ABSTRACT
Attempts to find a workable basis for progression in school history in chronology and knowledge have run into trouble. In particular, it is hard to distinguish chronological structure from aggregation, and does progression in terms of knowledge mean 'knows one fact, knows ten facts ... knows almost all facts', or 'knows some simple facts ... knows some difficult facts', or what? Finding a workable basis for progression in substantive concepts has also proved problematic. Concepts such as factory, treaty, king, peasant or even revolution seem as much economic, political or sociological as historical; also such concepts are not equivalent to volume, density and mass in physics. Notions like renaissance or restoration or industrial revolution offer another possibility; but they are historical particulars as well as concepts. Eventually it may be possible to specify progression in terms of the development of children's frameworks of the past, but attempts so far to clarify progression in terms of substantive conceptual development have proved relatively unsuccessful.
