This essay proposes a reading of Capital in the Twenty-First Century from a perspective rooted in the nineteenth-century United States. It explores some of the ways that Piketty’s book and its American reception could lead to a reconceptualization of US history. In a feedback loop, this exploration in turn suggests elements that extend and qualify some of Piketty’s conclusions, especially regarding the role of politics in the processes responsible for the growth of inequality under modern capitalism.

This article attempts to clarify certain points raised in my book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. In particular, I try to lay the foundations for a multidimensional history of capital and power relations between social classes. I study the way different forms of ownership lead to specific structures of inequality and social and institutional compromises.

In France, the links between the teaching of history in secondary schools and historical research in universities, higher education institutes, and the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) often seem tenuous. Evocations of these links usually boil down to debates about updating school curricula, invocations—often with ulterior political motives—of the teaching profession’s unity in spite of obvious differences and inequalities, or, on the contrary, denunciations of an objective that is idealistic, if not demagogical and senseless. In such a context, it might seem odd to devote a dossier to this question in an international academic journal. Indeed, this choice provoked vigorous debate within the editorial board of the Annales, especially since the dossier has the peculiarity of drawing on direct experience by giving a voice to secondary-school teachers and teacher trainers rather than specialized academic researchers.

This article seeks to link the teaching of history and geography to issues affecting research in the two disciplines. It invites the reader to reflect on the relationship between the knowledge that a teacher passes on to his or her pupils and the acquisition of a research method as a savoir-faire or know-how, even as a way of being. After offering an insight into current teacher training, the author, a secondary-school teacher, uses concrete teaching situations to explain the necessity of making pupils active participants in their own learning process and helping them develop sound research methods.

A skills-based approach encourages us to see learning as a journey between the simplest and the most elaborate level of competence, which can be developed over a whole lifetime. Teachers in a middle school in Vitry-sur-Seine (to the south of Paris) have developed a competency-based approach to history that focuses on the key techniques of professional historians, including developing hypotheses by analyzing sets of documents and writing historical narratives. The link between “academic history” and “school history” strengthens students’ learning.

Academic research has a tremendous impact on the scientific and methodological quality of history teaching in secondary schools. Yet the bridges between higher and secondary education are not always sufficient to meet this challenge. To what extent can teachers’ continuing professional education make history teaching more consistent with the findings of historiographical research and debates?

This paper argues that a discipline taught in schools is more than a mere copy of scientific knowledge. It investigates the relationship between scholarly and pedagogic knowledge from the end of the nineteenth century, when the teaching of history was tasked with participating in the construction of a shared national culture. In fact, it is only by mobilizing tools from the social sciences that the complexity of history teaching can be understood. The repeated accusations directed at the teaching of history in schools therefore reflect a trite and hackneyed understanding of its nature and mission.

The “scientific” and “educational” questions raised by the relationship between research and the teaching of history have returned to the spotlight with the current reform of teacher training in France. Undertaken as part of the “Refounding the School System” project initiated in 2012 by minister of education Vincent Peillon, this reform accords a central place to pedagogical approaches and “professionalization.” This article analyzes some of the issues at stake in this “pedagogical turn” for the training of history and geography teachers, particularly with regard to renewed questions about the social function of history and the recurrent challenges and reservations on the part of academic historians about binding the notions of “scientific” and “educational” together.

Behind the complex issue of the relationship between the professionalization of teacher training and the spaces where academic and disciplinary knowledge is produced lie questions about the very nature of historical research. This paper suggests that the reflexive practices of professional historians and of those who teach history can be a meeting ground for scientific, didactic, and pedagogical questions that concern secondary schools and universities alike. In terms of the training of future history teachers, this implies combining the acquisition of historical knowledge and a personal, hands-on experience of researching and writing history from the very beginning of the learning process.