Teaching school history to future teachers: an exercise in applied history

School history is traditionally part of the degree courses that prepare for the teaching profession. It often consists of a static knowledge of pedagogically significant events (e.g. reform laws) that unfortunately leaves weak traces in the teacher's professional skills. I would therefore like to propose a different way of studying the school's past through an applied history exercise, exemplified by an extremely important topic. It is necessary to start from an analysis of today's situation, which places the Italian school at a dangerous crossroads that appears clear to historical reasoning, but is otherwise difficult to recognise. We note, in fact, a tension that runs through the entire 20th century between two different school models: the “identity-value model” and the “democratic-scientific model”. The former assigns a priority objective to the school, of a value-based nature (nationalist, patriotic, religious, variously intertwined) and historically it can be found - with different nuances and characteristics - in totalitarian regimes, in theocracies, but also in democracies, in this case supporting their illiberal and anti-democratic drift. The words of this narrative of meaning are: transmit, hand down, control, celebrate, honour, i.e. to remain faithful to one's identity, defined on the basis of family and community belonging. The second model, on the other hand, assigns the school the fundamental objective of scaffolding the students' intellectual competences, of opening up to understanding the world through scientific and humanistic knowledge. The words in this case are: educate, emancipate, participate, collaborate, reason, support students in the search for their own personal identity that the school does not pre-define in any way.