Public History of School: A Different Way of Enhancing the School Past?

In recent years, a fundamental question has been raised in international historiography on education, namely what we mean exactly when we use the term public history. Public history, in fact, in its most up-to-date conception, should be an history written in a participatory form both by experts and specialists and by ordinary people, those who had long been the recipients of the traditional historical narratives, who become co-producers of the historical reconstruction. Actually, this is not always the case and public history today consists of a widest range of initiatives. Then we wonder whether the public history is defined – rather than by contents treated and the nature of their treatment – by the recipients to whom it is addressed and by the tools used to transmit those contents. Moreover, it must aim to reach non-professionals and must use tools suitable for this purpose, obviously not coinciding with those of traditional scientific communication, such as books and articles, unless they have non-canonical features. If there is a substantial difference between history and public history – which however still too often is written by historians without the creative contribution of the ordinary people – it is this. Some scholars claim that public history is also subject to the risk of making a public use of the past, since – despite being subject to a scientific constraint and to the application of the historiographical method, based on a critical analysis of sources – its objectivity can be challenged. The interpretation of the past expressed by a certain community, which can also be the main customer of the historiographical reconstruction, can be partial and affected by a vulgate spread over time within the community itself, which can determine a distorted view of the past predetermined by common sense, difficult to eradicate. This risk, however, is actually taken every time we make history.