Everyone complains that history has disappeared from school curricula and final exams. And everyone is ready to say that we are "prisoners of the present" and of the web, as many say, from Liliana Segre to Giuseppe De Rita up to Sergio Mattarella. But why history has disappeared from schools, it is the fault of the government in office and its reform?
Italy has been traveling through amnesia for years now, nausea and satiety with history. Yet we Italians had many defects, we have never been big readers, but the historical passion involved us, it even excited retrospective fans. History was blood and life. There were widespread historical magazines, and History a Illustrated History, opinion weeklies sold more when they had historical personalities and investigations on the cover (in particular with the leader). The popular history, in the wake of Indro Montanelli, it was going great. Politics harked back to historical provenances. For a few years instead, memory has moved from history to moralism, historiography has retreated into restricted circuits and historical judgment falls to the courts which can punish some revisionisms deemed indecent. History at school has become smaller, almost reduced to the contemporary age, at least since the time of the Minister Luigi Berlinguer. History reappears in the public sphere only to revoke toponymy or cancel honorary citizenships, to tear down statues and monuments that do not conform to the spirit of the present. There is no more life on the planet history.
But what are the historical roots of this loss of historical memory even at school? I would point two priority causes, intertwined: one is the Americanization that has also arrived at school, which is the denial of historical memory and the study of history; the other is the long wave of '68 which declared war on the past, to memory and history, seen only as a cemetery of abuses from which to free ourselves. The two factors combined have generated an obsession with updating the past and reducing it to today's precepts. With the result of giving birth to a GMO story, genetically modified. That story is prevalent in Italian schools today, because many teachers are politically correct. Another factor must be added to those two factors: if Memory translates only as Holocaust, if the story is reduced only to Horror and Absolute Evil, then it's better to remove it, take refuge in the present, in technology or economics.
If we talk about the disappearance of history in school programs and exams, it is therefore reductive to blame the Minister in charge, Marco Bussetti, or with his government. We need to go back to the "historical" assumptions that have made history cumbersome and annoying, to the point of erasing it from civil horizons, educational and cultural.
I believe he also has some responsibility the “official” and academic historiography who supervises the Canon and its observance, rejects revisionism and recognizes research only if it does not deny the dominant prejudice. We had to wait for the historic popularizers and journalists, like Giampaolo Pansa and Pino Aprile, and before them Giorgio Pisanò, Arrigo Petacco and others, to know something more, hitherto unsaid or unacknowledged, on the partisan war and post-war massacres, on the history of Italy and the conquest of the south; on the foibe and on the communist regimes, on some biographies, on the Mattei case or on the black pages of our republic. Official historiography has distracted itself on too many topics, he didn't talk about the dark sides, it limited itself to certifying and codifying the pre-established truth. Historiography has serious responsibilities if historical consciousness is narcotized. Of course, there is no shortage of respectable historians, important studies and works.
Then there is another aspect that distances us from history and concerns method and style. Gioacchino Volpe said, taking inspiration from Labriola, that the story to be credible and palatable, it must be "science of procedure and art of narration", that is, on the one hand rigorous research that reconstructs how things actually happened and on the other the ability to tell them, to involve the reader. Renzo De Felice, for example, he was gifted with the first but not the second, as Montanelli noted (which perhaps could be blamed for the opposite, but he did not pretend to write scientific texts). Volpe, who was an academic but originally also a journalist, or rather proofreader, he was gifted with both. So Rosario Romeo. I fear that today the "official historiography", with respectable exceptions, do exactly the opposite: the narrative becomes boggy and boring, like a scientific treatise, and the process, that is, the historical method becomes artificial, if not artificial, because it was subjected to omission, ideological prejudices and indisputable dogmas. The result is an indigestible pile of obviousness but accompanied by a sumptuous array of notes. Lots of seasoning for such meager dishes.
As partial consolation for the missing story, civic education has reappeared which returns to schools in the form of "citizenship and Constitution". Nice thing, on paper, but with the risk that it becomes the time of "political correctness" in which to propagate the issues of racism, the welcome, anti-fascism, homophobia and sexism. The personnel is already ready for the mission. It is worrying that the hour of citizenship and the Constitution could replace the knowledge of history and suggest that our history begins with the Constitution, and his hagiography. To fix a mistake, the erasure of history, there is a risk of making another one, the administration of political correctness, the ideological methadone of our years.
MV, Panorama n.11 2019
Source: http://www.marcelloveneziani.com/articoli/perche-e-scomparsa-la-storia/