If They are Taxi Drivers – What Are We? Archives and Schools

Abstract

It may sound strange that this contribution deals with taxis and their drivers. What do taxi drivers have to do with Public History? Actually, they have much more to do with it than one might see at a first glance, once we enter the world of metaphorical equivalents. The idea for this text stems from reading a tweet that was posted by Jessamy Carlson.1 She works at the National Archives in London and posted the following tweet during the British Archives & Records Association conference in 2011: “Archivists must be the taxi drivers of knowledge, directing people to interesting and innovative places they might like to see.”2 As soon as we enter the field of metaphors, many questions arise. In this particular case, the most pressing for my situation was: If they – the archivists – conceive themselves as taxi drivers of historical knowledge who take people to places of historical interest (to paraphrase Carlson) – then what are we history educators? Are we bus drivers who get groups of people (i.e., students) on a tight schedule (i.e., timetable) to places where they more or less want to be, but that are held important and interesting by the management of the bus company (i.e., ministerial curriculum authors)? Or are we taxi drivers as well? And if so, do we belong to a competing company – or to the same one? What would represent the traffic system in this case? And, after all, do both sides see this metaphorical situation in the same way? Of course, using metaphors takes us only so far. You easily can get lost – and not in a metaphorical way, even though you might have experienced getting lost with taxis and busses as well. So let’s stop using metaphors for now and get into the matter more thoroughly: What are the following considerations about? The first question is: Why are archives engaging in history education? And what for? This leads inevitably to the underlying question: Why should this selfconception of archivists as taxi drivers of knowledge, presented by a British archivist in a tweet, be of any concern to Public History, to history education, and to history educators in the first place? We live in a free society – and should we not