The senseless demand that history textbooks should not engage in politics

I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you: the history textbook adopted by the school where I teach doesn’t speak ill of Giorgia Meloni; in fact, it doesn’t mention her at all. It is, in fact, an edition dating from 2021 and, as far as Italian history is concerned, it stops at the second Conte government; the section on international history, whilst expressing some concern about Covid, describes global balances that are certainly delicate but devoid of any concrete threats to Ukraine or the Middle East – yet it does feature a photo of a jubilant Lula, hand in hand with Pepe Mujica. This anachronism is not merely a somewhat amusing detail, but the actual situation facing a vast number of sixth-form students, the so-called ‘indoctrinated’ ones by the now infamous Laterza textbook, which yesterday returned to the centre of the debate due to its unflattering description of the origins and actions of the Meloni government. In the vast majority of cases, textbooks are adopted for the entire three-year period, meaning that progressively updated editions do not come into circulation until a couple of years later; so if a school were to adopt the textbook in question now, it would perhaps be for pupils who would reach the final pages in the spring of 2029 – and who knows what will have happened in the meantime.

If they ever get that far. The dispute between Giuseppe Valditara and Giuseppe Laterza must in fact be considered on two levels: a theoretical one and a practical one. The theoretical level is captivating the debaters, but in itself it has no raison d’être: it is obvious that a publishing house has no duty to please serving ministers with its publications, and that a politician would not appreciate the government of which he is a part being consigned to history with a judgement that is, if not hostile, then at least sloppy. The practical aspect, on the other hand, is being ignored by public opinion, yet it directly concerns teaching practice, for which the textbook serves as a support and reinforcement. The Education Minister’s protest regarding the history textbook’s alleged capacity to indoctrinate pupils is based on a number of unstated assumptions, which I shall list before analysing them individually: school history syllabuses cover the period right up to the very present day; textbooks have a duty to remain neutral; teachers are passive conduits of what is written in the book; and pupils are passive recipients of what they study.

If they were made explicit, I am sure the minister himself would be the first to acknowledge that they are all incorrect. The trouble is that, by leaving them implied, they remain hidden and contribute to the spectacular misunderstanding from which the controversy has sprung. If, looking back, we all tried to recall just how far our study of history had gone at secondary school, we would realise that we never got round to discussing the government in office – at least not systematically, as part of a progressive chronological progression within the final-year syllabus. This was not the case when, in the fifth year, we began with the unification of Italy, let alone when the subject was not included in the final exam and faded into obscurity during the second term – in my case, the final event I was taught about was the sinking of the Lusitania, which brought history to a premature end on 7 May 1915 and left it to my extensive general knowledge to discover who had actually won this blessed First World War. This remains true even after the Berlinguer reform, which mandated that the entire final year be devoted to the study of the 20th century; now that I find myself on the other side of the lectern, it is a source of pride among colleagues when one of us manages to reach the point of discussing more recent events such as Tangentopoli, the war in Yugoslavia, the founding of the European Union. Berlusconi.

It is absurd to claim that history textbooks should remain apolitical. This does not mean that they can dictate terms like great sultans, expressing arbitrary or capricious judgements, as their task is, first and foremost, to equip young readers with the ability to argue on the basis of facts rather than prejudices. However, demanding neutral textbooks implies a conception of history as a static contemplation of crystallised events, whereas historiography is a dynamic discipline, founded on interpretation and ensuring the coexistence of different perspectives on the same events. If this were not the case, one textbook would be as good as another, and history would become far more tedious – a study comparable to memorising the telephone directory merely to reel off names and numbers before an enthralled audience. History demands interpretation, and interpretation involves the possibility of error.

At secondary school, I studied from a textbook with a strong Marxist slant which I still have to this day – the Brancati – although I could brandish it, foaming at the mouth, as an example of politicised historiography. For example, at the time, the interpretation of relations between Russia and Ukraine was the exact opposite of what we now know to be the reality and was aligned with Moscow’s propaganda (another textbook of a similar ilk culminated its account of world history with a photograph of Massimo D’Alema, a choice that turned out to be a misjudgement). Nonetheless, I remain indebted to Brancati for the lessons on which I have relied in my subsequent studies in the field: that historiography requires a guiding interpretative framework, lest it be reduced to scholarly caprice; that it must be founded on a solid understanding of the material conditions from which institutions arose; and that it must always be accompanied by a healthy dose of critical reading, capable of tracing the evolution of the prevailing interpretation of that period over the course of subsequent centuries or decades.

If this principle is ignored, history teachers risk being perceived as mere mouthpieces, reducing lessons to – as one politically incorrect colleague put it – a ‘textbook for the blind’: a tedious repetition of the same old content that pupils are expected to learn by heart. I, too, have had a teacher who would open the textbook and read it aloud to us, pacing up and down the classroom from the corner of the Epistles to the corner of the Gospels; I trust, however, that the Minister does not take this teaching practice for granted as the most widespread, or indeed the only one. If, as you walk past a school in Milan, you hear someone shouting themselves hoarse, that is me: I am trying to explain to my pupils that the lesson and the textbook are complementary parts of the learning process, so it is not enough just to read the textbook, just as it is not enough just to listen to the lesson.

History consists of one event following another, each with its own context—comprising aspects of varying degrees of significance—its correlation with other events (past, present and future), the succession of interpretations it has undergone, and the specific points of reference we can find in our own era. The interconnections between these elements are potentially infinite, and while the textbook presents a selection in line with the authors’ expertise, the teacher has a duty to highlight other possible connections, in line with their own abilities, the interests of the individual class, and developments in current affairs. A textbook that speaks ill – I am not referring to Giorgia Meloni, but to Count-Duke Guzmán de Olivares – will not prevent the teacher from presenting countless other perspectives and facets on the same figure.

Of course, if a teacher were to simply recite the textbook, if their lesson consisted of telling pupils to study from page such-and-such to page such-and-such, and that’s it, then there would be cause for concern that pupils might end up being indoctrinated. Even in this case, however, there is no need to worry: pupils no longer use textbooks, which parents buy, if at all, only because they are compulsory. An increasing number of colleagues confirm that their pupils (for mine, the seal of confession applies) simply study from more or less muddled notes taken during lessons, thus relying on oral tradition and turning the study of history into a game of Chinese whispers that leads to the certainty that the Spanish invaded England with the Invisible Armada and that Catherine de’ Medici was the seer of the Kingdom of France. Few even bother to consult the final page of the textbook; those who do—already avid readers—possess a sufficient arsenal of ideas and knowledge not to blindly accept the first line they encounter. The minister can breathe a sigh of relief: whatever appears in the textbooks, there’s no way the students will be indoctrinated by it. To be on the safe side, they don’t study.