




































The Emergence of Historical Inquiry as Curriculum:  Reconsidering the 

British Schools Council History Project 

 
Sherri Colby 

Texas A&M University—Commerce 

 

Abstract 

Concerns over the quality of history 

education in the United Kingdom led to the 

Schools History Project 13-16 in 1972. The 

project proved to be the first large-scale Western 

curricula designed to engage students in historical 

inquiry. In this article, I shall offer an elucidation 

of the philosophy of the British Schools History 

Project, a narration of the British and North 

American influences on the project, and a 

discussion of the project‟s impact. 

 

Concerns over the quality of history 

education in the United Kingdom led the 

government to fund a curriculum project, 

sponsored by the Schools Council (an 

organization of teachers, local educational 

leaders, and the Department of Education and 

Science, formed in 1964 to develop and to assist 

curricular reforms) at the University of Leeds 

(now based at Trinity and All Saints‟ College 

near Leeds) in 1972. The British Schools History 

Project 13-16 (SHP for 14 to 16 year-olds) 

developed curricula focused on the needs of the 

adolescent learner and the nature of disciplinary 

history (Rosenzweig 1984). The project proved to 

be the first large-scale Western curricula designed 

to teach procedural knowledge (the methods used 

in research by historians) and to engage students 

in historical inquiry. The project emphasized the 

nature of historical knowledge, the need for active 

student involvement, and the analysis of multiple 

primary sources (Booth 1993 1994). The SHP 

represented a dramatic shift from traditional, 

politically-centered, lecture-driven curricula, to a 

new ideology espousing “history as time, history 

as [human] motive, and history as enquiry” (Fines 

1980, Forward).   

During the mid-1960s in the United 

Kingdom, history education came under severe 

attack as a subject lacking purpose for adolescents 

in a rising technological age. Leading historians 

such as G.R. Elton, supporters of Piaget‟s 

theories, and interested government officials 

bemoaned the traditional lackluster instructional 

methods and claimed history failed to interest 

adolescents, who proved unable to access the 

advanced material (Rosenzweig 1984). As a 

result, a counter-reformation of concerned 

educators responded to those charges leading to 

the formation in 1969 of a new journal, Teaching 

History by the British Historical Association, 

dedicated to publishing articles regarding 

innovative methods of instruction. The journal‟s 

landmark publication by Mary Price (1968) 

“History in Danger” proved widely influential 

through Price‟s charge to restore history‟s place 

in the British schools and to revitalize teaching 

methods. Martin Booth‟s (1969) History Betrayed 

(supporting Price‟s claims) soon followed-- thus, 

leading to a whirlwind response by concerned 

educators (Husbands, Kitson, and Pendry 2003; 

Rosenzweig 1984).   

The formation of the SHP in 1972, led by 

David Sylvester, emerged as part of this counter-

reformation; the SHP‟s founding, overarching 

purpose consisted of reaffirming history‟s value 

for adolescents in the secondary schools. At the 

project‟s inception, the founding leaders did not 

begin with an entrenched philosophy—other than 



43 

 

the obvious commitment to history‟s value—or 

with a pre-specified curriculum. Instead, the 

experimental nature of the project enabled the 

founders to explore the role history played in the 

development of adolescents (Husbands, Kitson, 

and Pendry 2003; Schools Council 1976). In 

1976, the Schools Council issued their publication 

A New Look at History outlining the SHP‟s 

curriculum and rationale. In 1980, the Schools 

Council also published the Evaluation Study 

outlining the philosophy, purposes, and 

effectiveness of the project.  

The project changed the nature of history 

education in the UK and ultimately inspired 

researchers of history education (in both the 

United Kingdom and North America) discover 

historical inquiry as a form of curriculum. The 

movement led to the adoption of new terms, such 

as historical thinking (the nature of cognition in 

history) and historical empathy (the ability to 

perceive history from the perspectives of people 

from the past)—terms distinguishing Bloom‟s 

functions and the objectives of cognition and 

affectivity in history as unique and separate from 

other disciplines. In this article, I shall offer an 

elucidation of the philosophy of the British 

Schools History Project 13-16, a narration of the 

British and North American influences on the 

project, and a discussion of the impact of the 

project to history education. I hope to increase 

awareness of the project‟s aims, the 

circumstances surrounding its inception, and its 

influence—thereby inviting educators and 

researchers to discover and to consider what can 

be learned from the undertaking. 

 

The Philosophy of the Schools Council History 

Project 

Denis Shemilt , a team member  (1972 to 

1974), evaluator (1974 to 1977), and director 

(1978) of the SHP, figuratively compared the 

deficiencies in history education to Tolstoy‟s 

Russian peasant who believed locomotives 

actually received their powers of movement 

through the fire of hell‟s flames. The peasant 

adopted a metaphysical, mythical rather than a 

scientific understanding of the motion of 

locomotives. In comparison, students of history 

often espoused faulty assumptions about the past, 

and these errors of reasoning resulted from a 

curriculum that failed to teach the fundamental 

structure of disciplinary history. Shemilt explains: 

 

A view [for the peasant] inside the 

locomotive‟s boiler and firebox would 

not enlighten; on the contrary, it would 

be a vision of hell. Adolescents rarely 

construe history in a Tolstoyan fashion, 

but many of the assumptions they make 

about the subject are equally 

inappropriate.  Listening to a history 

lesson in ignorance of the logic, 

perspectives, and methods of the subject 

is akin to watching a locomotive without 

an understanding of physics, factories, 

and economics. (1983, 1) 

 

According to Shemilt, the elusive nature of the 

peasant‟s understanding of locomotives compares 

to the obscure, and even inaccurate, assumptions 

about history held by adolescents. The philosophy 

of the SHP rested upon the acceptance of history 

as a form of knowledge: the concepts defining 

human experience, the ways of relating and 

articulating these concepts, the ways of 

empathizing and reconstructing historical truths, 

and the means of conducting investigations (Hirst 

1965, 1975; Shemilt 1980, 1983). The authors of 

the SHP assumed the task of teaching students 

disciplinary history--namely, the defining 

concepts, and the methods of inquiry; thus, by 

enabling students to grasp “the logic, 

perspectives, and methods,” the authors sought to 

deepen students‟ historical understandings.   



44 

 

In advancing a new curriculum, the SHP 

sought to explore the sort of history most 

appropriate for adolescents in the UK and as a 

result determined two fundamental purposes for 

their rationale: first, relevance to the personal and 

social needs of adolescents (Schools Council 

1976), and second, grounding in reason, or the 

logic and methods of the discipline (Shemilt 

1980). Regarding the sort of history, they justified 

history as a subject through five useful purposes 

for adolescents: 

 

(a) as a means of acquiring and 

developing such cognitive skills as those 

of analysis, synthesis, and judgment; (b) 

as a source of leisure interests; (c) as a 

vehicle for analyzing the contemporary 

world and their place within it; (d) as a 

means for developing understanding of 

the forces underlying social change and 

evolution; (e) as an avenue to self-

knowledge and awareness of what it 

means to be human. (Shemilt 1980, 2)  

 

Lackluster instructional approaches failed to 

stimulate adolescents‟ leisure interests, to prepare 

them for contemporary life, to develop cognitive 

skills, to understand historical change, and to 

facilitate contemplations about the nature of being 

human. Considering the developmental needs of 

youth, the founders formulated a curriculum 

intended to foster meaningful identities for the 

adolescent through the “widening and measuring 

of his own experience against that of others” 

(Schools Council 1976, 9), and “the part history 

can play in this should not be underestimated, for 

in history, the adolescent has to access the vast 

pool of human experience” (School Council 1976, 

10). 

The SHP founders theoretically rejected 

the application of Piaget‟s stages of development 

to thinking in history; instead, they optimistically 

assumed children as young as fifteen could begin 

to interpret and analyze historical evidence 

(Schools Council, 1976). For the project team, 

“Bruner‟s dictum that, at some level, any 

worthwhile concept can be taught with integrity 

to school-age children” (Shemilt 1980, 8) 

foundationally underlined their philosophy.  Of 

this, Shemilt explained: 

 

In short, is the „form of knowledge‟ 

approach to history too academic for 

CSE [certified school education] 

children?  Surprisingly, the answer is a 

categorical „No!‟  All adolescents seem 

able to develop and refine their 

understanding of historical causation, 

their awareness of History‟s relevance, 

their construction of how we find out 

and explain things that happened in the 

past, and so on. (1980, 8) 

 

The authors encouraged adolescents to engage in 

the formal operations as applied to history 

through inquiry, analysis, and judgment. 

Furthermore, the structural differences between 

history and natural science proved problematic in 

translating Piaget‟s theories (based upon scientific 

thinking) to historical cognition (Schools Council 

1976). To illustrate, “the scientist postulates a 

single and coherent universe in which laws 

operating in one part also operate in all other 

parts, both observed and unobserved,” but “the 

historian assumes the contrary” (Shemilt 1980, 

44). Thus, the historian “posits actuality as a 

special case of possibility” and by evaluating and 

reconstructing evidence considers “logically 

possible worlds” (Shemilt 1980, 44).   

  The students engaged in high-level 

cognitive skills based upon Bloom‟s (1956) 

taxonomy. Receiving their inspiration from 

Coltham and Fines‟ 1971 publication of 

Educational Objectives for the Study of History: 

A Suggested Framework (outlining how Bloom‟s 

cognitive and affective domains transferred to the 



45 

 

objectives of history education), the SHP 

founders applied those ideas to a curriculum 

centered on the research methods used by 

historians. For cognition in history, those 

objectives focused on inquiry processes involving 

hypothesis formation, evidentiary sources, and 

historical reconstruction. Major areas for 

investigation included notions such as the role of 

human motivation in causation, the nature of 

continuity and change over time, and the 

connectedness of the past to the present (Schools 

Council 1976; Shemilt 1980). For the affective 

domain in history, the project founders 

incorporated the objectives outlined by Coltham 

and Fines (1971): attending, responding, and 

imagining. Those objectives addressed the 

founders‟ perceptions of how history education 

should foster adolescent development through 

fundamental goals: the deepening awareness of 

humanity, the analysis of contemporary world, 

and the understanding of the forces of social 

change.  

Notably, the founders chose to focus on 

the people of the past as central to the curriculum. 

The direct emphasis on history as motive 

hearkened back to the work of Collingwood 

(1962), whose philosophy of history included his 

concept of the historical imagination (Schools 

Council 1976). For Collingwood, historical 

reconstruction required in-depth digging and 

analysis of artifacts and documents.  Ultimately, 

the loss of past artifacts (both living and dead) 

necessitated imaginative thinking, in order to 

dramatically re-enact (much like a theatrical 

performance) the most probable events of history.  

Coltham and Fines also integrated Collingwood‟s 

ideas into the affective and cognitive objectives of 

history: 

 

Since the material of history consists 

principally of human beings‟ activities in 

the past, study of this area of knowledge 

demands conative effort on the part of 

the learner to enter, as it were, „the 

shoes‟ or „the skins‟ of people met only 

through evidence...historical imagination 

requires something more. (1971, 7) 

 

By “something more,” Coltham and Fines meant 

sympathy, or “the power of entering another‟s 

feelings or mind” and empathy, or “the power 

entering another‟s personality and imaginatively 

experiencing his experience” (1971, 7-8). The 

authors of the SHP applied Collingwood‟s (1962) 

theory of historical re-enactment to the project by 

employing new terminology--empathetic 

reconstruction and eventually historical empathy 

(P. Lee, personal communication September 14, 

2005; Shemilt 1980). For the SHP, historical 

explanation became articulated “in the form of 

casual analysis and the delineation of motives” 

(Shemilt 1980, 5); thus, all of the course segments 

required students “to evaluate evidence and 

empathize with their forebears” (8).  

Regarding the logic and methods of the 

discipline, the SHP curriculum established three 

underlying premises regarding history: 

 

(a) as a form of knowledge, having its 

own logic, methods, and perspectives; 

(b) as a model for enquiry-based, 

problem solving pedagogy; (c) as a 

humane study concerned with people, 

their actions, and perceptions of events. 

(Shemilt 1980, 5)         

                      

The logic and methods of the discipline assumed 

premises based upon Carr‟s (1961) well-known 

book, What is History?, and upon Carr‟s 

argument for historical relativism. According to 

Carr (1961), the past is a foreign country, lost to 

the present; therefore, historical truths can only be 

uncovered through available documents, facts, 



46 

 

artifacts, and oral testimonies. By examining the 

evidence, historians recreate the answers to the 

questions raised and postulate the most probable 

version of the past. Carr was not the only thinker 

on the subject, but his work directly influenced 

the authors of the SHP to shape their curriculum 

according to the theories he articulated (Booth 

1994). The leaders of SHP also drew upon 

parallel British scholars, such as Paul Hirst‟s 

(1965), who, like Schwab and Bruner, advocated 

disciplinary focused instruction; and other 

historians, such as G.S.R. Kitson Clark (1967), 

J.H. Hextor (1971), G.R. Elton (1968), whose 

primers of the historical method provided 

disciplinary grounding.   

The authors of the SHP assumed a mature 

understanding of history would entail 

connections: 

 

(a) the freeing of ideation from the 

constraints imposed by observed reality 

(actuality treated as a case of 

possibility); (b) the ability to 

systematically generate and test 

hypotheses (hypothetic-deductive 

reasoning); and (c) the capacity to think 

in purely propositional terms (the ability 

to see the validity of an argument is 

independent of the truth of the terms or 

existence of the objects with which the 

argument deals). (Shemilt 1980, 44) 

 

In summary, the SHP built their pedagogical 

philosophy upon three main criteria: (a) the need 

for teaching practices to elicit Bloom‟s higher 

levels of cognition instead of lower-ordered 

recall; (b) the need for Brunerian disciplinary 

structure (also supported by Hirst) to improve 

historical understanding; and (c) the need to 

teach—as Bruner advocated—disciplinary 

content in some reasonable form at all ages 

(Booth 1994; L. Levstik personal communication 

October 24, 2005; Schools Council 1976).  

 

Implementation of the Schools History Project 

13-16 

Offering a new model for teaching and 

learning in history, the SHP curriculum consisted 

of a 3 year program with five segments: What is 

History? (procedural knowledge in history), 

History Around Us (local history), Enquiry in 

Depth (historical inquiry/ British and U.S. 

history), Modern World Studies (historical 

inquiry/world history and contemporary issues), 

Study in Development (history of medicine) 

(Schools Council 1976; Shemilt 1980). Before 

embarking on focused inquiries, the authors first 

supposed that students needed to explore the 

purposes for studying history and the nature of 

the discipline. The What is History? segment 

foundationally rooted students in historical 

inquiry and engaged them in discussions about 

the value of learning history: 

 

The pupil is introduced to the idea of 

reconstructing from evidence, to the 

reality of different sorts of evidence 

which have been used in different ways 

and from which different sorts of things 

can be adduced, and to the problems of  

reconstruction in the face of biased, 

incomplete contradictory evidence.  

(Shemilt 1980, 5) 

 

In concurrence with instruction on the nature of 

historical reconstruction, the course specifically 

addressed the notion of historical explanation, the 

impact of human motives on historical outcomes, 

and detective work in historical inquiry (Schools 

Council 1976). 

The subsequent segment, History Around 

Us, enabled the students to apply what they 

learned in the previous course to their local 

communities and natural surroundings. The 

second course served the function of generating 



47 

 

history-related leisure interests through in-depth 

field work designed to “afford pupils practice in 

handling evidence of various kinds, in 

reconstructing daily life and physical settings, and 

in explaining change and particular departures 

from general archetypes and trends” (Shemilt 

1980, 5). The content and structure of the first 

two courses clearly delineate the need for students 

first to be schooled in historical inquiry as a form 

of knowledge and for students to then practice 

those skills in more familiar, local settings. After 

establishing a firm foundation in historical 

inquiry, the students undertook to study British, 

U.S, and world history. The final course, Study in 

Development, was designed to connect the past to 

the present through the examination of change 

and continuity over centuries of time. By 

emphasizing how history impacts the present, the 

course demonstrated progress and development, 

patterns and deviations, and intended and 

unintended consequences of human actions and 

avoided “falling into naïve historicism or 

mechanical determinism” (Shemilt 1980, 6). 

Thus, the course served as a means for students‟ 

to understand their place in the modern world and 

for understanding social change and evolution 

over time (Schools Council 1976).   

 

The Context for Schools History Project 

The authors of the SHP relied upon the 

intellectual theories of philosophers, educational 

psychologists, and historians in both the United 

Kingdom and North America. The political 

changes in both nations also impacted the shift in 

thinking from the traditional focus on nation 

states in history to a more rigorous exploration of 

social forces and people. A discussion of the new 

social studies in the United States and the new 

history in the United Kingdom offer a look at the 

influences inspiring the creation of the SHP. 

 

Inquiry and Social Studies in the United States 

In the United States in the early twentieth 

century, concerns over industrialization, 

standardization, and mechanization, led 

progressive educators such as John Dewey to 

advocate educational practices centered on the 

pragmatic needs of the child--the freedom of 

expression, the facilitation of creativity, and the 

development of civic responsibility (Dalton 

2002). Regarding inquiry, Dewey‟s hallmark 

publication Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938) 

offered a culminating perspective of his views on 

the subject. For Dewey (1938), inquiry is defined 

as follows: 

 

Inquiry is the controlled or directed 

transformation of an indeterminate 

situation into one that is so determinate 

in its constituent distinctions and 

relations as to convert the elements of 

the original situation into a unified 

whole. (104)  

 

From this definition, inquiry ultimately leads to 

the discovery of pragmatic solutions and the 

formation of meaningful relationships of ideas 

(Campbell 1995; Dewey 1938). Notably, Dewey 

(1938) categorized social inquiry as an extension 

of the natural sciences and “as so backward in 

comparison with physical and biological inquiry” 

(487). His chapter entitled “Social Inquiry” 

consisted of the probable comparisons between 

the social and scientific sciences and culminates 

with a discussion of the purposes of social 

inquiry—to address and to solve social problems.  

 Influenced by the work of Dewey and 

other progressives, Harold Rugg postulated more 

direct ideas about the importance of inquiry in the 

social sciences.  In 1921, Rugg published a piece 

in Historical Outlook articulating the need for 

problem-based social studies curricula designed 

to prompt investigations on contemporary 



48 

 

problems. Although he claimed his ideas 

stemmed from scientific methods, his approach 

really borrowed from activity analysis procedures 

used by scholars in the field of curriculum (Evans 

2007). Certainly, Rugg espoused a belief in a 

unified social studies curriculum as preferred over 

studying isolated disciplines and as enabling 

pertinent focuses on current challenges and 

modes of living. Like Dewey, his vision of 

progressive curricula intended to prepare students 

for democratic life through careful analysis of 

social issues. Earlier progressives helped prepare 

a ripe climate for Rugg‟s efforts to create social 

studies textbooks for curricular reform in the 

1920s and 1930s (Boyle-Baise and Goodman 

2009). In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the 

Rugg textbooks became censured by conservative 

business and patriotic groups, concerned over 

children questioning contemporary American life 

and capitalism (Evans, 2007). Despite the 

startling, heightened attacks, the Rugg textbooks 

helped set the stage for future ideas about inquiry 

and the social disciplines. 

Benjamin Bloom‟s Taxonomy of 

Educational Objectives (1956), in part, inspired 

new directions towards social studies teaching in 

the 1960s. The National Defense Education Act 

of 1958, a response to the Russian launching of 

Sputnik in 1957 and the subsequent educational 

concerns spawned by this event, resulted in $500 

million (spent throughout the next two decades) 

in funding by the National Science Foundation 

(NSF) toward curriculum projects. Amid this 

climate, Jerome Bruner (who worked with the 

NSF) published his classic work The Process of 

Education in 1961 (later reprinted in 1965), thus 

forging a critical link between disciplinary 

knowledge and developmental psychology (Dow 

1992). Bloom‟s cognitive levels of thinking 

(knowledge, comprehension, application, 

analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) provided 

pedagogical support for Jerome Bruner‟s 

educational theories (Fitzgerald 1983).  

Bruner emphasized disciplinary structure 

as the cognitive framework for thinking. 

Instruction should pattern the natural structure of 

the discipline through the spiral curriculum, or 

the early establishment of disciplinary building 

blocks and the gradual return (through review and 

the addition of new knowledge) to these 

foundational elements. This spiral curriculum 

assumes disciplinary content can be presented in 

some respectable form to children of any age, 

given sufficient time and structured learning. 

Inquiry functions as an essential component of 

creative thinking and developmental learning 

(Bruner 1965). Bruner‟s focus on disciplinary 

structure built upon earlier discussions such 

Joseph J. Schwab‟s work on the structure of the 

disciplines.  In the 1962 publication in the 

Educational Record, Schwab advocated 

disciplinary structure as essential for organizing 

the frameworks of curriculum planning, 

specifically relative to knowledge and 

experimental techniques. Although Schwab 

focused primarily on the sciences, the idea of 

experimental techniques equated to the Brunerian 

concept of inquiry.  

As part of the reform efforts, Bruner and 

Peter Dow (education professor from Harvard) 

developed in 1961 a new innovative sixth-grade 

curriculum, Man: A Course of Study (MACOS). 

The curriculum subsumed the social science 

disciplines (history, geography, political science, 

anthropology, sociology, and economics) under a 

study of what it means to be human. The 

curriculum did emphasize the inquiry as a 

fundamental approach to learning in the social 

sciences for children (Bruner 1969; Fitzgerald 

1983; Symcox 2002). The development and 

introduction of MACOS later led to the 1967 

seminal publication The New Social Studies, 



49 

 

representing the collaborative efforts of Edwin 

Fenton and Bruner. The Bruner-Fenton new 

social studies of the 1960s embraced the broader 

field of social studies through three overarching 

objectives: the development of inquiry skills, the 

development of attitudes and values, and the 

acquisition of knowledge (Fenton 1967a, 1967b; 

Fitzgerald 1983).  The curriculum approach 

advocated the use of primary document resources 

and artifacts as appropriate materials for inquiry 

lessons in the social sciences (Allen 1969; Bowes 

1969; Rogers 1969 Schneider, 1969). 

By the mid-1970s, however, the efforts of 

the new social studies became stagnated due to 

public concerns over poverty, racism, and the 

Vietnam War and due to increased attacks from 

conservative political and social groups (Gardner 

2001). As a result, the September 1975 report of 

the Committee on the Status of History in 

Schools, comprised of representatives from the 

Organization of American Historians (OAH) and 

the American Historical Association (AHA), 

declared the loss of interest and confidence in 

history (occurring in only a few short years by 

students, teachers, administrators, and politicians) 

as a problem steeped in presentism, or the lack of 

a historical orientation to the past (Kirkendall 

1975). According to Kirkendall (1975), students 

and teachers both suffered from “textbook 

orientation, straight chronological treatment, 

emphasis on dates, unimaginative presentation 

eschewing meaningful innovation and rational 

experimentation” (562-563). The Committee on 

the Status of History in Schools advocated a need 

for enlightened hindsight (Fitzgerald 1983):   

 

It seems unlikely that historians can 

destroy the influence of presentism, but 

they can reduce the anti-historical 

consequences of it by demonstrating the 

value of historical perspective and 

historical comparisons and the 

importance of a sense of time and space. 

(Kirkendall 1975, 570) 

 

Thus, in 1975, Fenton designed his new 

objectives for social studies—positive attitudes, 

self-esteem, learning/inquiry skills, knowledge 

acquisition, and valuing—after Bloom‟s (1956) 

affective and cognitive domains.  The need for 

revision of the new social studies prompted 

Sleeper (1975) to argue in behalf of curricula 

acknowledging the psychological dispositions of 

adolescents—meaning the nature of the 

interaction between the student and the past 

(Fitzgerald 1983). Sleeper advocated the creation 

of a new developmental framework, representing 

the “stages of historical thinking” as “connected 

to the broader stages of cognitive and 

psychological development” (105).  

 

The New History in the United Kingdom 

Prior to the twentieth century, history in 

the UK functioned as a subsidiary subject to the 

“English subjects” of literature, modern 

languages, and geography. In 1857 and 1858, the 

Oxford and Cambridge examinations—designed 

to assess through the quality of education in 

secondary schools through the testing students in 

the major disciplines—became the dominate 

influence on history education (Rosenzweig 

1984). The Education Act of 1902 extended 

central control of the British government over the 

elementary curriculum; secondary education 

functioned to prepare students for the university, 

in part, through the passage of the examinations. 

Although history remained a minor subject, the 

number of candidates seeking to take the history 

examinations proliferated, thereby expanding 

despite the subject‟s low status. The purposes for 

history education evolved around the transmission 

of an implied unifying political culture, especially 

emphasizing the Whig influences on a 



50 

 

progressive democracy (Husbands, Kitson, and 

Pendry 2003). In 1944 when the government 

instituted mandatory, compulsory secondary 

education, history classes naturally increased in 

enrollment, eventually allowing the subject to 

take a more dominate role (Rosenzweig 1984).  

By the late 1960s, critics, including 

university professors and educational leaders in 

the government began criticizing history for its 

lackluster instructional practices and the 

overemphasis on British/ European political 

history, at the exclusion of social history and 

alternative world perspectives (Rosenzweig 

1984). The growing dissatisfaction stemmed from 

three contributing factors: (a) British nationalism 

became suspect during the post-World War II 

years; (b) British historians began eschewing 

broad diplomatic, political, or military narratives 

and deferred to other social disciplines (a 

response to the practice of “total history”--

meaning focusing on history in the round versus a 

linear story communicating one theme--from the 

Annales school in France); and (c) the launching 

of Sputnik in 1957 turned attention toward 

science and technical education (Booth 1994). 

The efforts of social historians challenged 

traditional history and proved largely influential 

in shifting public opinion to acceptance other 

histories (social and world) beyond the political 

narrative of Britain (Husbands, Kitson, and 

Pendry, 2003). 

Research by E. A. Peel (1967a, 1967b), 

former president of the British Psychological 

Society and distinguished educational psychology 

professor at the University of Birmingham, raised 

questions about the value of history education in 

the secondary schools. Acknowledging the 

assumed conceptual and inferential difficulties 

experienced by students, Peel (1967a, 1967b, 

1972) attempted to extend Piaget‟s experiments 

with scientific and mathematical reasoning to 

children‟s textual reasoning in English and 

history (Booth 1987; Wineburg 2001).   

The thrust of research, however, came from 

Peel‟s student Roy N. Hallam and his research 

with one-hundred British high school students. In 

his experiments, Hallam asked adolescents (ages 

11 to 17) to read three textbook passages from 

British history and to respond to a series of 

questions. From his experiements, Hallam 

determined that formal operational reasoning in 

history occurred much later than in math and in 

science (Hallam 1967, 1970, 1971, 1978; 

Wineburg 2001). The wide promulgation of 

Hallam‟s research, however, heightened national 

concerns in the late 1960s (Booth 1994; 

Dickinson and Lee 1978) about whether or not 

history should be taught in the secondary schools.  

Notably, Hallam‟s research may have lacked 

validity for the following reasons: (a) the 

questions asked of the students failed to connect 

with the material studied in class; (b) the students 

expressed confusion over the meaning of the 

questions; and (c) Hallam‟s questions involved 

historical, moral, and religious considerations 

(Hallam 1967; Lee 1998; Shemilt 1980; 

Wineburg 2001).  

 Criticisms of the dominance of British 

political history in the curriculum heightened 

fears among conservative politicians of an 

iconoclast neglect of British history teaching (Lee 

1995). Response to this crisis began with 

individual teachers independently attempting to 

adopt new approaches. The crisis eventually 

prompted new reforms as educational leaders 

began calling for a new history adapted to the 

needs of a modern school (Ballard 1970; Booth 

1994).  As a result, the Schools Council formed in 

1963 to address these growing concerns through 

the formation of projects designed to challenge 

„the great tradition‟ (Husbands, Kitson, and 

Pendry 2003). Their landmark 1968 publication 



51 

 

Schools Council Enquiry One affirmed these 

complaints through deliberation of the 

overwhelming public opinion that history 

teaching lacked usefulness and interest for 

students and their parents (Lee 1995). As 

mentioned previously, the widely influential 

publication “History in Danger” (Price, 1968) set 

the stage for the Schools Council to initiate a 

shift--from history as rote learning to history as a 

form of knowledge—through the creation of the 

SHP.  

 

Reconsidering the Schools Council History 

Project 

The project influenced teaching in 

England, Wales, and Northern Ireland; by 1994, 

approximately 30 percent of all secondary schools 

in grades 10 and 11 followed the SHP curriculum 

(Booth 1994). The project prompted the HMI 

(Her Majesty‟s Inspectors, an executive agency, 

charged to examine educational quality) in 1977 

to support historical thinking as a viable 

component of curriculum (Fitzgerald 1983). The 

1988 Educational Reform Act in the U.K. 

introduced the National History Curriculum for 

England. The majority of schools in the United 

Kingdom adopted some aspect of the SHP into 

their curricula, and the project furthered an 

appreciation for active learning and for the 

examination of primary source material (Booth 

1993). 

Prior to and in response to the 1988 

Educational Reform Act, the right-wing 

conservatives heavily criticized the SHP for the 

narrow focus on inquiry and expressed concerns 

of the loss of British citizenship education. The 

authors of the SHP found themselves in the midst 

of a political struggle, with progressive minded 

child-centered teaching emerging from the left 

and subject centered, traditional citizenry 

instruction emerging from the right (Husbands, 

Kitson, and Pendry 2003; Lee 1995). The 

National History Curriculum specified learner 

outcomes and attainment targets to be measured 

by standardized tests, a concerning aspect of the 

program due to the faulty nature of the 

examinations (Lee, 1995). Knight (1996) 

indicated that the National History Curriculum 

disappointingly returned to the Piagetian view of 

children and thinking and therefore structured 

students‟ opportunities for historical inquiry 

around this framework. According to Lee (1995), 

the national curriculum did not squelch the 

ideology of the SHP because individual teachers 

in local schools chose to advocate for the 

principles of the SHP by integrating aspects of the 

curriculum into their own methods.  

As Peter Lee explained (personal 

communication September 14, 2005), the SHP 

brought recognition in the UK of the term 

historical empathy. The adoption of historical 

empathy as the purpose of SHP spawned a flurry 

of confusion over the precise meaning and 

implication of the term (Lee and Ashby 2001; 

Stockley 1983). As both Lee (1995) and Booth 

(1994) affirmed, the resulting mechanistic 

curriculum and the emphasis on standardized 

testing regrettably clouded the SHP‟s founders 

intents regarding empathy as an educational goal 

(Booth 1994; Lee 1995). The National History 

Curriculum did encourage a limited focus on 

people in the past and their perspectives, but 

overall, the curriculum still remained primarily 

political rather than social in nature.   

In the early 1980s, North American 

researchers began responding to British initiatives 

by exploring historical empathy (Stockley 1983), 

procedural knowledge, and disciplined inquiry 

(Fitzgerald, 1983). The work by Howard Gardner 

on thinking, cognition, and multiple intelligences 

and his leading publications Frames of Mind: The 

Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983) and The 



52 

 

Mind’s New Science:  A History of the Cognitive 

Revolution (1985) energized researchers and 

practitioners toward new considerations of 

thinking (S. Wineburg personal communication 

October 24, 2005). In this intellectual 

environment, the 1983 special issue on the 

philosophy of history teaching in History and 

Theory (published at Wesleyan University), 

outlining Peter Lee‟s and Denis Shemilt‟s theory 

of historical empathy and their efforts with the 

Schools Council History Project, proved 

instrumental in spawning a wave of research—

slowly building in the 1980s and increasing in the 

1990s—relative to disciplined inquiry, learning 

theory, and procedural knowledge in history. 

Although “the exact pond crossing” (L. Levstik 

personal communication October 24, 2005) from 

Great Britain to the United States remains 

unclear, this issue proved influential in generating 

a new group of North American researchers, 

including Sam Wineburg (personal 

communication October 24, 2005), and by 

directing the attention on thinking and cognition 

toward a specific focus on disciplinary history. 

The Schools Council History Project 

impacted curriculum theory in history education 

in both the United Kingdom and North America 

through its emphasis on history as a form of 

knowledge and on history as inquiry. The project 

primarily challenged the Piaget-Hallam ideology 

by encouraging teachers to directly emphasize 

historical thinking skills. The project‟s 

contributions to history education include the 

fundamental issues of:   

 

(a) the illumination of new cognitive and 

developmental possibilities for 

adolescents 

  

(b) the acknowledgment of history as a 

form of knowledge through a reliance on 

the structure of the discipline and the 

teaching of the historian‟s craft 

 

(c) the development of historical inquiry 

as curriculum, with an emphasis on 

history as motive and history as time, 

and with an emphasis on social history 

and people 

 

(d) the encouragement of the active 

teaching of history 

 

(e) the adoption of historical empathy 

(the careful consideration of an historical 

view of the past from the perspective of 

the agents involved) as a noteworthy aim 

 

(f)  the fueling of research on the nature 

of cognition in history (historical 

thinking) 

 

(g) the lucid highlighting of a 

pragmatic—yet philosophically based--

theory of teaching and learning in 

history 

  

The project, however, did suffer from limitations. 

Shemilt (2000) recently re-examined the project 

and discovered two main problems. First, the 

repeated emphasis on the mastery of facts and 

concepts proved problematic because the students 

acquired only isolated bits of information.  As a 

result, the history curriculum failed to foster 

interconnected meanings. Second, the partial 

inclusion of narrative history often led to 

students‟ confusions regarding the relationship to 

and the difference between focused micro 

histories and grand linear histories. This apparent 

gap handicapped students‟ ability to either 

postulate any probable causation for event-



53 

 

making or to couch causation in terms of 

imaginative rather than logical possibilities.   

 Despite these limitations, the SHP merits 

attention from those currently interested in history 

education, and more specifically historical 

inquiry, historical thinking, and historical 

empathy. The project team developed the first 

large-scale Western curriculum founded upon the 

premise of history as inquiry. John Fines 

enumerated the contributions of the Denis 

Shemilt and the Schools Council History Project: 

“He has cast new light upon the nature of 

discipline in school, clarifying the meaning in 

terms of History as enquiry, History as time, and 

History as motive” (Fines, 1980, Forward). The 

Schools Council History Project challenged 

Piagetian assumptions of adolescents by 

highlighting “how badly we underestimate 

children as thinkers and children as learners,” 

(Fines, 1980, Forward) and “if we ask good 

questions and really listen, we can actually hear 

children thinking and learning” (Fines, 1980, 

Forward). Reconsidering the aims of SHP remind 

scholars and teachers of the importance of 

offering children the opportunity to explore the 

past, to develop complex understandings, and to 

articulate rich historical perspectives.   

 

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