ABSTRACT
Whenever curricular reforms are proposed, history is almost invariably the subject that gives rise to the most heated controversy. Although the debates tend to reflect diverse views about the purposes of history education (see Chapter 1), they are often perceived as disputes about the historical knowledge that young people should acquire. One focus for debate is obviously the selection of the substantive content that they should study. The other main focus, all too easily and crudely caricatured as ‘knowledge versus skills’, is essentially concerned with the importance assigned to understanding history as a particular form of knowledge, rather than mastering it as a body of knowledge. In England the curriculum developed by the Schools Council 13–16 History Project (SHP 1976) challenged ‘traditional’ history teaching in relation both to the type of substantive knowledge taught and to the role of epistemology within it. New kinds of units (with a stronger focus on local history, for example) structured in different ways (long-term studies in development contrasting with short-term depth studies) were taught using an enquiry-based approach, intended to help children understand how historical knowledge was constructed. That approach, which came to be known as the ‘new history’, was both widely adopted and widely criticised, especially when elements of the enquiry-based approach were incorporated into a new national examination at 16+ (with the introduction of GCSEs in 1985). The kind of debates that raged then, and later as a national curriculum was introduced (and subsequently revised), not only echo much earlier debates between ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’ views of education but are also reflected in similar national debates in many other countries.
