Impossible but indispensable? – about historical and literary information in high school

Abstract

This text is about the methods, employed in schools, of putting high school students in touch with cultural tradition. My interest in this issue is connected to the recent appearance of meaning of the “historical and literary order” in the 2018 syllabus, despite the fact that since 1990, the weight attributed to that meaning in syllabi has gradually shrunk, to almost completely disappear in 2002. 

To answer a question: “why is the history of literature needed to be taught in schools?”, I started my analysis from pointing out the disappearing trust in historical and literary syntheses. This trust has been plummeting for over 40 years, which is connected to the so-called crisis of representation. In my view, the answer to my question may lie in the analysis of the 1949 syllabus document, in which the vision of the past is construed with a very apparent ideological intention, despite efforts to keep up the pretense of objectivity. By exposing the mechanisms that lead the authors of the 1949 document, I try to show to what extent the domination of chronological order opens up the potential of school documents to manipulate the past, which can lead to falsifying the images of cultural tradition.