Abstract
In societies that have failed to confront past injustice, the most common justifications for the inclusion of history education within the school curriculum invoke the idea that those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it; or they appeal to goals such as reconciliation, or to the importance of recognizing and morally redressing the harm done to victims. These justifications are all sound and important. However, they must be supplemented with a justification of a different kind, one that appeals to a different kind of value, namely that of personal and political autonomy. When historical injustice is left unaddressed in school, so this paper argues, all children and adolescents are wronged, including those who were not involved in, or were directly affected by, past injustice. This is not simply because as a result they run the risk of repeating, or of being the victims of, behavior that caused past violence; or because without history education the harm done to their predecessors is left unacknowledged. They are wronged because ignorance of past injustice curtails the full exercise of their autonomous agency. It does so by denying them access to information that is crucial for evaluating their values and commitments. History education in schools can avoid this scenario, promoting autonomy instead.
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Notes
I do not think I need to elaborate on the importance that history has for individuals. As Annette Baier argues: “Persons are essentially successors, heirs to other persons who formed and cared for them, and their personality is revealed both in their relations to others and in their response to their own recognized genesis.” (1985: 85; my emphasis).
The example is based on a real case. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKrJ_v8jh_w.
It is an open question whether we should hurry to describe this mode of engagement as political. Readers of Plato may be reminded of Euthyphro (Plato 2001) here. As is well known, in the Platonic dialogue Euthyphro is at the court house seeking to prosecute his own father, whose negligence resulted in the death of a servant. Socrates and the relatives of Euthyphro are shocked at the latter’s behavior, which they deem to be impious. But for Euthyphro the only question is whether “the killer killed in justice or not, and if with justice, let him be, but if not, to bring a case against him even if the killer shares one's hearth and one's table” (4b, c). As many commentators have argued, what is at stake in Euthyphro’s suit is not a concern for justice, but a private concern for the “purity” of his name.
Unlike Wollschlaeger’s example, Sarmiento’s is fictional, but not removed from some of the attitudes toward historical injustice that prevail among the Argentinian youth today.
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Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Historical Injustice International Conference hosted by the Justitia Amplificata Centre for Advanced Studies and the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, in August of 2015. I would like to thank the members of this audience for their feedback. I am also grateful for the comments of two anonymous reviewers for this journal, as well as those of its editor.
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Espindola, J. Why Historical Injustice Must be Taught in Schools. Stud Philos Educ 36, 95–106 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-016-9536-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-016-9536-1