“DE VOLTA PARA O FUTURO”

historical education and curriculum in a time to remember

Abstract

To what extent does changing understanding of the past impact on the future? Much more than a rhetorical question, this question is on the agenda. In times of potent displacement in the field of education, either by the implementation of new public policies in Brazil, such as the BNCC, or by the profound reinventions of the very concept of education and the emergence of an official discourse that repeatedly weakens the school institution and the figure of the teacher, is it still possible to talk about history at school? And if the subject is history, what story is the basic education curriculum talking about? This essay, which seeks to reflect on the contemporary history curriculum in basic education, addresses the limits and possibilities brought by historical education, as well as the potential that it presents to contribute to an emancipatory and transformative history. If, on the one hand, we are inserted in a scenario of dismemberment, and, on the other hand, the utopian desire to try to fix the impossible is constituted as something belonging to the human being, it becomes increasingly relevant to redefine the study of the past within school institution. And in this way, turn our eyes “back to the future”.