The educationalisation of difficult knowledge: how the Never Again report was translated into educational content in Argentina’s postdictatorship

The 1984 Never Again Report by Argentina’s National Commission on the Disappearance of People was one of the first of its kind in Latin America and became the dominant narrative about that country’s military dictatorship. In this article, I trace how the report was taken up, discussed and even confronted in four educational materials produced between 1996 and 2026, within shifting politics of memory. Central to my analysis are Deborah Britzman’s notion of difficult knowledge, related to how historical catastrophes are worked through education, and that of educationalisation, which reframes problems as a matter of knowledge, teaching, and learning. The four materials, diverse in their genres and authorship, present historical narratives and classroom exercises with multimedial texts that invite memory and identity works connecting past and present, looking backwards but also forward. I reflect on the pedagogical challenges of confronting the past as an action that is never settled, as there are persistent wounds, changing memory politics, and a growing temporal distance from the events. I conclude that knowing about catastrophes cannot be constrained to historical knowledge of traumatic pasts but demands ethical and pedagogical reflections on the forms that the rendezvous with the past takes for each new generation.