Abstract

BASTOS, Mário Jorge da Motta. The challenge of meaning the past: The teaching of medieval history in Brazil. Acta Educ. [online]. 2021, vol.43, e55177.  Epub Sep 01, 2021. ISSN 2178-5201.  https://doi.org/10.4025/actascieduc.v43i0.55177.

The professionals who teachs History, at any level in which their teaching is exercised, are increasingly threatened in their activity and challenged in their essential condition of exercise - the mobilization of the public - by a growing sense of contempt for the past, especially the more remote, within the framework of capitalist societies that are only recognized in projections for the future. To this we dedicate, more and more, our greatest feeling of empathy! The ‘daily dismantling in the air of any and all expressions of historical solidity’ frees us from the f

eeling of the weight of time on our backs, accelerating history in a present that is experienced as a constant change that only links us to the future, only projects us ahead. Historicity increasingly seems to reside in science fiction, and past tense in novels that celebrate a lost world or that may not have even existed! In view of this scenario, historians in general, and medievalists (and antiquists!) in particular, need to reflect on the conditions, perspectives, practices and meanings of the study and teaching of our ‘time slices’ in all levels of education in Brazil. How is the present and what will be the future of this past in the intellectual formation of Brazilians?

Keywords : medieval history; brazilian medievalistic; historical consciousness; appropriations of the past; education.

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