Hıstory Educatıon between the Major Reforms in Bulgarıan Educatıon 1948 – 2002

Abstract

History as a school subject has been present in the curricula ever since the establishment of the Bulgarian secular education, and over the years the study of history began to be given more and more importance in our educational system. Society‘s perceived need to acquire knowledge about the past is the only opportunity to better understand the present and anticipate the historical perspective. The radical changes that occurred in Bulgarian society in the second half of the 20th century led to the establishment of a completely new kind of educational system, built on the Soviet model as comprehensive and universally accessible, but at the same time politically burdened with the forcibly imposed new moral and ideological conjuncture. This process was most clearly visible in the arts, among which the discipline of History suffered particularly hard the long-term defeat of its ideologizing and outright falsification. The proposed research examines the political justification of the main historical concepts studied during the period of socialism, the development of the methodology of teaching history in schools between the reforms in 1948, 1959, 1968 and the follow-up of the situation after the end of the totalitarian regime in 1989 until the reform in 2002.