ABSTRACT
One of the most derided developments in history education, at least in the UK during the 1980s, was the teaching of empathy as an historical concept. As ideas originally developed within the Schools History Project were extended to all history teachers with the introduction of new public examinations at 16+ (GCSE), many in the history education community found themselves grappling with questions about the essential nature of the subject and what precisely they were trying to achieve when teaching about the past. The idea of empathy, seeking to understand the ideas, attitudes and ways of thinking of people in the past was considered an important aspect of historical thinking. However, empathy, as a concept, became an issue that was used to attack the ‘new history’. Empathy was seen as lacking a clear conceptual focus, often being associated with tasks that asked pupils to ‘imagine’ and thus the distinction between historical imagination and literary invention became obscured. The extracts in this chapter explore the issues relating to defining empathy, trying to identify what it means to get better at empathising with people in the past, and the ways in which classroom teachers think about empathy in their own context.
