Like a voice in the wilderness? Striving for a responsible handling of the educational heritage

This chapter deals with the themed exhibitions set up within the context of the Municipal Education Museum in Ypres. It allows the reader to gain insight in the curation as well as in the organization and planning of themed expositions (e.g., driven by personal motives, used to display scientific/research findings). Besides these museum's activities, this contribution also sheds light on how the museum was enmeshed in a bigger network of institutions - e.g., "concurring" In Flanders Fields (IFF) museum, local government, universities - and on the experienced difficulties/struggles while maneuvering between the various aspirations of these stakeholders. The main idea behind the exposé is how expositions in education museums should function as "instruments to think with and about the (educational) past" (historicizing approach), rather than tools that foster a naïve consumption of ready-made, simplified (hi)stories (educationalizing approach). Such conceptual, methodological, and theoretical assumptions concerning the nature of the history of education have been put forward on the international scene by the author as well as by his colleague to whom the Festschrift is dedicated. Both closely collaborated since the beginning of their career as partners to increase the importance of the history of education as part of social and cultural history. Their advisory role in the education museum in Ypres was only one aspect of this bigger endeavor.