Educational trajectories in an adverse political context

Abstract

The teaching of social sciences and history in Colombian schools has returned to public debate as a result of Law 1874 passed in 2017. This law seeks to restore the teaching of history in schools, on the assumption of an apparent abandonment, which ignores more than 30 years of research. This chapter provides an account of this situation by (1) examining what has happened in the last 30 years with history in schools from the perspective of school knowledge, with emphasis on curricular debates; (2) analyzing the Colombian context and its effects on the education sector, particularly the censorship and omissions that history and social science teachers must make in contexts where armed confrontation between paramilitaries, guerrillas and military forces made schools and teachers military targets; and (3) analyzing the impact of quality policies (skills, mass evaluation, and state defunding) on the dimensions and dynamics of the social science area and of history in particular.