It’s All About Interpretation: Discourses at Work in Education Museums. The Case of Ypres

Abstract

Our years of work as scientific advisers to Municipal Museum of Education in Ypres, granted a number of experiences that we can easily link to the idea that writing and representing histories is above all a matter of making interpretations, and even of making interpretations of interpretations. Evidence for this point of view is to be found in association with the craze of the 2014 commemorative education on the occassion of the centenary of World War I, in which the normative content of the accompanying history-making machine can hardly not be recognized. It is obvious that contemporary interests play a part in this – as is the fact that these interests are easily projected on the past. This is certainly the case in Ypres, which holds on the one hand the historical world heritage of the battlefields and massacres of 1914–1918 and possesses on the other hand the most important education museum of Flanders. The history of this Municipal Museum of Education is, moreover, complexly linked to that of the flourishing In Flanders Fields Museum (IFFM) which main purpose is to propagate the message of peace as the bottom line of commemoration. In our article we are going to investigate, at the basis of our own experiences, how all these in fact educational discourses interact and conflict with each other, and to what extent they are affected by extra-scientific motives, like for example the defense of one own’s institutional positions.