Public Memory

So I have moved away from Storytelling and what could I be potentially moving towards? Commemorative events... How schools shape public memory through the four NE days?

"... the stakes involved in public memory are far more complex. What is being remembered? Who does the remembering? How is it done, and why? What is the context in which memory work is being carried out?" (Tai, 2001, p. 1)

"The Greek playwright Agathon is reported by Aristotle to have declared: "Even God cannot alter the past." Samuel Butler answered back across two millennia: "It has been said that though God cannot alter the past, historians can." Others, besides historians, can and do alter it as well. "It's a poor sort of memory that works only backwards," remarks Lewis Carroll's Queen in Through the Looking Glass. Indeed, memory works forward as well as backward; the past is shaped by the future as much as the future is shaped by the past. Memory creates meaning for particular events or experiences by inscribing them in a larger framing narrative, be it personal or collective. Whether implicitly or explicitly, in this larger narrative is embedded a sense of progression and vision of the future for which the past acts as prologue. In Penser la Révolution française, François Furet pointed out how the political sympathies of different actors, including historians, led them to conceptualize the French Revolution either as the end point of the narrative of the French nation or as the beginning of the Republican narrative. In Vietnam, deciding how to remember a century's worth of historical change is a matter of grave difficulty for a society filled with uncertainty about its future and only just beginning to rethink its past." (Tai, 2001, p. 2)

Oh my gosh, Tai writes so beautifully. I was immediately drawn into her words.

References
Country of Memory : Remaking the Past In Late Socialist Vietnam, edited by Hue-Tam Ho Tai, University of California Press, 2001.