History is a branch of science that deals with the sum of
the events happened in the past and history should be learned to understand
today. As a part of today's reality, history influences and directs our
attitudes and preferences. A French writer, Marguerite Yourcebar, says:
"History is a school of freedom; it saves us from prejudices and teaches
us to look at our problems from a different point of view."
In this context, the awareness of history, the way the history is written and the teaching of history gain importance. As Cypriots, how much do we know about the historical past of our country and the history of the intercommunal relations? To have an awareness of history and to draw useful lessons for the future, we have to have a good knowledge of our history and approach our past without any prejudice. For this purpose, it is necessary to have well-educated historians, rich archives open for all, platforms where everything could be discussed freely and a democratic surrounding free of all taboos. Without having all these, it would be very difficult to bring the historical realities to the daylight. It cannot be said that the Cypriot communities are quite at ease in these subjects.
THE REWRITING OF HISTORY
BOOKS
The famous German thinker Goethe says: "History has
to be rewritten after certain periods" and he gives this pretext: "It
is a necessity, not only that new facts emerge, but also the angles of
viewpoints change in due course." (1)
For this reason, the profession of history is basicly an activity of
reconstruction, different from
photographing. Although one starts to write the concrete facts, the
material he or she works on, were put together by other brains. The
history-writer has to ask him-self or her-self continuously: "On whose
side am I?" and "What was the reality?" The events of the past
have to be interrogated and have to be written and read in a way to enlighten
the present day. Those who do not read history with an interrogation of a
humanist awareness and with the scale of justice, cannot get out of alienation
and they become modern obedients. Is this not therefore the main mission of the
official history?
History has a very important place in our daily life and
it is distorted either by the politicians or by the ideologues. The mass media
usually exploits history for its own purpose and it fans the feelings of
enmity, instead of intercommunal friendship.
For the sake of softening the intercommunal relations
between the Greek-Cypriots and the Turkish-Cypriots and the international
relations between Turkey and Greece, the subject of rewriting the history
textbooks has also gained importance lately, as some politicians refer to it
and the press reports it as newsitem only. Here the concept of history comes to
the foreground and it becomes necessary to start off with modern values as the
historical events are transfered to the students and the public.
What else, the state should not guide history and it
should stop history-writing made to order. If the history-writer and
history-teacher write and teach the history without grasping the problems of
the present time, the past will continue to be shown to us as a dry
adventure.
THE YOUTH DO NOT LIKE THE
HISTORY LESSON
The history lesson in the secondary education is boring
in general for the students, because of the way of history-writing and the
methods of its teaching. The system of teaching depends on learning by hard and
the students have to remember certain days, months and years. On the contrary,
the students have to be attracted to the events, they have to explore what, how
and why's and share the pleasure of
learning which will be more useful. This can be realized beside by understanding the lesson, by using different
books and studies and by creating an atmosphere where the student's own view
will have an importance. It should not be forgotten that his or her horizon
could be opened only by his or her own capability and willingness.
The usefulness of the history textbooks can only be
mentioned if they can open a modern way in front of the student as he or she
judges the past. The teaching and learning of history should be done according
to the up-to-date developments in education, communication and society. The
basic and further education of the teacher, the time of teaching and the means
of teaching are important and they have to be developed. With this kind of
approach, history can be made an unboring and meaningful lesson in the years of
secondary education.
THE INTERROGATION OF
HISTORY-TEACHING
If we look at the practice in Turkey, the Philosophical Institution of
Turkey organised in 1975 a seminar of "History-teaching in Turkey".
19 years after that came the "Symposium on History-teaching and Text-books"
in 1994 when the history-teaching was interrogated seriously for the first time
in Turkey. This was followed by the "International History
Congresses" organised by the Bosphorus University since 1994.
An interesting study was started in 1991 in 27 European
countries including Turkey, organised by the EUROCLIO (The Standing Conference
of the Associations of the European History Teachers) which has its
headquarters in Den Haag/Holland and the Körber Foundation in the framework of
the project "Youth and History". A total of 32 thousand students
between 14 and 15 years of age were interrogated in the subject of
history-teaching and the results were published in two volumes in 1997, showing
that the youths do not like the history lesson. Another important result was
that the feeling of "nationalism" was being inoculated to the
students through the history-teaching in the European countries.
The President of the EUROCLIO, Joke van der Leeuw-Rood
told at an evaluation meeting that some of the history teachers are responsible
from the prejudices prevailing in Europe. Prof.Salih Özbaran, participating
from Turkey, stated his own evaluation that the nationalist view has always
been dominant in history-teaching in the European countries and that this
negativity is valid also in Turkey. He drew attention to the following point:
"Unfortunately, in many countries the history
teachers do not have the freedom of teaching the appropriate and necessary
subjects and the curriculum and the political pressures obstruct doing them.
(2)
THE PROBLEM OF CREATING A
CYPRIOT AWARENESS OF HISTORY
The aims and purposes of history education have to be
told openly to the students. One of the important aim of history teaching at
the school has to be the creation and the development of a "historical
awareness". This awareness can be defined as the relationship between the
commentary of the past, the perception of today and the expectations from the future. One of the
important aims of history-teaching should be the development of the values of
today, the communal, moral and cultural perceptions. Another aim of
history-teaching and history-learning is to help the students to develop the
past values into contemporary ones. (3)
A Cypriot identity that will defend the independence, the
sovereignty and the territorial integrity of our island can be formed without
damaging the identity of the ethnic-national communities living in Cyprus. But
this Cypriot identity, can only be achieved by developing an awareness of
history and by implementing it into practice and reflecting it in the
education. (4)
The historical past of the Greek-Cypriots and the
Turkish-Cypriots cannot be isolated from the past of each other. As there can be no pure culture,
there can be no pure history. The Greek-Cypriots and the Turkish-Cypriots have
to approach the histories of their ethnic mainland structures as an
"intercultural history". Because the histories of the ethnic mainland
structures bear the different colours of each other's history. A discriminatory
and single-coloured national history can fan enmity against the other
community.
If a comparison can be made between the history of Cyprus
and a carpet woven with different colours and type of silk, an inhuman
behaviour of a single community, coexisting in the process of history, made by
all the ethnic-national communities living in Cyprus, can make the whole
history upside-down as a single thread can colour the whole carpet.
A national identity cannot be one-coloured as in the case
of a national history. This identity can only be an "open" identity
that can be defined by its historical and daily connections with other nations.
Such an identity can only be formed by a type of thinking, capable of covering
the multi-layered structure of the cultures and their dynamism that is fed by
the contradictions of the cultures. Instead of a type of thinking, which is
determined by an "covert" understanding of nationalism, closed within
the limits of one language and one culture, only a type of thinking, which can
grasp the intercultural and interlingual relations and implement them into
practice, can maintain the respect to different cultures and can coexist with
different communities.
Such a type of thinking, which can stop enmity against
the other community, can bring the change only through education and by bringing an intercultural and an
international dimension to all the educational institutions. For example, when
history is defined as an intercultural history, when a history written in a sense by all the communities together
and taught as it is, the communities will have the same responsibility to the
events that happened in their communities as it happened in the other community
and they will not make any difference between "I" and "the
outsider".
It is dangerous to have a type of thinking which
separates him- or her-self, his or her nation and culture from other cultures
with thick lines, which sees the world as "me" and "the others,
or "me" and "the outsiders", dividing them into two fronts.
At the end, this type of thinking sees the disappearance of the others as the
only way for the existence of him- or
herself. Whereas, the people and the communities who sense themselves as an
inseparable part of the whole consisting of different colours, will not
assimilate the other colours, races, religions or will not think of the
annihilation of "the other" by exclusion. This way of humanist
thinking underlines the universality of the national cultural heritage and its
intercultural dimension and it interrogates introvert cultural understanding
that does not give a chance to the outsider and to the other culture. (5)
History has to play a unifying, rather than a
discriminatory role between the nations and communities. As different to
patriotism, in the nationalist way of history-writing, the writer chooses
"we" in every stage of history and sees "the others" as
enemy. It is the same for all the nationalists. To see those from his
nationality as different from and superior to others is the minimum
characteristic of the nationalist history-writers. There are writers who make
this in a harder or softer form. But what is seen in all the nationalist
history-writers is to see his or her own nation-state superior and to defend,
if necessary, the interests of his or her own nation at the expense of the
others. This way of looking at history and making comments is a dominating
characteristic at least in some stages of official history writing in the
development of a nation-state.
Everything in history generates its contrary and there are people who are always inclined to write the story of how rightful they are and there are those who see at the same time how micro-nationalism created many disasters. The number of those who look from a humanistic point of view and think how one can get rid of these are getting higher. (6)
The review of the text-books and the history-teaching
with multi-lateral and international efforts is a very long and much tiring
process. The efforts of producing new models for text-books in Turkey, Greece
and in the Balkans are being continued by the non-governmental bodies,
historians and social scientists.
THE HISTORY TEXT-BOOKS UNDER
EXAMINATION
I would like to extract here some material relevant to
our subject from the Turkish-Cypriot newspaper "Istiklal" of 16
January 1951:
"In a
newsitem given under the title "Unesco News: The re-writing of
history textbooks with a mentality of
international understanding", it was stated that the reciprocal
examination of textbooks in Latin America started in 1921. The first
international agreement on this subject was signed in 1933 between Argentine
and Brazil. Before this, the Danish read the Norwegian history textbooks and
saw that all the Danish kings were reflected as bad and powerless persons.
Therefore, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Island formed a commission. Sweden did
not participate at the commission, but appointed independent experts from other
countries. This common study in the field of teaching history started at the
end of the First World War."
The Istiklal newspaper reported in its issue of 18
January 1951 under the same title of "Unesco news" that in a meeting
convened between 24 and 26 October 1951,
the "important points by writing the (history) textbooks" were
decided to be as follows:
"1. To stress more on the history of civilisation,
rather than on political and military events.
2. Not to go higher than the level of the students and to
use always a language which will be understood easily by them.
3. The writer should not overemphasize the deeds of his
or her own national heroes on the disadvantage of the heroes of the other
nations. All the heroes are the common heritage of humanity. Besides the
military leaders, the inventors and sociologists should also be appreciated.
4. The East and Africa should not be neglected. History
has to be really international.
5. Every country should be ready to introduce its history
textbooks to the examination of the historians from other nations." (7)
RECENT MEETINGS
The situation in our country was examined for the first
time in Braunschweig/Germany by the "Georg-Eckert Institute for
International Textbook Studies" in an international conference organised
in April 1994 under the title "Cyprus in textbooks and textbooks in
Cyprus". The problems created by the history textbooks coming from Turkey
and Greece respectively and the important points by writing textbooks on Cyprus
history were discussed in detail for the first time (8)
The same Institute organised another conference in
Thesaloniki in October 1998 where the history textbooks from Albania, Bulgaria,
Greece, Macedonia and Turkey were examined. There it was disclosed that the
references to the neighbouring countries were in 23% cases negative, in 73% cases
impartial and only in 3% cases positive. The references to Turkey in Greek
textbooks were in 56.6% cases negative and the references to Greece in Turkish
textbooks were defined in 55.5% cases under the category of "enemy".
(9)
THE EXPERIENCE IN BOSNA-HERZOGOVINA
In the Federation of Bosna-Herzogovina formed in 1994
with the Dayton Agreement, the officials have devised plans for separate
education, insisting that giving each group the right to study its culture in
its own language is how a European democracy protects its minorities. Critics,
however, say Bosnia has to be treated differently, because such a policy will
play into the hands of nationalists by emphasizing children's differences
rather than their similarities. Vildana Selimovic, a school teacher said:
"We are supposed to create a new generation that will not recognise
ethnicity as a factor in life, but with this new proposal, we might do exactly
the opposite."
At issue is whether Croats who make up about 11% of the
Muslim-Croat Federation, should have their own school program and books, with a
slightly different approach to history and culture and taught in a slightly
different dialect. The differences in speech are less than those separating a
northerner and a southerner in the United States.
Most Serb children are already getting a separate
education and use textbooks from Serbia. Serbs live in the other 49% of Bosnia,
where few of the Moslems or Croats expelled during the war have been able to
return. The federation's Education Ministry is offering Muslims and Croats
three options: separate schools, separate classrooms within the same school or
at minimum, separate classes in "national subjects" such as language,
history and art. There is no provision in the federation plans for children of
mixed marriages or for the Serbs and it is not clear that all local districts
will follow the policy anyway.
The separatist movement of the Croat nationalists was
aimed to secede and join Croatia, but it failed. Some Croatian textbooks, in
which the ethnic Croats are taught that the neighbouring Croatia is their
homeland, are in use now, but the Federal Education Minister said Bosnia would
develop its own texts and curriculum for ethnic Croats.
Atif Purivatra, a Muslim commentator, said the separation
policy was unnecessary because Bosnians share the same culture. "You
cannot speak of a separate Serb, Croat or Muslim history within Bosnia" he
said. (10)
In the proposed Federal Republic of Cyprus, there has to
be also mixed schools, which will teach in English language, beside the schools
in Greek and Turkish language and it would be of utmost importance to determine
precisely their curriculum and the contents of the history textbooks.
Footnotes:
(1) Tarih ve Toplum, Istanbul,
March 1990, p.62
(2) Prof.Dr.Salih Özbaran,
Noone loves the history lesson, Cumhuriyet, (Istanbul), 21 January 1998(3) Prof.Dr.Salih Özbaran, Youth and history-II, Cumhuriyet, 11 January 1998
(4) Ahmet An, Notes on the Development of Cypriot Awareness (Turkish), Nicosia 1998
(5) Prof.Dr.Tara Sayin, Xenophobia and intercultural education, Cumhuriyet, 26 July 1993
(6) Doç.Dr.Halil Berktay, The dialog between the historians is of utmost importance, Milliyet, 16 August 1995
(7) Istiklal (Nicosia), 16 and 18 January 1951
(8) The history textbooks in Cyprus were discussed in a conference in Germany, Yeni Çag (Nicosia), 9 May 1994. For the texts of the contributions by Ahmet Cavit An and Pavlos Tzermias, look at the Cyprus Review, Vol.6, Spring 1994, No.1
(9) School textbooks 'at root of hatred', Cyprus Weekly, 23 October 1998
(10) Schools may separate Muslim and Croat children, Cyprus Weekly, 7 November 1997
No comments:
Post a Comment