Public Debates, Public History, and School History Curricula: The Greek Case

Abstract Public debates about school history curricula meet the interests of public historians and educators in many different ways because they raise questions such as: “What history or whose history do we teach in schools?” “How can we make school history more public?” “How can the school history subject move toward a critical consumption and production of public representations of the historical past?” The withdrawal of the 2018–2019 history curricula in Greece and their replacement in 2021 with the updated history curricula of 2015, added another link in the long chain of educational reform and counter-reform in Greece, and demonstrated, once again, the close relationship between school history and public education policy. Moreover, in the Greek case, the revealing comparison between the withdrawn history curricula and those that replaced them brings to the fore the ways in which public history approaches can significantly contribute to the meaningful engagement of pupils in school history and, more generally, to an open, flexible, learning-centered, and inclusive education.