A lesson plan on eugenics designed for students in the last year of high school. Why? I see an essentially practical reason: reading the school books (and listening to teachers' lessons…) one notes how the subjects of social policy, welfare, and the relationship between science and policy are still marginal, not related to real life and, most of all, not presented as problematic. In classrooms today (as I will point out in this work), we still hear, all too frequently, certain hurried statements, certain "commonplaces" abut population and policy and certain attitudes that taken for granted. And this, despite the fact that the historiography on these themes has, in recent years, produced significant new information, especially in Italy. One could object: "but eugenics, welfare and social policy are basically 'niche' themes for specialists that little to do with a student's basic preparation." And I would respond: "are they really?" The subjects of bioethics, genetic manipulation, human cloning, personal integrity, the relationship of science and power, manipulation of the masses and privacy are abstract themes, marginal to the daily lives of the teenagers we are teaching? Aren't they, rather, the “scorching” themes that these teens are constantly coming in contact with? I think that talking in class, during a history lesson, of eugenics, Darwinism and social policy is one way of giving teenagers real help in orienting themselves in the present: it is a way of clarifying that it wasn't genetics that “invented” the problems that characterise it in the last twenty years, but that it has only "rediscovered" and, perhaps, complicated them. It is a way of calling attention to the depth and complexity of problems that are frequently trivialised by the mass media. I hope not to appear pedantic or needlessly rhetorical when I quote Croce: “so that past history will come back to life and be present as the evolution of life requires it.” If it's really our job to accompany teens as they explore the world of history, then it's not very profitable to make long marches through political history and only briefly, and occasionally, make detours into geographic and social history. One has the widespread feeling that the climate is really changing, even in the schools: the institutions, politics and power no longer represent the only horizons. Now, families and social institutions are asking for a more detailed view, for content that is closer, more alive and sincerely linked to the student's reality. Then, teachers are being asked to pay great attention to the educational and training (ahead of the cultural) repercussions of their teaching. For this reason, I believe that what Braudel calls “material life” will become increasingly central to the teaching of history. First of all because, as one easily sees in class, it interests and inspires teenagers. In the second place, because it helps teachers in their role of educators, allowing them to approach students and parents on shared, deeply-felt problems and allowing them to deal with new documents that are rich and not boring, that lead to places and witnesses also lined to the area in which the school lives. In effect, social history will help new teachers respond to real, and not rhetorical, questions in a professional way. Through the study of subjects such as eugenics, the teacher could have dialogues with teenagers and their families that are really authentic. In these years in which Western society has felt the strong pressures of hedonism, the enticements of economic well-being and scientific certainties, even the enticements of "eugenics" (genetic engineering, in vitro fertilisation, human cloning and preventive abortion, etc.) have come back in style and students in class often ask us to help them gain a better understanding so they can orient themselves when called upon to decide. In our role as teachers, we certainly can't indoctrinate them or choose for them. But we can accompany them, with the benefit of our specific competence, as they explore these problems.