Between identification and empathy to elaborate the difficult past: an experience of a classroom debate with Chilean children

ABSTRACT This article presents an analysis of historical thinking operations deployed in a student debate on Chile’s difficult past. A discussion was held in a public school during the second semester of 2019 on sensitive issues in recent history. Twenty-seven students between eleven and fourteen years of age participated in the activity, corresponding to the sixth grade of primary education. The results indicate that the students are active thinkers of past events through operations such as identification and historical empathy. According to the debate, these operations unfold through the categories of family affiliation and social class from which they identify and empathise with the actors of the past and the temporal relationship with their own experience. The article concludes with some insights about peace education in post-conflict societies where the past conflict remains in the present.