Translated by Irene Cecchi
A few months ago, reports emerged that the new guidelines for primary and lower secondary school curricula, developed by the Ministry of Education and Merit with a commission of experts including scholars, teachers and educators, opened the History section with the statement: “Only the West knows history”.
The phrase sparked considerable criticism but nevertheless remained unchanged in the final document, published on the Ministry's website on July 7th and now awaiting final approval from the State Council. Indeed, this is the very sentence that opens the section dedicated to the subject of History, where the document seeks to explain why history is important and how it intends to be taught.
The sentence may have been intended as a provocation, followed by a clarification: “This absolutely does not mean that other societies and cultures have not had a history and ways of telling it”. The Minister himself stated, speaking about the approach to teaching history, that he wants to treat it as “a grand narrative, without burdening it with ideological superstructures”. In the same statement, he emphasized the intended focus of school programs: a preference for the history of Italy, Europe and the West.
The Minister’s statement immediately brings to mind the reflections and debates in modern times that ask whether a non-ideological, neutral and objective history is even possible. Narrative is always interpreted, developed and defined from someone’s point of view, shaped by the interests and needs of the narrator: in this light, history can be considered a collection of interpretations steered —often unintentionally— by and toward specific perspectives for partly subjective reasons. Deciding what to tell —and in this case, to teach— is inherently a guided choice.
On this point, the guidelines agree: they acknowledge that what we define as history is “a specific way of observing and recounting reality” and that our cultural approach has its foundations in Greek historiography from Herodotus and Thucydides, later enriched by the Roman contributions of Livy and Tacitus.
Several issues have been raised regarding this text: the spokesperson of the Unione degli Studenti (an independent, non-partisan high school student association) criticized it for being conservative and reactionary. Opposition parties in Parliament shared this view, with Elly Schlein calling it “nostalgic.” The Rete degli Studenti Medi, another student association, also highlighted the complete lack of student involvement in the process.
Beyond political positions, the two pages of the document sound “Westernist”, where Westernism refers to the idea of superiority of Western culture and civilization, particularly where the text states that due to a certain mindset predisposed to knowledge of facts, causes and effects, the West “has been able to intellectually master the world, to understand it, to conquer it for centuries and to shape it”.
Too often throughout the text, a stark contrast is drawn between “the West” and “other peoples” or “the peoples of the entire world”. First of all, as questioned in the open letter from the Italian Association for Chinese Studies (AISC): which West is being referred to? And in opposition to which East? Secondly, the contrast between these two vague entities is not just a contrast but a hierarchy: “History, that is knowledge and judgment about the past [which, we recall, should be ‘a specific way of recounting reality’] became a decisive source for the political thought and education of the people of the Western world and later of all countries. In particular, also thanks to history and politics, populations —first in the West, then across the world— became conscious of themselve[…]”. In this context, the AISC rightly recalls the rich and well-documented historiographical tradition of China, which clearly disproves the Western claim to primacy in the discipline and, even more, to the supposed cultural maturity that such a primacy would imply.
The only exception to this pronounced and repeated separation between the West and “the others” appears in a section of the text that refers to all peoples as part of a single “humanity,” and to history as the “history of all humankind”. However, this would have been a moment to preserve the distinction. This section discusses the impact of the “coming of Christ” on the approach to and conception of history: history is said to have become a “path of trial that humanity was called to undertake” toward salvation in the afterlife, which gave rise to hope and, above all, a sense of purpose. While this is certainly true for the “Western cultures” shaped by Christianity, it’s questionable whether it is appropriate to extend this piece of history to all of humanity.
Although the guidelines are not strictly prescriptive and allow flexibility for individual schools, they are intended for today’s schools, modern and globalized institutions, increasingly shaped by migration and cultural mixing. These are vital spaces for discovering difference, discussing inclusion and respecting diversity; central arenas for debates on how to manage cultural and religious identities and differences in ways that protect and respect all of them—from France’s proposal to ban religious symbols to Australia’s commitment to “multi-faith education”.
In this context, the approach to “others” proposed by the Ministry’s guidelines seems to go in the opposite direction: according to the Italian Ministry of Education, history teaching in primary schools must focus on the origins of Western civilization because our culture is founded upon it, “both to help students mature in their awareness of their identity as individuals and citizens, and —given the increasing presence of young people from other cultures— to promote the integration of the latter, an integration that also crucially depends on knowledge of the historical-cultural identity of the country in which they live”.
This direction emphasizes the centrality of national identity as a means for integrating foreigners yet without appearing to consider any openness to the culture, identity and history of the other.
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