The evolution of history pedagogy in Malta

Abstract

Trying to answer the question “What is History?” can be difficult and problematic. There are those like the positivists who believe that History is a science and that the laws of historical process can be discovered, while there are others who believe that what historians do is to collect and verify evidence and then interpret it in a way that is more or less acceptable to their readers. Two classical works which have long been used by students of historiography and which represent these opposite poles of the debate are G. Elton’s The Practice of History (1967) and E. Carr’s What is History? (1964). More recently the postmodernist movement, which gained academic popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, has joined the debate. Postmodernist theory attacked and cast serious doubts on the actual validity of the subject itself. Modern philosophers like the American Hayden White (1978) present History as a narrative discourse, the content of which is mostly invented! A philosophy in line with Richard Rorty’s idea (1982) that behind our existence there is no real world as we imagine. In the early 1990s Keith Jenkins declared, “History is not the past…they are ages and miles apart” (1991, p.5). According to postmodernist thought the questions historians ask are determined by the questions of their society, reflecting the same apprehensions or optimism of the time rather than the historical period the historian is studying.