Teaching history as a public use of the past

Abstract

A theoretical analysis is presented whose central objective is to put into discussion the principles that allow us to maintain that the teaching of History is a public use of the past. The analysis is composed of three parts: in the first part, the categories of various traditions of production of knowledge about the past are developed – as public uses, public history, memory and historical culture that help us understand different ways of relating the social function, academic discipline and school knowledge. The second part includes the definition of the school as a place that creates the conditions of possibility for the production of a particular historical knowledge, that we call school historical knowledge; finally, the derivation link from which the epistemological dimension of historical knowledge can be observed and the practical utility of defining it as a public use. As a result, we show the tensions that this position implies, renouncing the claim of neutrality and recognizing the political nature of discourses on the past and of all educational acts. It is a way of thinking from México about history in the present, as well as thinking about school in Latin America, where practices and discourses are plural and are crossed by inequalities and coloniality, but also, reconstructed by diversity and resistance.