Opportunities and problems of developing historical consciousness Are we going to fight the "intellectual underworld"?

Abstract

History education is in crisis, and this crisis is related to the decline of general historical culture. While history education continues to convey the results of the science of history, the content and tone of the historical debates, and people's image of the historical past are rapidly moving away from it. In order for playing a more effective role in shaping historical public thinking, it may also be necessary to rethink the overall aims of studying history. In this paper, I present some analytical criteria for comparing and evaluating approaches to the role and purpose of history education. To do this, I use Peter Seixas's model on the social role of history teaching (Seixas, 2016), addressing the concepts of Jörn Rüsen (Rüsen, 2006), Stéphane Lszique (Lermekque, 2018) and Andreas Körber (Körber, 2018) on the components, levels and development of historical consciousness.