History at the mercy of politicians and ideologies: Germany, England, and the Netherlands in the 19th and 20th centuries

The paper analyses and compares developments in history teaching in Germany, England, and the Netherlands in the 19th and 20th centuries. The development of history teaching in the three countries shows striking similarities. National politics have always used history education for purposes which did not necessarily tally with distanced critical thinking, carefully balanced judgements, and a striving for unbiased interpretations. In the two centuries described here, only the decades of the 1960s and 1970s have been different. Then politics and society scorned a subject which was so clearly unfit for a ‘modern age’. Attempts were made to eliminate history from the school curriculum. As a consequence, history educators adopted a defensive position and a new type of history teaching emerged, which put critical and distanced thinking at the centre. Because politics had turned its back on history, it was possible to develop a vision of history teaching which did not serve any preconceived political aim but took historical thinking as such as its point of departure. During the 1980s and 1990s, the old recipe of forging nations was revived and traditional curricula were once more brought to life.