History Education and the Construction of Identities, pages 139–150 Copyright © 2012 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. 139 CHAPTER 10 COMMENTARY Identity Construction and the Goals of History Education Cesar Lopez and Mario Carretero A pioneering writer on the topics covered in this book, the French historian M. Ferro (1981) afﬁrmed in his work How the Past is Taught to Children that: Our images of other people, or of ourselves for that matter, reﬂect the history we are taught as children. This history marks us for life. Its representation (…) of the past of societies, embraced all of our passing or permanent opin- ions, so that the traces of our ﬁrst questioning, our ﬁrst emotions, remain indelible. (p. vii) We have discussed Ferro’s assertion a number of times in recent years, and we must confess that we have occasionally thought it, if not wrong, at least exaggerated. However, thirty years after the publication of the original work, which is seminal in the ﬁeld, his statement seems more accurate than ever. The history taught in most countries (Carretero, 2011; Foster & Craw- ford, 2006; Symcox & Wilschut, 2009) is composed of versions of the past that in addition to giving historiographic meaning to the study of causal temporal relationships, also amplify the nation-state’s ofﬁcial voice—often (c) Information Age Publishing Review purposes only