Which history – A debate inside Italian scholarship is playing out across classrooms and screens: cyclical and teleological ways of reading the past are being left behind, academic hierarchies have collapsed, and an overwhelming flood of research has made “history” feel less
On paper, history is supposed to steady us. It offers patterns that repeat and directions that—if you believe in teleology—lead somewhere better. But in today’s classrooms and media landscapes, those assurances are fraying.
Paolo Pombeni. writing in issue of Il Mulino (Italy). traces the problem to an age he describes as marked by “individualism and singularity. ” when both cyclical and teleological approaches to the past are being abandoned at the same time. The fallout is not abstract. A collapse of hierarchies within the academic discipline of history. combined with an explosion in the quantity of research being produced. has produced what he calls a “Babel” of scholarship.
For students, the consequences start at the point of first contact. “Which history is needed to help develop the tools of knowledge at our disposal?” is the question Pombeni puts front and center. He argues that encyclopaedism won’t work because history is simply too vast. Students. instead. should begin with a past that can be understood using “concepts and knowledge” they already have “some connection” to.
He also warns against moralism. The instinct to use history as a courtroom—judging the past negatively—does something else: it limits students’ ability to understand “complex realities.” The purpose, Pombeni insists, isn’t condemnation. It’s empathy and compassion.
That shift in purpose runs through the teaching question that follows. Francesco Rocchi writes that history is entangled with “politics. personal memory. and differing systems of values.” Teaching. then. is not a clean delivery of information. Historians have to decide how to “package” a mass of perspectives, approaches, and provisional conclusions into a coherent curriculum.
Current teaching guidelines, Rocchi says, often assume that if students are taught facts, they will automatically learn to think critically. But children already have their own “personal ideas and beliefs”—some of them “bizarre or counterproductive”—and they actively build their own conceptual structure. In that environment. Rocchi argues. a teacher cannot rely on a single method of “lecturing” or “indoctrination.” The classroom has to be built as “a continuous. iterative cycle of feedback and dialogue. ” the only route toward a pluralistic and inclusive practice that respects students.
What happens when the past is taught as a single direction, or reduced to a single verdict?. Monica Azzolini’s case for the history of science answers with a different kind of insistence: even if it has a “marginal” role in Italian education. it is an “essential instrument for understanding the challenges of the present.”.
She offers three examples. First. botany: historians of science have used Italy’s remarkable herbarium and museum collections to understand “long-term ecological changes.” Second. botanic gardens as a lens on colonial history—showing “how the scientific practices of the past continue to shape our institutional and cultural present.” Third. artificial intelligence: because historians of science “interrogate the social. cultural. and ethical consequences” of innovation. their work becomes crucial “for developing a more conscious. responsible. and inclusive use” of AI technologies.
In each example, Azzolini argues, history of science does more than reconstruct the past. It provides “conceptual and material tools for guiding contemporary decisions” in areas that matter. The pressure point she names is the “progressive devaluation” of the humanities. Reintegration is not a cultural luxury here; it becomes a necessity, including in public discourse.
Then comes the other classroom—television. People complain that TV has stopped teaching history. Luca Barra and Matteo Marinello dispute that. In absolute terms, they say, the amount of high-quality history programming has grown enormously in recent years. The catch is what that growth costs.
As history programmes “hybridize” with entertainment, depth and complexity shrink. The result is a “continuous negotiation” between the rigour of the discipline and the demands of the television format. Producers often feel they must establish a “direct link” with the present, so certain historical periods are preferred over others. Presenters, meanwhile, have to negotiate between the roles of historian and entertainer.
Political history—what’s sometimes called “dad history”—is especially popular. but Barra and Marinello say that isn’t because audiences are simply conservative. Its popularity is an assertion of relevance: a route for reconnecting with the present and rediscovering less familiar historical figures. Television history makes “inevitable and necessary compromises. ” they write. but it also offers comfort in “an ever more uncertain contemporary moment.”.
All of it loops back to the same hunger: not just for more history, but for a usable kind of history—something that can help people live with uncertainty without shrinking the past into a single message.
In a short interview, Marcel Gauchet—historian and political philosopher—pushes back against intellectual fashion. He discusses the relationship between history and democracy. political history of religion. his own career. his colleague Pierre Nora. cancel culture. and the role of history in the current intellectual climate. He offers a vigorous defence of history as “the most powerful instrument of democratic peace-making at our disposal. ” if we can only use it well.
In the space between Pombeni’s Babel of scholarship and Rocchi’s insistence on dialogue in the classroom. the question becomes difficult to dodge: when there are too many histories and not enough shared tools. what exactly are students. viewers. and citizens being taught to do with the past?. Pombeni’s answer is about empathy and compassion. Azzolini’s is about practical conceptual tools. Rocchi’s is about feedback and pluralism. and Barra and Marinello’s is about the compromises that come with turning history into public television.
Gauchet’s insistence lands like a final warning and a promise at once: history may be the instrument of democratic peace-making, but only if it’s handled with care—because without care, the collision of versions doesn’t educate. It confuses.
history education Il Mulino Paolo Pombeni Francesco Rocchi Monica Azzolini Luca Barra Matteo Marinello Marcel Gauchet Pierre Nora history of science television history artificial intelligence humanities devaluation empathy and compassion pluralistic teaching
So basically nobody knows what history even is anymore.
I don’t get the “Babel” thing but it sounds like there’s too much info and teachers are just winging it. Like students can’t tell what’s important.
Wait, are they blaming TV for the history thing? Because my nephew watches a bunch of documentaries and thinks that counts as learning. Also “individualism and singularity” sounds like a fancy way to say everyone does whatever they want in class.
This reads like professors are mad that there’s a million research papers now. But then they’re also saying students don’t know which history to use, so like… just pick one? I feel like the map loss part is metaphorical but still, we all know nobody teaches the real stuff anymore. Between the collapse of hierarchies and “teleology,” I’m just gonna assume it means history class got watered down.