The questions that lead us to think about History, as a professional choice and as a necessary field of knowledge in schools, are questions originating in the present time. The past that interests us is the one that dialogues with the current time. The postulates that emanated the composition of a totalizing and supposedly impartial vision of other times have long been questioned by historians.
The writing of history and, by extension, the actions that are replicated in museums, classrooms and other environments, is a manufacturing process, as Michel de Certeau (1925-1986) warned us. Fabrication of meanings, meanings and boundaries between the past and the present, between the thought and the thinkable, between fact and meaning. Borders are mobile and indicate where we are and what procedures we can adopt to recognize limits, impasses and the set of praxis in which societies look in the mirror and look for traces of what they are.
Conservative and progressive, authoritarian and democratic are some of the delimited spaces that can suggest a wide spectrum of actions and procedures between the present time and the origins of a society. What remains from the past is not always what we most want to observe in the present time: working with History is uncomfortable because it denaturalizes and problematizes the choices that live among us.
History does not emerge as a given or an accident that explains everything: it is the correlation of forces, confrontations and the battle for the production of senses and meanings that are constantly reinterpreted by different social groups and their demands that, consequently, give rise to other questions and discussions. Debates about methodologies for historical knowledge, in this sense, are not minor issues or of mere academic interest: they legitimize or not procedures that justify the interpretations and choices of each time. History is not, as common sense combined with current obscurantism thinks, the domain of full relativism: it works with rules and principles that need to be enunciated, confronted and validated.
Is it necessary to teach History?
At a time when many voices question the place of History in the education of children and young people, in Brazil and around the world, it is necessary to reinforce that everyone has stories and the curricular component is a right. Every social body has its history and needs it to be told, problematized and, above all, repositioned according to the changes and demands of each time.
As historian Marc Bloch (1886-1944) noted, time is a fundamental category for the study of History. An Arabic proverb says: “a man is much more like his time than his parents.” In other words, it is up to those who study History to understand the living conditions adopted in each era. What matters for historical studies are ruptures and continuities, what changes and what remains. Now, how can we understand the comings and goings of human societies without having time as a basis? History tries to understand past societies within the limits placed on their own time. But this is not always a simple task. In some cases, we may come across ideas and practices that are very different from current ones, which may be strange.
In the name of the official discourse of the formation of Brazilian territory, for example, a narrative was constructed that legitimized the extermination of indigenous peoples, looting and countless atrocities to legitimize the State. For a long time, this story was sweetened to generate jingoistic feelings about Brazil's power. Today, this discourse of the giant homeland coexists with that of extermination that continues to be practiced in the name of development. The actors change, the justifications change, but questions are only raised when there are inconveniences and silences that need to be pointed out.
The two images, above and below, almost 500 years apart, indicate questions about Brazilian territory and demands that remain on the current agenda.
The study of past societies does not function as a key that opens a chest full of answers to the problems of the present. But it is still essential for us to deal with current issues. We cannot deny that the past is very present in our lives. Our way of living is steeped in history: we carry legacies, often diffuse, of the actions of past societies. The Greeks, when founding democracy, established a legacy that was recovered and altered at other times, until it reached the present day. When we think about how democracy was defined in ancient Athens, we can establish relationships, think about differences and similarities with our way of conceiving this form of government. Therefore, it is not enough to look at the origins, but when we come across the comings and goings of History we can compare and reflect on our time. In this way, with the study of History we sharpen our reading of the present time, seeing and understanding the contradictions that present themselves.
Writing, teaching, making history
In current demands, another central theme for the area of History is dealing with the traumas that mark societies and that affect the very human condition that we share. Totalitarianism, dictatorships, forms of segregation and ethnic, racial and gender decimation, for example, open perspectives for continuous and inexhaustible questions.
The problem of writing, memory and testimony is fundamental for a country like Brazil and for all those who wish to forget situations with very serious consequences, such as the victims of the dictatorship. As Jeanne Marie Gagnebin observed, in her work Threshold, aura and remembrance (2014), writing refers to what is not to be forgotten, it is our fight against death and a process that transforms both the dead (in the past) and the living (in the present). And, in History classes, we write, think and give new meanings constantly in the hope of reaffirming that we are not doomed to repetition.
