Enseñar historia, educar la temporalidad, formar para el futuro

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze and value the importance of teaching and learning history to build children’s own personal and social future, the future of young people in our democratic societies. Firstly, I’ll present the role attributed by some historians to future as the background for researching about the past. Secondly, I’ll focus on ideas and curricular and educative proposals, designed from history education point of view, that think of the future as the cornerstone of history teaching. I’ll conclude with the presentation of some curricular proposals which I’ve been part of, and the presentation of some materials I’ve created, in which the backbones are the relationships between past, present and future. The main educative value of history education consists on giving children and young people the knowledge and the competences needed to situate themselves in the world, understand what’s going on within it, and have the theoretical skills to interpret and evaluate reality, its background and its consequences, to foster commitment in building their own personal and social future. Future is history’s real engine, it makes us take decisions form a present perspective, that at the same time are the result of decisions taken in the past when the current present was the future.