Among the possible threats to history that we discussed in Vilnius was an intriguing item classed as “the Canon”. The discussion centred around the fact that we tend to see history as a series of events or developments that together make us/our history what it is.
But the discussion we had made it clear that we found The Canon to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, an agreed Canon of History makes the teaching of history much easier and simpler. If The Canon is agreed we, the teachers of history, do not have to argue our case for the importance of the individual parts of our curriculum; but on the other hand, we also run the risk of having a far to prescriptive “set of knowledges” or a sort of checklist of historical knowledge that our masters can point to and say whether our “product” is good enough.
The idea of a Canon was very much part of the American literary scene when I studied in North America in the later eighties: two books in particular (Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, 1986 (dare I refer you to the Wikipedia-article about the book) ? and Harold The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, 1994 argued for a return to a traditional Canon of western literature of the kind that had been criticized as being composed mainly of the works “Dead White Males”.
