This paper is concerned with the purpose and the pedagogy of teaching History in schools,
primary and secondary. It asserts that History is a unique subject in the curriculum. History,
more than any other area of study, requires an intuitive understanding of relationships and
human complexity, as well as the academic processes of inquiry, analysis, and evaluation. It
requires students to empathise with cultures and experiences very different from their own
in space and time, and also to recognise and understand difference in value systems and
rhetoric. As such, history is ‘a form of consciousness’.1 But above all, the study of History at
school asks students to make sense of, and find relevance in, the learning of History itself.2
The reality is that many of our students are disinterested in, or disengaged from, the
experience of History.3 Yet, as teachers, we are acutely aware that the Historical worlds, the
social worlds and the creative worlds of students interact and co exist in the formation of
identity.