Bauer's History

 For the past two weeks I have been teaching a course for teacher students who aim to teach the 1-3 third year in Swedish elementary schools (i.e ages 7-9). This has been rather of a challenge to me, since the history curriculum for these school years is mostly about pre-historic societies such as the stone and Iron Age. In a classical understanding of history, this is not really history since historians engage with the time after that written sources makes their entry around 3000 b.c. Still the course also contains a lot of history didactica, making it clear that historians are needed at it. Furthermore, I also think that it is wise that this is part of the national curriculum since if we started in a literate society children would automatically ask the question: but what was before that?  What I however is not very content with is when I look at the course material and literature towards training teachers at this level. The largest Swedish publishing houses tend to publish ...

 For the past weeks I have taught a course on the uses of history. What has struck me is that the literature often portray myths as something inherently bad, even though myths according to their own descriptions could be neutral. So let’s start with the definition: Myths are often in this perspective based around the human need to explain our existence. In contemporary society few would believe that humans would be descendents from ash and elm, even though this was common in the Viking era. But this does however not mean that myths have played out their parts, since we for instance sometimes need to explain were groups such as ”the swedes” and ”the Dane’s” came from. In my perspective myths can however also turn to much smaller communities, since we all for instance have that colleague that worked at our workplace fifteen years ago that nobody met but still discusses their behaviour on an after work. The last aspect highlights another part of myths: they are close to our own life-w...

 In the 2024 movie The Conclave one of the possible candidates for papacy was described as strikingly modern. One way that the film tried to illustrate this was his phrase "We do not want to return to the times of large families and overcrowded houses 'cause momma and poppa did not know any better", which was a subtile way to illustrate how both the catholic and many protestant churches had handled the issues of contraceptives and sex education. In todays very polemic landscape, it is easy to think that only the most provocative parts of sex eduation (i.e. educating about social gender) is under attack, but the latest development here in Sweden have made me wonder.  A week ago, NGO RFSU (national association for sexual education) claimed that the proposal for a new curriculum contained what could be viewed as a dismantling of sexual education in Sweden. This was due to sexual education being written out of the general curricula and instead being placed in plans for indivi...

 For the past month I have taught a course on the usage of history. This is a rather Scandinavian/north European concept, since Anglo-Saxon literature would rather speak of for instance public history. In the north European schools there instead tend to be a focus of how the past is invoked in society, and why.  As a political historian it would be rather obvious for me to mainly focus on how political parties or politicians have used history in my teaching. Yet this have actually not been the case. Instead most of my examples have been oriented towards the question of history in aesthetics, ranging from art to country songs. There are many reasons for this. From a theoretical position I feel that history needs to be studied outside of politics. The basic idea is here that politics in the end is a reflection of wider society (or atleast it should be ideally), and that viewing usage of history in aesthetics therefore have great relevance also for politics. It is perhaps more li...