Fron University to School:a Pilot Experience in Didactics about the Shoah . Dall'Università alla scuola: un'eperienza pilota di didattica della Shoah

The discussion of educating to transmit the memory of the Shoah takes place in a kind of overheated media context, in which remembrance activities and controversy lead to a kind of emotional and cognitive numbing. An educational challenge raised by this saturation of memory consists of transforming the “duty of remembrance” into a meaningful working through of the past. In this paper a project on teaching the Shoah, run in three cities, is analyzed. A comparison emerges of the different patterns of memory found among second-generation immigrant children, in centers and peripheries, and in different generations. Against the background of a reflection on Shoah, violence becomes then one of the pivotal themes of this project and also a special angle for investigating the structure of our societies and the overall quality of our present day context. In a sense, teaching the Shoah translates then not just into teaching history but also into addressing some unsettling questions of our time.