Changes from report parliamentary committee draft to plenary report

Added16. Recognises the central role played by teachers in the generation and transmission of competencies required to understand and critically assess historical facts, and emphasises the importance of teachers not only receiving adequate training but also engaging in continuous professional development, including peer-learning activities and the sharing of best practices both at national and transnational level; underlines, in this context, the added value of the Erasmus+ Teacher Academies;

Added17. Calls on the Member States to provide tailor-made (history) teaching materials and training that enables teachers to better focus on transnational aspects and the multifacetedness of history, imparts adequate didactics and principles of modern teaching and is primarily concerned with forming self-reflective young people;

Added18. Emphasises that there is great value in collecting data and comparing and evaluating methods and tools for teaching history, and welcomes the work of both specialised governmental and non-governmental organisations active in this area, including the Council of Europe’s Observatory on History Teaching in Europe and EUROCLIO; stresses the need for more EU Member States to participate in the Observatory;

Added19. Acknowledges the potential of museums critically addressing Europe’s contested history as a tool for learning about the past and building historical awareness, in particular the ‘House of European History’ as a flagship project for which sufficient resources should be made available in order to ensure wider outreach to the European public;

Added20. Stresses the importance of preserving Europe’s rich cultural and historical heritage and memorial sites, in particular as a means for establishing a critical historical consciousness, provided they are not abused for ideological purposes, and highlights the role that the European Heritage Label and independent institutions promoting European heritage, both tangible and intangible, can play in this regard; encourages the Member States to step up their efforts to define and protect places of democratic memory, especially those related to underrepresented groups; emphasises the potential of Europeana in serving as Europe’s digital library, archive, museum and education platform;

Added21. Acknowledges the potential of digital media and the rising level of digitalisation in education, while expressing its deep concern about digital channels being increasingly abused for political manipulation and the circulation of disinformation, including concerning history, as highlighted by Russian historical revisionism accompanying Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine; calls on the Commission and the Member States to step up their efforts to strengthen media and digital literacy and to endow teachers and students with adequate skills and tools facilitating fact-based history teaching, and enabling them to identify, contextualise and analyse traditional as well as modern historical sources;

Added22. Stresses that learning mobility opportunities across borders provided by European programmes and other mobility schemes favour the exchange of ideas and promote transversal knowledge as well as intercultural understanding, helping to break down national barriers and providing a better understanding of past and present;

Added23. Calls on the Commission and the Member States to strengthen the tools currently available at European level in order to foster a critical and self-reflective European historical consciousness, in particular the Erasmus+ programme, which supports mobility and intercultural learning as key tools to increase understanding of other cultures and nations, and the CERV programme, which provides support for transnational historical remembrance projects and promotes civic engagement;

Added24. Requests that the European institutions, the Member States, candidate and prospective candidate countries, educational institutions and civil-society actors step up their efforts to foster reconciliation, abstain from any attempt to instrumentalise history for political purposes, and fight historical revisionism and denialism both in the European Union and beyond; recalls the importance of these aspects for future enlargements of the Union;

Outlook: the legacy of the past and the EU’s future

25. Espouses the ideal of a ‘culture of remembering’ and historical consciousness based on shared European values and practices in approaching the past, yet at the same time avoiding any undue levelling or simplification of history;

Change 16

Changed16.26. Expresses its hope that on the basis of critical self-reflection relating to history and historical responsibility at national level, a truly European reflective discourse on the continent’s past may emerge, with history not being abused for power-political purposes;purposes, and expresses its hope that a ‘community of destiny’ among European peoples will emerge from common historical work;

Change 17

Changed17.27. Envisions national collective memories eventually contributing to and merging into a European public sphere, with nationaldiverging remembrance cultures complementing each other rather than being in competition, and dealings with history becoming an issue of civic rather than political action;

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28. Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the Council and the Commission.