The Rise, Fall and Rise of Empathy in British History Teaching

The status of empathy in British history has a more complex history than has been hitherto realised. The roots of empathy-led history teaching lie in the interwar period, but it was not until the 1970s that politically progressive educators began to embrace this approach in significant numbers. In the late 1980s, the use of empathy in history classrooms drew the ire of the right-wing press and the Thatcher government, which imposed a more patriotic and fact-based school curriculum. In the 1990s, however, historical empathy returned to the fore in a different guise: as a key pedagogical strategy of the burgeoning field of Holocaust education. This remains a major focus of empathetic history teaching in Britain, but its methods and purpose have become increasingly muddled and contested. This article sets these British, and especially English, curricular debates within a broad international context of shifting political, cultural and academic approaches to empathy.