Rethinking Heritage as Public Education

This talk delves into the critical issues surrounding heritage interpretation, exposing its existing challenges and exploring their social and political consequences for public education. By disputing the dominant expert-led approaches to heritage interpretation, which often result in an authorized consumption of the past, the talk repositions heritage as a powerful tool for fostering critical thinking, promoting inclusion, and embracing diversity. Through the lens of the ladder of heritage interpretation, this lecture examines a spectrum of approaches, progressing from mere consumption and entertainment to knowledge and truth-telling, learning and understanding, imagination and immersion, and finally, reparation and reconciliation. Yujie Zhu will employ metaphorical devices, such as university tutorials and ChatGPT, to highlight how heritage facilitates open dialogue and enables the assessment and questioning of the past from multiple pers - pectives. Without active public participation and critical reflection, the claims of heritage interpretation for public education remain shallow and lacking in substance, especially in the digital era.