Social interactions and the impact of memory
Another unavoidable and overarching observation is that before they can produce lessons of the past for the future , memory policies provoke interactions in the present . Memory is appropriated through social interactions – rejection or support , recognition or interpretation . Although they are indeed faced with the past , both the promoters and targets of memory policies must first experience things ( school textbooks , exhibitions , memorials ) or exchanges ( between students and teachers , between state or Union representative and citizens , between NGOs and people , and so forth ) that are meaningful in the moment , in the context and their social situation . Memory policies do not resolve conflicts from the past , and nor do they foretell the future behavior of their audience . Their memorial message is by nature distorted , because it is always embedded in the social relations , including the economic inequalities , symbolic dominations and power relations of any kind that give it meaning today .
There is , for example , a gap between teaching recommendations and practices . Although the “ civic dimension ” is emphasized by teachers , as was clearly demonstrated in the Swiss case , and although in France many do use the pedagogical tools proposed by the Ministry for Education during classes dedicated to the violent past , the factual content of the curriculum often remains the core of the class . Teachers do not always follow the imperatives of this ritual of civic conversion through memory , and certainly do not do so systematically . Aside from a theoretical acceptance of the importance of the past in building today ’ s society , they do not adopt the civic function ascribed to them as automatically as we might think . For example , and although we do not have a comprehensive study on this , there is reason to believe that the international day for the memory of the Holocaust and the prevention of crimes against humanity , 27 January , is often ignored by teachers 5 . This gap between expectations and practice is not due to the teachers ’ lack of support for values of humanism and tolerance , but primarily to the social space of the classroom .
The classroom is indeed a space for interactions between a professional , the teacher , and students who also live in other spaces of socialization . In France , training for history teachers is primarily focused on their knowledge of their subject , rather than on pedagogy or didactics . Once , after receiving a kind of professional socialization , they reach the classroom , most teachers transmit facts , in keeping with the official curriculum rather than the commemorative calendar . In doing
5 DE COCK Laurence et HEIMBERG , Charles ( 2014 ), « La Journée de la mémoire et ses pratiques scolaires . Une évocation critique », Revue pluridisciplinaire de la Fondation pour la mémoire de la déportation , décembre , p . 119-126 .
EUROPE INSIGHT
45