A teacher distributed denialist texts on partisans to students. It is a serious episode that demonstrates the need to reinvigorate the teaching of history to counter the propaganda of social “truths” and attempts to rewrite the past
The serious episode occurred on the last days of school and is summarized in some sheets distributed by a teacher to the students of the Aldo Moro Scientific High School in Reggio Emilia, a gold medal city for the Resistance. In them they raved that the Resistance itself was not historically proven, much less that carried out by women. The legitimate reaction, after the dismay of the History colleagues, was the taking of an indignant condemnation position in a published document, which was followed by statements in the same direction by the students, of a group of teachers from the other Reggio Emilia high school , the Ariosto-Spallanzani, and educational institutions.
In itself the story, as well as the clumsy attempts to justify it, could be defined as an unfortunate and gross idiocy, but from a more overall look, in reality it offers the opportunity to start a reflection that goes beyond the single situation.
In fact, for some time now we have perceived an attempt not only to rewrite a certain history, which is inconvenient because it is taken as an emblem of democracy, born from the Constitution and now under siege, but also to develop another strategy, perhaps even more dangerous. . It is a question of building a hegemony which, from the victim paradigm, typical of the post-fascists, shifts the structure to a narrative which re-establishes its own criteria of definitive legitimation.
In an era in which the proliferation of information results in the indistinction of sources, the decline of objective reality, open to rational validation, is accompanied by a profiling of subjectivities in the short circuit of the communication of hate.
The school, then, a collective space capable of guaranteeing the universality of education and at the same time acting as an endogenous stabilization mechanism, therefore becomes a possible terrain for conquest. Already partially emptied of those corporate structures that arranged its functions with a view to regulating the market, today it nevertheless remains the only place of intergenerational meeting, in a society that sees every other common action falling apart.
The teaching of History, in particular, already penalized by a very limited timetable, is certainly a crucial factor on which a debate should be opened again. If in itself knowledge itself today is going through an epistemic crisis, even more so a discipline that immediately opens its gaze to the present, through the critical analysis of human events, or rather, better from that present sheds a light on the meaning of the past, as it can resist from a scientific point of view, without succumbing to the demands that cover every attempt at orientation with a superficial patina?
If even an important Italian writer supports the presentation of the book How stupid we have become by Armando Massarenti, which is a clear symptom of collective stupidity for Palestine, it may not be because that fragile but essential mechanism of civil equilibrium has broken, for which dissent, the manifestation of an irreducible conflictual otherness, acted upon by the culture historical, were the sprouts of every instance of liberation and as such are now annoying in the climate of narcotizing homologation?
There is undoubtedly a need for knowledge, for in-depth analysis. The analytical practice of documents, the dissemination that avoids sensationalism, the conscious professionalism of those who teach are urgently needed. An approach to the knowledge of History as a laboratory dynamic that nourishes teaching is necessary, so as to help children develop that overall vision, those correct interpretative languages, preparatory to a conscious examination of long-term processes. We need a school of dialogue which, in reasoned discussion, in authoritative lessons, places the outcome of doubt and the comfort of discovery. We need to reinvigorate the teaching of History, which today must save students not only from the propaganda of digital truths, not only from oblivion, which, as the “outdated” Nietzsche would say, is a healthy exercise, if it selects what matters and it rejects the superfluous, but above all from the attempt to make it an instrument capable of canceling out every experience in an indistinct opalescence, in which everything and its opposite are a sterile contrast and not a fertile aporia.
It is time to start again from a discussion on the public but legitimate use of History, so as to definitively assign to researchers the value of their dissertations, distinguishing critical examination from opinion, measured study of the complexity of phenomena, from spurious disclosure or worse from adherence to easy instrumental consensus. History must be freed from the threat of urgency, from the blackmail of contingency, to recalibrate its civil impact in the construction of free conscience, in the maturation of political intelligence.
It is necessary to start again from the democratic learning of History, to resume democratic conflict.
The author: Marco Cosentina is a high school teacher in Reggio Emilia
In the photo: Italian partisans parade through the streets of newly liberated Milan in 1945
