REMEMBRANCE IN TIME - Index of

ABOUT TEACHING HISTORY - 2012
Zoltán FARKAS 1
’History is interesting – for us, history teachers. But the students, who are sitting in the classroom,
are interested in totally different matters: conflicts with friends, their parents, their lovers, and
other kins of things, things which history has to compete with.’
(László Lırinc)
It seems to be a bit irrational effort to give a proper overview about the last twenty years in
less than twenty minutes. The main reason for this is that from the change of regime lots of
reforms, political turns effected and bothered the teaching activities. But of course the
personal experiences of the last two decades do not simplify the fulfillment of our task. So
that is why such retrospection may be subjective, and not only the experiences but the length
of the elapsed time forces one to select carefully. My paper introduces the following
elements and shows how they effected the history teaching of the last twenty years.
First I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the dilemmas. If we look back at
those years we see that the euphoric anticipation is our major memory which manifested
in the professional reform. We thought that time that a new history teaching could be
formed free from ideological voices, which is neutral and based on scientific research and
which can transmit a meaningful future towards the students. History teachers saw it
clearly, that it brings major changes in the content of the material – reflecting the needs of
the society - which is supported by a methodological renewal. But the majority of the
history teachers looked at this process as a devaluation in the profession and it turned out
shortly afterwards that the expectations would not be fulfilled. On the one hand the group
of history teachers was divided by the new approaches of history and on the other there
was a lack of a national educational consensus which would grow out of a professional
basis and of course the politics also had an impact on history teaching. A hoped and
unified theory from the historical scholarship did not exist, because it based on an
illusion, the history only presented the different narratives instead of the truth. This
required the total reform of the methods of history teaching but the history teachers did
not prove to be constructive.
Another question was whether history teaching should be basically about quality or
quantity. The teachers tried to exclude this dilemma and they escaped in a way with using
the positivist approach in teaching. They reasoned that there was the entrance exams, and
the general education but actually it was a way of surviving and an efficient method to
use because they had to lack the scientific support. This resulted in the students having a
wide lexical knowledge consisting only the data, so they had a ’crossword – knowledge’.
That is why the interest in history, which had existed at the time of the change of the
regime disappeared in a short time which is not surprising as the students –and the
teachers themselves – were forced to adopt the new educational model.
1 SZTE Ságvári Endre Gyakorló Gimnázium, Hungary.