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This article analyzes the educational impasse potentially posed by the confrontation between a present in crisis and a past narrated as a victorious conquest of the principles of modernity (progress, development, freedom). Posed as contemporary values to be defended rather than as contextualized ideas and choices, these principles establish the school narrative of a harmonious link between sociopolitical freedom and industrial economic growth, even if it means locking students into a present that is dysfunctional but cannot be called into question. Based on a reflection centered on the school narrative surrounding the Industrial Revolution in French high schools, this article analyzes the existence of “presentism” within the prescribed curriculum in order to shed light on the aporias of this type of history teaching in a crisis context. This critical analysis then provides an opportunity to propose some didactic avenues based on contemporary epistemological reflections and on recent historiographical developments in order to transform the fatalistic narration of the crisis into a problematization allowing us to weave echoes of intelligibility between the past, the present, and the future.