Teaching the history of colonization and decolonization in France: A shared history or to each their own?

Strongly influenced by the paradigm of republican universalism, education policy in France favours an approach that largely relativizes, or even denies, the dimension of cultural diversity. The content of the secondary school history curriculum reveals this phenomenon. In the 2007?C2008 school year, 185 students in the final 2?years of secondary school in Amiens completed questionnaires about the importance their schools place on the history of colonization and decolonization. The analysis showed how the respondents?? relationship to this historical topic was linked to the degree of their own experience of migration. Although today??s classes are pluralistic, schools?? failure to take into account the diversity of the population??a legacy of history??diminishes students?? ability to think in terms of ??otherness?? and, as a result, to imagine a common history shared by the various populations living in France.     

Unfulfilled promise: radical discourses in South African educational historiography, 1970–2007

This paper examines the discourses and modes of representation embodied in educational historiography from the 1970s to the present and their implications for intellectual identity construction in SA. The paper shows how the theoretical foundations of the liberal and Afrikaner nationalist discourses, which vacillated between race and ethnicity, shifted to social class and gender in radical and neo‐Marxist discursive formations of the 1980s. It highlights how the decline of radical scholarship has resulted in a synthesis of constructivist and postmodernist discourses that privilege nation‐building, identity and cultural diversity after apartheid within a predominantly neo‐liberal paradigm. It argues that the transition to post‐apartheid education came to be thought about within a horizon of possibilities different from the rigid paradigmatic tradition of the short‐lived neo‐Marxist school of the 1970s and 1980s.