According to Rüsen (2010), due to situations of practical life, decisions are made depending on values and the historical consciousness is a prerequisite to mediate values and reality. In fact, it works in a specific way of direction in practical life present situations, because it gathers past and present, giving perspectives of future to living realities, building moral values to a "temporal body". A qualitative investigation was done from these presuppositions (EISNER, 1998), with sixty Brazilian youngs (13 to 16 years old) of low and middle social classes. These were students from a public school of Curitiba city, Paraná State (Southern Brazil). They were asked to make a narrative from the following question: "Write to a young person like you about your reflexions on: Do altruism, the non-ephemeral thought and difference still have a place in the contemporaneous world?". This question was chosen because it was an examination question to enter a Brazilian university. The results demonstrated the existence of different ways in which the youngest translate the past to the present, and also their perspectives for the future.
historical consciousness; historical education; historical learning
