SchoolsRetooled TM

Historical Habits of Mind

• Understand the significance of the past to one’s own life and to society.

• Distinguish between what is important or not, to develop the “discriminating memory” needed for judgment in public and personal life.

• Perceive past events and issues as they were experienced by people at the time, to develop historical empathy as opposed to present-mindedness.

• Comprehend that diverse cultures and shared humanity exist at the same time.

• Understand how things happen and how things change, how human intentions matter, but also how their consequences are shaped by the means of carrying them out, in a tangle of purpose and process.

• Comprehend the interplay of change and continuity, and avoid assuming that either is somehow more natural, or more to be expected, than the other.

• Prepare to live with uncertainties and exasperating, even perilous, unfinished business, realizing that not all problems have solutions.

• Grasp the complexity of historical causation, respect uniqueness, and avoid excessively abstract generalizations.

• Appreciate the often tentative nature of judgments about the past, and thereby avoid the temptation to seize upon particular “lessons” of history as cures for present ills.

• Recognize the importance of individuals who have made a difference in history, and the significance of personal character for both good and ill.

• Appreciate the force of the non-rational, the irrational, and the accidental, in history and human affairs.

• Understand the relationship between geography and history as a matrix of time and place, and as a context for events.

• Read widely and critically in order to recognize the difference between fact and conjecture, between evidence and assertion, and thereby to frame useful questions.