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HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE
by Keith C. Barton





History is a subject of great importance in the modern world, but people differ in their understanding of the nature and purpose of historical knowledge. For history educators, the subject usually involves analyzing cause-and-effect relationships, in an attempt to gain insight into how human society has developed over time. But others may use history primarily as a source of moral lessons, or as a way of identifying heroes and villains to be celebrated or condemned. Similarly, for some people history serves as a source of individual or personal identity, a story that explains who "we" are or where we came from as a family, community, nation, or ethnicity. And still others may think of the past as a means of recreation or personal fulfillment-an arena of antique furniture, restored buildings, and outings to prehistoric ruins. Most of us, in fact, probably use history for all these purposes at one time or another.

This range of perspectives has a significant impact on our role as history educators. Students come to us knowing about history already, and they have grown up in a social context in which history is important-but what they know, and the sources of that knowledge, are not limited to the academic study of history at school. Students learn about the past not only from their teachers but from families, peers, political and social organizations, and the media. If we ignore these influences, our portrayals of history are likely to become irrelevant. Students will not care about knowledge that is important only at school, or that is unconnected to what they have already learned. And if we challenge students' prior concepts too directly-by dismissing "popular" uses of history as meaningless, or by arguing that only academic history is objectively "correct"-we may create resistance that prevents us from broadening students' understanding. In the U.S., for example, any attempt to teach about the interaction of people during the period of European conquest of the Americas leads to charges that educators are trying to destroy the great achievements of Western civilization.

If we hope to teach history amid this range of perspectives, we must recognize the legitimacy of differing ideas about the past, and we must give students the intellectual tools they need to draw from them meaningfully. Rather than ignoring the purposes of learning history, for example, we should engage students in thoughtful discussions of history's place in contemporary society. We should help them analyze different historical representations-in school and out-and help them understand the purposes of these accounts, as well as how they have been produced. Where do historical images and texts come from? How are they structured? How do we assess their reliability? These are questions that are just as important for popular movies or family stories as for academic texts. By emphasizing the broad relevance of these questions (and the skills needed to answer them) we may be able to connect history to students' prior ideas while we expand their knowledge of the past and their ability to critically examine the sources of that knowledge. This kind of flexible and useful historical understanding will benefit students more than mastering-and then forgetting-a checklist of discrete historical content.

Keith C. Barton      
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