The captive narrative

Author(s)

Mauricio Liberal Augusto

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Educação (FE/SBD)
• Defense date: 2013-11-07

Examining board members

José Sergio Fonseca de Carvalho; Vanessa Sievers de Almeida; Angela Lorena Fuster Peiró; Elias Thome Saliba; Adriano Correia Silva

• Advisor: José Sergio Fonseca de Carvalho

Abstract

During the 1980s and 1990s, in Brazil, a widespread consensus has been developed inside the academic community of History against a supposed traditional teaching, which should be replaced by a renovation process. As a late echo, the discussions about this issue were clearly influenced by the militant fervor characteristic of the two decades of military dictatorship and by the successful initiatives for the reestablishment of democracy. The proposers adopted the Nouvelle Histoire as the primal source to conduct the efforts in favor of the History teaching renovation. This thesis takes as an important reference the work of Hannah Arendt, who was not a historian, neither an educator in a strict meaning perhaps this is the reason why her perspective is so fertile to make an opposition to that renovator consensus , and intends to demonstrate that, in the circumstances in which it happened, the consensus tended to the simple and pure rejection of the so-called traditional teaching and to the recurrent use of the conjecture that only is possible to know and understand what we did by ourselves. At the same time, and contradicting its libertarian purposes, that renovator consensus looked for although it did not admit replacing the initiation of young people in the meanders of History by a workshop of History in order to convert them into small historians. By revealing this set of attitudes, adopted by a self-referential community, this work aims to emphasize the unquestionable distinction between university and school implicitly denied by the mentioned renovators; it also aims to recover the formative sense of History in light of Hannah Arendts work, particularly in relation to the meaning that the author attributes to the historical narrative. Furthermore, it attempts to show that the desired renewal, by carrying the historiographical theory and practice to the teaching practices of this discipline, led to the obscuration of the formative sense of History. Based on a musical metaphor used by Arendt in the preface to Between past and future, the thesis is framed just like a suite. Politics, history and education represent three distinct and related voices of Arendts theoretical reflection which converge, at the end, to illuminate the formative sense of History teaching. (AU)