What have European students in common to learn about Europe? This is the question that the European Academy of Yuste addressed in June 2008 in the declaration: Towards an interactive curriculum on European civilization for high school students. The Academy consisting of prominent artists, scholars and intellectuals from different member countries of the European Union proposed the necessity to include European civilization in the curriculum for secondary school students.

The innovation of this project lies in the fact that the programme for European civilization will not refer to a specific list of historical persons and events or to specific history schools books. On the contrary, it will provide students and teachers with the opportunity to see on their own how scholars, reformers and artists from their own region contributed to the process of exchanges that constitutes European civilization .  

A dozen themes will be selected,  which together should cover the major aspects of civilization in Europe during the past five hundred years or so and which connect with the disciplines being taught at the high school level. Each one-word theme stands for an entire discipline and for a major thread in European civilization: e.g. the lens, an object that every high school student knows from his contact lenses or her cell phone, stands for the turn towards empirical science and the extension of spatial dimensions to the microbial and the celestial level through microscopes and telescopes; the physics teacher may collaborate on this theme with the teachers of history and English. There will be other themes like, the post, the fossile, the piano, the novel, the portrait, the passport,… each of these familiar objects stands for a particular aspect of European civilization and is home within a specific high school discipline. Of course, these are just the initial suggestions… other themes may and will be added to the list.

What have European students in common to learn about Europe? This is the question that the European Academy of Yuste addressed in June 2008 in the declaration: Towards an interactive curriculum on European civilization for high school students. The Academy consisting of prominent artists, scholars and intellectuals from different member countries of the European Union proposed the necessity to include European civilization in the curriculum for secondary school students.

The innovation of this project lies in the fact that the programme for European civilization will not refer to a specific list of historical persons and events or to specific history schools books. On the contrary, it will provide students and teachers with the opportunity to see on their own how scholars, reformers and artists from their own region contributed to the process of exchanges that constitutes European civilization .  

A dozen themes will be selected,  which together should cover the major aspects of civilization in Europe during the past five hundred years or so and which connect with the disciplines being taught at the high school level. Each one-word theme stands for an entire discipline and for a major thread in European civilization: e.g. the lens, an object that every high school student knows from his contact lenses or her cell phone, stands for the turn towards empirical science and the extension of spatial dimensions to the microbial and the celestial level through microscopes and telescopes; the physics teacher may collaborate on this theme with the teachers of history and English. There will be other themes like, the post, the fossile, the piano, the novel, the portrait, the passport,… each of these familiar objects stands for a particular aspect of European civilization and is home within a specific high school discipline. Of course, these are just the initial suggestions… other themes may and will be added to the list.