The Past, Present and Future of Teaching - The Significance of Teaching Modern History Today

Abstract

Modern social sciences are based on abstraction and integrated knowledge. One of the most typical characteristics of the recent educational system is conveying of up-to-date practical knowledge. Today’s history teaching must come up to this expectation; consequently it is a basic requirement that modern history textbooks must transfer such knowledge.
Teaching History has always been a basic question in education. In addition to the serious professional debates there have always been public discussions on the issue of teaching this subject. Even the professionals themselves, including the scholars of science and education, were not always able to protect the prestige of the subject.
This is not considered to be a peculiar Hungarian phenomenon as for instance in England from the 1960’s the crisis of History teaching has arisen from time to time and there were plans to omit History from the Curriculum as an independent subject. In other cases narrowing the scope of the subject or teaching it as a part of an integrated subject in social science has been brought up. The basic requirements of modern History teaching include the development of multi- and interdisciplinary way of thinking, formulating the abstraction skills and raising high school students’ time and space dimension.