Keywords

Introduction

In the early nineteenth century, two domains emerged as key pillars in the burgeoning project of state formation occurring throughout Europe: a professionalizing historical discipline and an emergent system of modern schooling (Berger and Conrad 2015; Tröhler et al. 2011). Both were expressly aligned with the processes of nationalization and national identity construction (Anderson 2006). Historiography was largely directed toward establishing and preserving a nationalist master-narrative based on a collective (and often mythic) historical experience, and school education was, among other things, tasked with shaping an appropriate historical consciousness so as to bind forthcoming members of the citizenry together around a common civic identity anchored in this shared history.

In the post-Cold War era, characterized as it is by divisive memory politics and a preoccupation with the status and significance of the past (Huyssen 2003), a major imperative for Western liberal governments has been to protect the unity of this nation-building project in response to the real and imagined threats of globalization, mass migrations, and identity politics. These are shifting the ground upon which nation-states have typically defined and defended themselves (Taylor and MacIntyre 2017). In this context, history education has regularly been implicated in political and cultural skirmishes about the representation of the past (Elmersjö et al. 2017). This rests on an assumption of the critical importance of shaping an appropriate historical consciousness through schooling for the ongoing health of the state-citizen relationship.

The chapter argues that we can more deeply understand the current preoccupation with a past seen as problematic, and the focus on history education as both its problem and solution, by investigating the implications of a changing experience of temporality which has occurred since the 1980s. First, this requires a historical understanding of the centrality of history education for political legitimation and nation-building. And second, it requires a knowledge of the character and effects of the changing experience of temporality characteristic of the post-Cold War period and, which in particular, has generated two related responses in Western democratic nation-states: an increased reflection and attachment to national identity and an impetus to reckon with the problematic past. Thus, retrospective politics has emerged at this juncture as a prominent form of political legitimation and a means to regenerate the nation-state amidst a crisis of legitimacy marked by its alleged diminishing authority.

To address this agenda, the chapter examines the effects of a changing experience and understanding of temporality for history education since the 1980s which has precipitated an intense focus on national identity and on coming to terms with a problematic past. I argue that this has had significant implications for history education and has undermined the relationship between history, education, and civic identity which has been central to the nation-building project since the nineteenth century. To do this, the chapter first addresses the shared nation-building agenda of professionalizing history discipline and history education as a part of emerging schooling systems during the long nineteenth century. The focus here is on their temporal and ideological roles as citizen shapers and legitimators of the nation-state, as well as orienters in a particularly progressive temporal configuration (Benjamin 1968; Koselleck 2004). The chapter then unpacks how by the late 1980s the close relationship between history, history education, and the nation-state, founded on a nationalist master-narrative and progressive historical consciousness, was becoming increasingly indefensible as the challenges of the post-1960s decades eroded the authority of master-narratives as well as the epistemological foundations of Western historical thinking. Finally, the implications of the post-1989 experience of temporality for history education are drawn out through an examination of its contested and contradictory agenda today, and future directions for research are suggested.

History and State Formation

The process of modern (nation-)state formation has been, since its beginnings, bound up with a particular experience and understanding of historical time, with history writing, and with the process of national identity construction, all of which emerged as a kind of programmatic core for the tide of state formation beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century in Europe (Berger and Conrad 2015). Reinhart Koselleck famously labelled this period the “saddle time” (Sattelzeit), roughly 1750–1850, which he argued marked the “dissolution of the old world and the emergence of the new,” and whereby a major transformation in the experience and understanding of temporality took place which signaled the “birth of modernity” (Bevernage and Lorenz 2013, p. 43; Koselleck 2004, p. 12). During this period, particularly Enlightenment, cosmopolitan ideas about liberty, the state, and the citizen were transposed into nationalist liberal frameworks by the victory of the nation-state as the primary form of territorial administration and the nationalist idea as the principal conception of collective allegiance (Berger 2007, p. 4). Of central importance for this project was forging the mutually reinforcing relationship between the individual and the state whereby “duties towards the state are traded for the benefits and rights of citizenship” (Rosa and Bresco 2017, p. 414; Tröhler et al. 2011, pp. 13–14). Here, history became a central device for remembering and creating collective belonging from which to construct a shared civic solidarity and to legitimate the emergent state’s demands and benefits (Popkewitz 2014, p. xii).

As many scholars have shown, the professionalized discipline of history was being formed in the early nineteenth century in close connection with the growing power of the nascent European nation-states and with the accelerating and rupturing experience of temporality characteristic of the postrevolutionary era (Berger and Conrad 2015; Bevernage and Lorenz 2013; Koselleck 2004). Chris Lorenz explains that:

…it was the birth of the future that paradoxically gave birth to the past as an object of historical knowledge…Therefore history as a discipline has been dependent on the “modern” worldview in which “progress” is permanently and simultaneously producing both “new presents” and” old pasts”- in one dialectical movement. (Lorenz 2014, pp. 48–49).

Professional historians tended to serve as an ideological support for the state and constructed historical “meta-narratives” that presented “the nation’s movement from its early beginnings, through the rise of national self-consciousness, to its current struggle for recognition and success” (Megill 2011, p. 25). The appeal to history for purposes of political legitimation and establishing collective belonging was considerable in these times of social upheaval where the state took to generating itself on the basis of an oft-imagined and distinguished past (Berger and Conrad 2015).

The underlying chronosophy at work in these processes framed historical progress as an infinite march toward the realization of greater freedom and shaped a dominant conception of historical time – as progressive and homogenous – like an arrow, pointed toward the future (Benjamin 1968). It also encouraged the idea of a national temporal and civic simultaneity, the continuous solidity of national citizens throughout time which thus moved “calendrically through homogenous empty time” as a solid, indivisible body (Anderson 2006, pp. 24–26; Bevernage 2012, p. 16). This historical nationalist master-narrative, coupled with the dominant conception of progressive temporality, aligned citizens of the new nation-states with a common story and set of values, myths, and traditions within which to ground their collective national identity and from which to orient themselves simultaneously toward a hopeful future.

Education and State Formation

Aside from historiography, another domain that has been particularly significant in forging national identity and fostering a sense of collective belonging has been the system of modern education that was emerging during this same period. The developing education systems of the nineteenth century were radically different from the sporadic and pluralistic schooling that had abounded during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Green 2013, p. 11). Andy Green explains that what gave these emergent education systems their particularly modern character was that they “involved the development of universal forms of provision, the rationalization of administration and institutional structure, and the development of forms of public finance and control” and that this together “signaled a revolution in the concept and forms of education and a transformation in the relations between schooling, society and the state” (Green 2013, pp. 11–12).

This relationship between schooling, state, and society was highly significant for the process of nation-building during the “saddle time” and throughout the nineteenth century because state formation required:

…not only the construction of the political and administrative apparatus of government and all government-controlled agencies which constitute the ‘public’ realm, but also the formation of ideologies and collective beliefs which legitimate state power and underpin concepts of nationhood and national ‘character.’ (Green 2013, p. 83)

Thus, a major item on the new educative agenda was to consolidate and convey the values and traditions of the emerging nation-state and shape citizens in the image of the “national character” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1992, p. 264; Taylor and MacIntyre 2017, p. 614). Public and universal education came to be an “integral institution in the burgeoning nineteenth-century nation state and a vital pillar of the new social order” (Green 2013, p. 85).

Green has shown how this broad task included an array of competing and often contradictory expectations including but not limited to the assimilation of immigrants, the promotion of religious doctrines, the forging of national identity and culture, and the indoctrination of the political and economic creeds of the dominant class (Green 2013, p. 86). At its core, however, as Daniel Tröhler et al. (2011) have argued, the main concern of modern schooling in the early nineteenth century was with making society by making the child as a future citizen. The school was conceived as a repository of the general good and as society’s mechanism for promoting the moral health and social regeneration of society (Tröhler et al. 2011, p. 2). Thus, modern schooling “…helped to construct the very subjectivities of citizenship, justifying the ways of the state to the people and the duties of the people to the state” and came to “assume a primary responsibility for the moral, cultural and political development of the nation” (Tröhler et al. 2011, p. 87). Here, schooling was imagined as a new model of socialization for forming the citizenry and inculcating the principles and duties of the nation-state (Williams 2014, p. 1). Since the emergence of modern schooling systems, the production of the national citizen has been a foremost concern and aim of education.

The school subject of history has been the forum par excellence for conveying the nation-building story and from which to construct a sense of community and collective allegiance to the nation-state (Bellino and Williams 2017; Clark and MacIntyre 2003; Taylor and MacIntyre 2017). Indeed, the historian Allan Megill has argued that collective identities can be both “non-reflective and unintentional” but “are also formed, as a result of deliberate effort, most obviously as a result of teaching carried out in schools” (Megill 2011, p. 31). As such, thinkers and proponents of schooling during this time understood that national citizenship must be solicited and national identity actively constructed. As a result, schooling sought to explicitly construct and reinforce national imaginaries, the narratives and images of the nation whereby individuals could situate themselves temporally, as citizens with obligations and responsibilities (Popkewitz 2000, pp. 7–9; Tröhler et al. 2011). Imparting nationalist historical representations, myths, and traditions so to form an appropriate historical consciousness and orientation in time was central to this process. It is through history teaching that historical events were transformed into a moral narrative and set of skills which defined and inscribed a normative and nationalist notion of the citizenry (Friedrich 2014, p. 8).

This was connected to the broader transformation of the Western episteme taking place in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century by the development of a strong historical consciousness, which Michel Foucault describes in The Order of Things (Foucault 1966; Berger and Conrad 2015). This forming of a distinctively modern historical consciousness was instigated by the rupturing and accelerating experience of revolution and historical progress characteristic of the postrevolutionary era. The experience of time as rupture and progress and history as a process of continual movement toward the future, as opposed to a series of timeless exempla, was rationalized within the emergent frameworks of nationhood and the national “character,” whereby advancing freedom and progress were framed within the system of European nation-states. The prevailing public discourse at this time was one characterized by melancholy and loss of traditional authority but for which national history served as “…a drama offering, perhaps at times consolation but, above all, explanation for the contingency, provisionality and malleability of the historical process” (Berger and Conrad 2015, p. 6). These explanatory nationalist narratives were at least partially imparted via the teaching of history and heritage traditions in schooling.

It should be clear therefore that there is a very close historical and ideological relationship between the construction of nation-states, the development of the profession of history, and the emergence of modern schooling systems with their citizen-shaping agenda of forging national identity and shaping historical consciousness. However, with some notable exceptions (Friedrich 2014; McLeod 2017; Seddon et al. 2018; Viñao 2001), an important and underdeveloped aspect of the education literature is that underwriting all of this was a particular experience and understanding of historicity (i.e., the idea that human life and ways of thinking are historically constituted) which characterized the long nineteenth century. This dominant temporal configuration was subject-oriented, disruptive, accelerating, and teleologically pointed toward the future. The central unit of orientation and organization during this period was the nation-state which Stefan Berger has explained: “…serves as the ‘central axis’ in this construction of a sense of historicity” (Berger and Conrad 2015, p. 6). Thus, history, history education, and nation-building came to be bound together by a shared temporal and ideological agenda.

The Challenges of the 1960s and 1970s

Contrary to the common assumption that after the world war nationalist master-narratives were largely repudiated and revised, there were many continuities between the pre- and postwar periods in terms of historiography and history teaching. In Europe, nationalist myths still largely dominated historical writing and teaching as history-makers took up the task of justifying their nation’s role in the conflict and position thereafter (Berger and Conrad 2015, pp. 285–301). In British settler colonies such as Australia, historians worked to retrospectively legitimate and explain prior colonial activities and attitudes as being distinctively nationalist in character and nation-building in effect (Hearn 2015). Importantly, there was an established peace agenda for history education present at the beginning of the century and which grew especially after 1914, which sought to align history teaching with “a spirit of international understanding” and orient it away from virulent nationalism (Elmersjö and Lindmark 2010, p. 64).

However, it was not until the 1960s that major aspects of the nexus between the nation-state, history, and history education were substantially challenged. The experience of decolonization and the associated civil rights, labor, and women’s movements culminated in the 1960s in a widespread counterculture of protest, dissent, and anti-establishmentarianism. This was founded upon an awareness of the catastrophic futurism of the first half of the twentieth century, and legacies of the horrors thereby inflicted in the name of historical “process” and “laws” of human history, as well as knowledge of the destructive powers of nationalism and imperialism. The combined effect of this was the gradual erosion of the nationalist master-narratives which had previously underpinned national identity and had served as the ideological well-spring and legitimating fodder for the nation-building project.

These growing critiques manifested initially in professional history and later in schooling. In historiography, the rise of social history during the 1960s – which drew upon the methods of the social sciences and expanded the subject matter of historical research by exploring social life – exemplified the spirit of 1960s dissent and inclusion. This was shortly followed by an expansion in oral, labor, women, black, Indigenous, and communist histories which each challenged the traditional methods and role of historians as nation-builders and gatekeepers of the nationalist master-narrative and which built on approaches from the 1920s and 1930s.

In schooling, considerable changes were afoot during the 1960s and 1970s. Politically, in Western democracies there was a postwar reconstructionist agenda of investment in education. This involved the development of teacher training colleges, the construction of new universities and schools, and the increased accessibility of education at all levels, especially to members of the burgeoning middle class (Campbell and Proctor 2014, pp. 176, 186). In educational psychology, the cognitive revolution saw behavioral learning theories – which had been the predominant paradigm since the late nineteenth century – gradually replaced by the set of ideas which became known as constructivism and which emphasized the active, social, and constructive process of making meaning (Bruner 1960; Dewey 1938; Piaget 1954). This aligned with the 1960s and 1970s “New Left” agenda of participatory democracy, peace, and liberation.

For history education in the Anglosphere specifically, the Schools Council History Project (SCHP) launched at the University of Leeds in 1972 marked the beginning of the transformation of history education from the transmission of the nationalist master-narrative to a disciplinary process of inquiry. The project emphasized the distinctive disciplinary framework of historical study and conceived of the school subject as a discrete form of knowledge with its own procedures and concepts for teaching and learning (Lee 1983, p. 25; Shemilt and Schools Council (Great Britain). History 13–16 Project, 1980). This is as distinct from the “more synthetic” historical thinking advocated at the same time by German history didacticians (Ahonen 2012, p. 76). The SHP framework positioned students to emulate the disciplinary thinking skills of the historian and was aligned with a broadly constructivist agenda focused less on the retention of facts and rather on the active process of learning (Seixas 2015).

By the late 1980s then, the close relationship between history, history education, and the nation-state, which had persisted since the late eighteenth century founded on a mythic nationalist master-narrative, was becoming increasingly indefensible. In Australian education, this was exemplified by the relative triumph of Studies of Society and Environment (SOSE) by the 1980s and relegation of history as a discrete subject. Rather, SOSE was imagined as a socially relevant, inquiry-based curriculum which would empower individuals through fostering critical inquiry. Many progressive educators in Australia rallied around the new social education which was seen as possessing progressive democratic potential. Leading educators influenced by this revival envisioned the place of history in school curriculum, not as a discrete (and elitist, politically conservative) subject but as a contextual tool for a more inclusive and progressive social and civics education (Taylor 2012, p. 31).

Typically, the erosion of the transmissive, nation-building role of history education in Western nation-states has been explained in terms of changing approaches to educational policies, “progress” in history education research, political contests between reformers and traditionalists, as well as historiographical changes (see, e.g., Clark 2004; Seixas 2015; Taylor and MacIntyre 2017). All are correct to some degree. But we can deepen our understanding further by recognizing that a shift in the dominant experience and understanding of temporality in the post-Cold War era created a crisis of legitimacy for the nation-state and subsequently undermined the authority of its nation-building stalwarts history, and history education, to which the following discussion turns.

The Post-1989 Experience of Temporality

Since Koselleck’s work on the time of modernity, a wave of scholarship has examined various modern experiences and orderings of time (Koselleck 2004). One line of analysis which has proven influential is that since the 1980s, there has been a perceptible shift in Western experiences of time (Bevernage and Lorenz 2013; Harootunian 2007; Hartog 2016; Huyssen 2003). For example, in Present Pasts, cultural historian Andreas Huyssen argued that while the earlier decades of the twentieth century were oriented toward “present futures” where the future is seen as a hopeful possibility, since the 1980s the focus has shifted to “present pasts” (Huyssen 2003, p. 11). He thought that the contemporary obsession with the status and significance of the past signaled a shift in the ways modern subjects and societies experience temporality itself. Similarly, in Regimes of Historicity, François Hartog argued that the prevalence of contemporary watchwords such as “memory,” “heritage,” and “commemoration” signal a fault line in the current “regime of historicity,” the paradigm which regulates the relations between past, present, and future in a given society. This fault line occurs when the relations with the past that underpin a given society’s time relations become no longer self-evident. The demand for memory that characterizes the current “presentist” time regime can, for Hartog, “…be interpreted as an expression of [a] crisis in our relation to time, as well as an attempt at providing a solution” (Hartog 2016, p. 144).

So, what has precipitated this shift in Western experiences of time? As previously outlined, throughout the “saddle time” and up until the period of the world wars, temporality was shaped in ways that oriented understanding and experience as progress and movement toward an anticipated future. In this context, professional historians were the “privileged interpreters of the present in its relationship to the past and future” (Lorenz 2010, p. 67) and the purveyors of the “grand narrative” of modern history which framed gradual advancement and enlightenment within a system of nation-states and which gave shape to historical understanding (Hutton 2016, p. 6). However, by the 1960s the historical profession’s dominion over historical knowledge, enjoyed since the nineteenth century, was being weakened, and their capacity to explain the connections between past, present, and future eroded. An awareness of the catastrophes that had been waged in the name of the future and progress, as well as the historiographical transformations and experience of the 1960s countercultural revolution, underpinned this (Lorenz 2014, p. 43), as did the formative intellectual atmosphere of the 1970s exemplified by Lyotard’s 1979 definition of postmodernism as “incredulity towards metanarratives” (Lyotard 1979; Hutton 2016, pp. 3–17). The subsequent fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the unforeseen reordering of global politics that followed, and the prevalence of ideas about “the end of history” exemplified by Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 text marked the “beginning of the end” and collapse of the future (Harootunian 2007, pp. 472–473; Hartog 2016; Koselleck 2004). Hartog declares this moment as inaugurating an “endless present” or “crisis of presentism” when the future is no longer conceived as a hopeful utopian possibility, as in the time-consciousness of modernity, but is rather seen as an increasing threat. Hereby, Western time consciousness has come to be dominated by a preoccupation with the past and by the immediate self-historicization of the present (Hartog 2016, p. 193; Lorenz 2017).

The Nation-State and the Crisis of Legitimacy

In the period since 1989, there is clearly an intense focus on national identity and on coming to terms with the problematic and persisting past. These can be read as effects of the changing experience of temporality since the 1980s, whereby the nation-state has been attempting to regenerate itself amidst a crisis of legitimacy. This has been prompted at least partly by the erosion of the previously taken-for-granted agenda of legitimating the nation via historical representation and history education which has become increasingly problematic in the period since the 1970s and especially since 1989. The intense political focus on issues of national identity and the problematic past then overflows into public debates, particularly about education due, in large part, to its close historical and ideological relationship with nation-building and forming national citizens. This in turn has had considerable ramifications for history education in particular. This chapter contends that these educational implications are better understood when positioned within a broader set of cultural and political responses to a changing temporal experience.

For example, since the end of the Cold War, there has been a greater sensitivity about recognizing present-day responsibilities for historical crimes (Lorenz 2014, p. 50). The impetus and pressure to reckon with the problematic past is underwritten by the changing status of the past, which has led to growing recognition that the persisting past does not fade away for victims of injustice (Bevernage 2012). Thus, a “present past” has become increasingly burdensome for the nation-state which has been called upon to take responsibility and atone for past harms and historical injustices and to recognize minority experiences, in order to reconstruct or reconcile a polity after a period of violence, oppression, or forgetting. This has been labelled a “politics of regret,” “recognition,” or “reconciliation” and has manifested in various mechanisms such as criminal tribunals, truth commissions, and official apologies, subsumed under the notion of historical justice (Bevernage 2012; Olick 2007; Torpey 2006). This burdensome past is particularly heavy in settler societies, whereby the nature of settler colonialism involves the continuous denial of pre-settler sovereignty and ongoing practices of assimilation and elimination (Wolfe 2006). The expanding scope and demands of what has become a stretched conceptualization and experience of “the past” can be positioned within shifting Western experiences of temporality, whereby the past persists and demands reckoning with.

This impetus, founded on a changing experience of temporality, is then reflected in educational efforts to incorporate the findings of truth and reconciliation commissions and official apologies within history curricula and textbooks as well as state-sponsored learning materials (Bentrovato et al. 2016), to include educational reform (particularly history education reform) in peacebuilding and conflict-resolution proceedings (Cole 2007), and to promote “multi-perspectivity” – the disposition and pedagogy of confronting multiple perspectives in contested historical narratives as a tool for promoting plural, democratic participation and for overcoming divisive stereotyping (Ahonen 2012; Elmersjö et al. 2017).

This expands the agenda for history education beyond the current orthodoxy centered around developing cognitive disciplinary skills which emerged during the 1970s. It implies that history education can be used normatively to intervene in present/past narratives in order to actively shape student attitudes and thus change society for the better. It seeks to return history education to a moral narrative which inscribes and defines a normative account of what constitutes “good” citizenship. There is clearly a tension here between positioning history education as disciplinary, value-free process of critical inquiry on the one hand, and as a normative tool for shaping particular values on the other.

Likewise, in response to this changing temporal regime and the lack of recourse to an unproblematic national past, there has been an “increased reflection about and attachment to national identity against the background of an accelerated process of globalization and immigration” (Van Nieuwenhuyse and Wils 2012, p. 158). Indeed, Taylor and MacIntyre (2017, p. 614) have explained how acrimonious public contestations concerning national history have tended to coincide with a weakening of the nation-state as the sole legitimate authority within a territory and singular vestige of identity. In response to the perceived threats of globalization and the subsequent weakening of liberal notions of citizenship, nation-states have responded with hostility and defensiveness seeking to discredit perceived attacks on the nation’s heritage and legacy and bolster a positive account of national achievement.

Common sources of contention internationally include military operations, genocide and violent atrocities, as well as colonial dispossession and the treatment and representation of minorities. In familiar debates around the world concerning the representation of the contested past, history education and schooling generally have routinely been drawn into broader cultural clashes over collective memory. Some high-profile examples include:

  1. 1.

    The 2005 French “memory of colonialism” law whereby school curricula were revised to emphasize “the positive role of the French presence overseas” and which required teachers to convey a positive account of French colonialism

  2. 2.

    (a) The weeks following the 2005 terror attacks in London, when French politicians immediately invoked schools and teachers as protectors of French secularism and the values of the republic

    (b) The decades-long culture wars in the United States including the debates in the late-1980s about the “cultural literacy” approach to social studies and return of a “great canon” amidst the apparent “threats” of multicultural curricula

  3. 3.

    The insurrection of compulsory patriotism in American schools in the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks in 2001

  4. 4.

    The Putin-sanctioned national history textbook revision in 2013 Russia

  5. 5.

    The 1990s “history wars” in Australia which centered around the issue of representing the nation’s colonial past in school curricula

These are just some examples of what Clark and Macintyre (2003) have shown as an international phenomenon. This reflection about an attachment to national identity since the 1980s has also manifested in curriculum and textbook revision efforts including the implementation of national curricula in Britain and Australia and the resulting controversies, as well as lavish commemorative educational programs particularly aimed at the remembrance of war and conflict (Van Nieuwenhuyse and Wils 2012).

In summary, the lack of recourse to an unproblematic national past has precipitated an intense focus on history education as a key battleground in the challenge of representing and using collective memory for political legitimation and identity building. When the nation-state perceives itself to be in crisis, history education is oft-invoked as a primary instrument for securing national identity and preventing further deterioration. In the post-Cold War era, this has manifested as a crisis of legitimacy exemplified by the global phenomena of “history wars” (Clark and MacIntyre 2003; Taylor and MacIntyre 2017, p. 615). Yet at the same time, this crisis of legitimacy has also been reflected in efforts to position history education as a solution to the problems generated by a changing temporal experience. History education is now often implicated in the educational reform efforts linked to peacebuilding and transitional justice processes, as well as other forms of retrospective and reconciliatory politics, where it is positioned as a harbinger of justice and reconciliation. This is despite the imminent contradictions inherent in any attempt to align the prevailing disciplinary model of history education with the goals of justice and/or reconciliation.

Conclusion and Future Directions

It is crucial to keep in mind that what is often at stake in the memory debates which are a feature of the shifting “time regime” is a vision of the nation, including its contested past and present, as well as an imagined future. In the examples outlined, what is at stake for the defenders or apologists of the nation’s historical record is a legitimated and trouble-free present which is not stained by the minor “blemishes” of the past but is rather vindicated by a positive record of national achievement. The project of imagining and representing a positive or glorious past for the purposes of present political legitimation and identity formation is always also connected to an imagining of the future as the continuation of past and present political agendas (Bellino and Williams 2017, p. 5). By drawing attention to a nation’s violent and oppressive past, the nationalist project of legitimating the present and galvanizing support on the basis of a past legacy is undermined.

Public controversies on collective memory serve as good indicators of the problems and tensions within or between societies, and in such controversies, it is often a purported lack of historical consciousness, school curriculum, and other historical representations that are targeted. In addition, public controversies on public memory also reveal a broader disease among Western nation-states concerning the status and significance of the past (Hartog 2016; Huyssen 2003; Olick 2007). This is underwritten by the shift in the dominant experience and sensibility of time and apparent waning of national sovereignty, which has occurred in the period since the 1980s. This has undermined the nexus forged during the “saddle time” between history, (history) education, and nation-building which focused on creating and transmitting a nationalist master-narrative and forging the state-citizen nexus based on a shared history. As such, a shifting temporal experience and crisis of legitimacy has generated two related responses in Western nation-states: an increased reflection and attachment to national identity and an impetus to reckon with the problematic past.

Understanding the significance of this temporal shift is important for researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers concerned with the politics of history, remembrance, and education. First, it helps to explain the rise of memory politics since the 1980s, including especially the educative focus on (history) education as both problem and solution to contestations over collective memory. In understanding that in the West history education has always been central to state and national identity formation, it becomes clearer why at the current juncture – where history’s traditional promises and character have become compromised and where the nation-state no longer has recourse to unproblematic past – there is considerable anxiety and confusion about the nature and purpose of history education. This temporal perspective provides a broader framework for understanding the persistence and virility of history and culture wars, as well as insight into the continuing appeal of revisionist and nationalist education reform efforts. It also incites broader historical investigations into how different temporal configurations in history shaped relationships between accounts of history, education systems and approaches, collective identity, and the prevailing system of governance in a given geographic space.

At the same time as history education is stripped of its traditional role as nation- and identity builder by the demise of master-narratives and changing temporal relations, it is nonetheless still heralded as a vital tool for civic identity and democracy. This maintains the idea that an appropriate historical consciousness shaped through formal schooling is still central for civic accord. It also rests on an assumption that the disciplinary skills of history are neutral and timeless and that they can be neatly divided from history education’s traditional civic agenda of constructing civic identity and belonging via a nationalist master-narrative. Thus, a mainly depoliticized history curriculum persists in Western nation-states which are ordered by cognitive “skills” and disciplinary thinking competencies. This largely eschews the political and presentist dimensions of historical consciousness and culture which are ever-apparent in the frequency and vehemence of public memory debates.

Therefore, there is a critical need to consider whether or not the skills of the historical discipline can in fact be meaningfully divorced from the temporal configuration that underlies both the discipline and history education. Further, this line of thinking compels a deep consideration of the political implications of temporal configurations in history education, in particular how temporal schemas frame what knowledge comes to be recognizable and legitimate in history education and the political and ethical implications of this, as well as how history-makers are performative and active constructors of temporal relations. Time is not merely a neutral container or abstract timeline upon which to base frame history lessons. If history education continues to be heralded as a purveyor of peace, justice, and reconciliation, paying attention to processes of historicization (whereby history-makers historicize phenomena to place it “in time”) would be essential work to supplement the proclamation of such weighty moral agendas. This represents a significant reinsertion of the political into history and remembrance education. Further research, both empirical and theoretical, is certainly required to determine whether a disciplinary framework for history education (founded in the epistemology of the nineteenth-century professional discipline) is able and suited to perform these tasks and, if not, what sort of historical learning is the most ethically and politically responsible.

Over 200 years since the emergence of the core nation-building relationship between history, education, and civic identity, as well as the characteristically modern experience and understanding of temporality which underpinned that project, changing temporal experiences and understandings are now producing challenging possibilities for history education, and indeed the nation-state, to which researchers need to be attentive.