When a historian adds a meaning to an event it
becomes phenomena. Conceptual history understanding
(ex. analysis of the concept ‘war’ not the Greek-Turkish war)
3) Interdisciplinary Studies (Comparative history teaching - Different
textbook analysis - as Millas did)
4) Group studies (Negotiation of different thes is, -National histories
vs. Nationalist Histories)
5) New course definitions
6) Institutionalizing history teaching
“As a result of the whole workshop: when concrete measures are taken for
the sake of diminishing the stereotypes in history teaching a more objective
education might be achieved giving way to more peaceful generations. To
continue this discussion on the role of the education on Turkish- Greek civic
dialogue and have furthermore proposals, we as the participants of this
workshop decided to establish an online dialogue group. We wish that in the
future our peaceful dialogue would continue to build bridges across Turkey and
Greece.”
Rebuilding Communication Association des Etats Généraux des Etudiants de L’Europe