The historical consciousness of 15-year-old students in Greece

This is small scale, empirical, qualitative research which explores the historical consciousness of 15-year-old students in Greece. The main research question is to what extent and under what circumstances students refer to the past while addressing current problems. The present study aims at discerning different students' stances towards the past and draws on Rüsen's theory and typology of historical consciousness as an initial basis for the analysis of the Greek data. The research findings suggest that the sixty students interviewed throughout the main data collection tended to refer to the past selectively: the students of this study selected either their 'learnt' cultural past, whenever their identity was contested, or the recent past on the basis of the recent past's similarity to the present. When students chose not to refer to the past, they did so by citing the "changes" that have taken place in history, changes that made the present so "different" from the past. Finally students were found to make an unconscious use of the past, or to make use of an 'implicit' past: in the latter case students made use of an extended present as a recent past in order to be able to predict the future. In all the cases above students seem to have made use of a "practical" "consulted" past in order to serve their "current practical engagements" (Oakeshott, 1983: 15). The latter finding suggests that history education should focus on the development of students' "historical" awareness. In this way students would not deal with a "fixed", "consulted" past which would be either completely different or exactly the same as their present. On the contrary, students would understand the past in a dynamic way, as continuously changing and being transformed into present forms of understanding, into "more positive modern configurations" (Rüsen, 1993: 75). In this way students would create present-past frameworks more easily in order to face their current concerns, frameworks which at the same time would be "historically" informed