remembrance education history education historical thinking Belgium citizenship education history wars historical distance cross-curricular objectives Commemoration and remembrance are integral elements of postmodern western culture. Although academic historians are increasingly inclined to acknowledge that there is no hard and fast dividing line between collective memory and profes- sional historiography, they do not always welcome the increasing pressure from national governments and international organizations to guide and even regulate collective memory through history education or through so-called ‘remembrance education’. The rationale of remembrance education is that modern nations have a certain responsibility for crimes or suffering that has been caused in the past, and that recognition of this forms a component of education in democratic citizenship. Remembrance education thus becomes a general umbrella for education about ‘dark chapters’ from the past, with the Holocaust as most evident example. This article focuses on a single (sub)national case. Within the Flemish Community, which is the body responsible for education in Flanders and the Dutch-speaking schools in the federal Belgian capital Brussels, remembrance education has, since 2010, been an official part of the cross-curricular final objectives of secondary education. Starting from the concrete context in which this initiative originated and is currently being developed, we examine the complex relationship between remembrance education and history teaching. The differences and affinities between both, we argue, become visible by comparing the position of the academic discipline of history in both fields, by comparing the position of the present, the role of empathy and of a pedagogy