History Matters on the role of upbringing and education in impacting the colonial past

What role does upbringing and education play in the impact of the colonial and slavery past? In a new episode of History Matters, Hasna El Maroudi talks about it with Cecily Dos Santos, Zadkine Works Teacher and Branch Director at Humankind Childcare and Development, History Professor Eline Rademakers and Breana Bute, Law Student and guest editor at History Matters. .

History teacher Eline Rademakers has developed a teaching kit to create polyphony in the school curriculum. With this, she hopes to break through the “cultural archives”. “Cultural archives are all the ideas that are already there, in this case about the colonial past,” says Rademakers. “I’m a high school history teacher and I’m doing my doctorate at university. What I noticed was that I was in a split. The science was at a certain level, but the education was a bit behind. For example, thinking about the use of words. In science, we speak of “enslaved persons”, whereas in my textbooks, we speak of “slaves”.

Student and guest writer Breana Bute recognizes the difference Rademakers talks about. “In high school, we had a chapter on the golden age and a paragraph on slavery. The effects of this were actually not discussed.

Next week in part 2 of this episode, Hasna El Maroudi talks with Alderman Faouzi Achbar, Welfare, Society, Sport and Digital Inclusion, and Catia Antunes, Professor of History of Global Economic Networks at Leiden University. All episodes of History Matters are here and can be found on the Shared Past, Joint Future Rotterdam website.