The process of demystifying cultural heritage narratives in teaching and education has its own special implications in legal practice. This is because the same careful thought which goes into teaching kids about culture, or adults about history, is the kind of thought that goes into preserving the fact of each, and ascertaining the truth of those facts in legal procedures, if need be.
Motions to suppress evidence and other tools in the legal trade, and a variety of other things, are often misunderstood – both by law and philosophy students, and by the community at large. Such confusion can lead to significant misunderstandings. Consider how a failure to think carefully about what a heritage education project is, is, can also lead to misconceptions.
Units of study related to heritage education should introduce younger people to ideas such as evidence, what it is, and why it matters. The understanding of difficult material, maybe something the students will never directly wrestle with at the same level again, exposes them to what is already part of their lives (the study of heritage), and can hopefully prevent or alter the perception of it as boring or only meant for those seeking a career in related disciplines.
A motion to suppress a statement, for example, is a way of bringing critical information to light. It is a tool used in criminal trials to exclude evidence. So, the question arises, how does legal rules, tools and principles help in cultural heritage education?
Like evidence, discussions of a motion to suppress a statement, for example, can draw on the field of evidence and those concepts, and bring that into contact with heritage education. The same legal principles might apply to a motion to suppress a statement or other suppression motion, that apply to education and using the past to teach lessons to be learned in the present.
Even understanding the concept of proof is important, given how prevalent it is in heritage concepts, where people are trying to understand the past, to learn lessons, and to determine how those lessons can apply going forward. In both heritage education and in criminal law, proof plays an important role. What do we prove? What can we consider as evidence? What evidence might be inadmissible as evidence?
In criminal law, proof is handled by a series of different rules, such as the rules of evidence, a whole area of law, but its also handled by legal tools like motions to suppress a confession, which safeguard the integrity of that connection, the link between the culture of the past which can teach us lessons and the law, ensuring that those lessons are safeguarded, and that there’s no disconnection between what really happened and the lessons being learned.
In each case though, whether you are suppressing a statement and getting at the truth, or creating a lesson plan about the past and hoped for lessons for the future, the focus should always be on careful thought and deliberation.