On the significance of doing philosophy in the history classroom: A theoretical and practical engagement with historical consciousness

This article offers an exploration of how the teaching and learning of philosophy and history may go forward together in the future. This comes at a time when both disciplines are undergoing considerable challenges in making themselves meaningful in school curriculums, albeit for different purposes. Whilst school philosophy has implicitly been considered a necessary feature of school curriculums by way of teachers addressing topics such as logic and ethics, the explicit teaching of philosophy itself has gone begging because the benefits of doing so have not been proven to be self-evident for curriculum writers (Hand 2018a). On the contrary, school history has consistently maintained itself as a subject that must be learnt by students, but the teaching and learning of the subject has undergone significant pedagogical reform since history educationalists have introduced and revised the ideas of historical thinking within history curriculum. Whilst philosophers have begun to form a more definitive pedagogical approach towards how they should teach philosophy, they are now concerning themselves with the policymaker’s question of why they should be teaching it. In contrast, historians are still at a crossroads as to how they should be teaching history but are still assured that they should be in the first place. Accordingly, this article will explore how both disciplines can answer their respective questions by unpacking the concept of ‘historical consciousness’. In doing so, it will make a more direct case as to why philosophy should be explicitly taught in schools as it provides a framework for students to engage with philosophical ideas and skills that are essential to the encountering and exploration of a student’s historical consciousness within the school history classroom.