This book reveals how school memories offer not only a tool for accessing the school of the past, but also a key to understanding what people today know (or think they know) about the school of the past. It describes, in fact, how historians¿ work does not purely and simply consist in exploring school as it really was, but also in the complex process of defining the memory of school as one developed and revisited over time at both the individual and collective level. Further, it investigates the extent to which what people ¿know¿ reflects the reality or is in fact a product of stereotypes that