History as General Education The Place of History in the Secondary-School Curriculum in Norway, 1869-2019

The article examines the development of history as a subject and wider curricular perspective in the upper secondary school in Norway from 1869 to the present. The first decades of this period saw the sweeping replacement of the classic Latin school by a modern secondary school based on a historical, national and scientific curriculum. While mainly driven by democratic reforms within primary education, this transformation set the stage for a close cooperation between university and secondary school that lasted well into the post-World War II period. The university and school versions of history and other humanistic subjects closely resembled each other, converging in a liberal form of nationalism that imagined national history as an individual acquisition of a universal (i.e. European) civilizational process. However, while modelling history primarily as a continuous evolutionary process connecting past, present, and future, the school subject also contained remnants of an older, classicist image of history as magistrae vitae. From the interwar period, both these paradigmatic ways of seeing and appreciating history subtly lost ground, due both to the introduction of student-centred learning, the weakening of historicism in the humanities, and the growth of the social sciences. When a comprehensive secondary-school system superseded the continental-styled Gymnasium in the 1970s, history did not immediately change its content or pedagogical purpose, but lost some of its integral function within the curriculum at large. Later curricular reforms in 1994 and 2006 have increasingly emphasized the students' general competencies and generic skills. A student-centred emphasis on historical method and consciousness has partly superseded a traditional definition of history as a chronological sequence of momentous events and processes in the past. The article suggests that this trend could be seen as indicative of a larger shift from a future-oriented to a radically presentist "regime of historicity" (Francois Hartog).