Foundation and Application. History between Historical Science and School Education

This article concerns one of the most fundamental problems of the contemporary school curriculum - the problém of the trans-formation of the didactics of an educational field into educational content, or the teaching subjects, particularly in the area of education in which the problém of transformation is to-day turning out to be the most complex“ the sociál science area of education (or more cor-rectly the sociál sciences - humanities, since this term more clearly conveys the bipolarity of our human reality, i.e. its individual and its sociál side, between which their are numer-ous andvery various links). The main focus of the article is on history education, which forms the spině of social-science/humani-ties education; historical knowledge (and the corresponding skill of being able to use this knowledge in conerete situations) is as it were the mathematics of social-science-humanities education, because just as in the natural sciences we cannot get by without a certain amount of knowledge of the math-ematical apparatus, so a basic orientation in the social-science/humanities field requires historical knowledge.
Social-science/humanities disciplines and the teaching subjects derived from them do not demand so high a level of abstraction and the use of formalised languages as the natural sciences, but by contrast they make significant demands on „spirituál“ maturity -capacity for understanding, empathy, criteria of values, the ability to see things from several different perspectives and across cultures. This implicitly the involve considerations of life experience, and this creates a certain barrier to interpretation for the young genera-tion. The situation is further complicated by the fact that todays school history, which is defined as directed to the „maintenance and cultivation of historical consciousness“ has to také account of the whole breadth of historical information that we encounter in present-day society (historical culture). It cannot then be merely a transformation of historical science in the sense of historical scholarship; in any čase the latter no longer has a universally acknowledged normative form. In school history and the historical element of social-humanities education in generál the issue has to be a matter of identifying (to the level attainable for the different types of school) the socio-cultural whole of historical culture (the reality of today and approaches to it are however by andlarge fragmentary, because it is impossible for us to grasp it as a whole), and the cultivation of methods of critical treat-ment of historical information. It is to this end that the school history curriculum and its concepts háve to be gradually and carefully adapted, even though we know that these concepts are not entirely suitable and are also „fragmentary“. We are justified in calling this a situation of crisis, but this does not mean that the importance of the historical compo-nent in humanities/social-science education is weakening. On the contrary - the priority today must be to develop education in the order ofthought in the humanities, reflecting the mainly inexact, value-related and inter-subjective character of human reality, resting on a historically created and co-experienced cultural-civilisational cultural code.