A Brill Calendar: June 30

Few facets of Nations reveal their core as clearly as the way they teach history to school-children.

It is not long ago that attending school became obligatory for ‘Spes Patriae’. Modern states and their educational paradigms grew up together in the 19th century. Reading, writing and arithmetic were prime components in the curriculum; a national machine can’t run without a modest, but comprehensive proficiency in that tripod.

One notch lower, the teaching of ‘history’ occupied a special place. The word derives from ancient Greek for ‘investigation’. By the same token, a national educational system is an auto-analysis: a knotty job under any circumstance, involving mental faculties able, and often quite willing, to accommodate non-sequiturs and lies and to manipulate perception.

No finer instrument for justifying the Ways of State to Man than national history. From 1917 until 1989 – at the earliest – USSR text-books on Russian history, aiming at the communist vision of the state, differed profoundly from predecessors covering the same subject-matter in Tsarist days; while Nazis rewrote the history of German speaking peoples as soon as they came to power, a racist government-endorsed reading as short-lived as the system deeming this knowledge indispensable.

In the Kingdom of The Netherlands, elementary education in national history was created under the Siren-like, enchanting spell of the heroic Eighty-Years War against Habsburg Spain and the ensuing age of Rembrandt, Huygens and Spinoza. Nation-wide, children were drilled to know for the rest of their lives that in the year 1600 a battle raged near Nieuwpoort. Who waged it, and why, with what results and when precisely (June 30) has largely vanished, two generations later, ‘into air, thin air’. It is seldom that disappearance of such imprinting is regretted by educators. Yet, study of history is still seen as too important to leave to historians: without a common past, no common future. Time has come for a European history.