ABSTRACT
History is important in its own right, as a way of seeing the world, not just for helping students to write or count or communicate with one another, and certainly not for providing fodder for politicians' (rival) conceptions of what it might mean to be a good citizen. If history education is to be more than a bureaucratic response to administrative diktats, and teachers not merely functionaries, it requires its own clear purposes. School history must equip students with historical knowledge, but knowledge involves understanding, both of the past and of the basis of knowledge claims about that past. History educators make bold claims about how well history is taught, but a sense of what history education should add up to seems curiously absent. This chapter talks about historical literacy to explain what is central to history education. Colligations play a central role in the organization of historical knowledge.
