Council of Europe

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History at the Council of Europe

2001 – "Educational policies for democratic citizenship and social cohesion"

At the 20th session of the Standing Conference of European Ministers of Education in Cracow, Poland in 2000, the European Ministers of Education reviewed the completed projects.

They highlighted the importance of history as a key factor in the development of democratic citizenship, and pointed out that the aim of the project ""Learning and Teaching about the History of Europe in the 20th Century in Secondary Schools" had been to enrich national approaches by strengthening the European aspect of history teaching and establishing a basis for dialogue and joint examination of mutual concerns or moments of shared history. Thus, the project had:

• made significant progress towards a pluralist and tolerant conception of history teaching, in particular through development of the individual’s research skills and critical thinking;
• highlighted innovative teaching methods that make appropriate and effective use of the new information technologies and the new sources available;
• developed examples of open approaches to sensitive issues in 20th century European history, approaches that take different conceptions and points of view into consideration;
• set out the principles and methods of a new approach to basic and further training of history teachers;
• made a practical contribution to study of the Holocaust and development of methods of teaching about it.

The following project : "The European dimension in History Teaching" was to build on these.

The adoption of a Recommendation on history teaching in twenty-first-century Europe

They recommended also that the Education Committee use the results so far and the conclusions of the project’s final conference to draft a Committee of Ministers recommendation on history teaching with particular emphasis on teacher training, which became Recommendation (2001)15.

They also asked to step up assistance activities concerning design of new history curricula and setting of standards for history teaching, including the production of new textbooks in the Russian Federation, the countries of the Caucasus, Southeast Europe and the Black Sea region.

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