STUDYING THE PAST IN THE PRESENT TENSE: The Dilemma of History Textbooks in Conflict-Ridden Areas

Abstract

We begin with three propositions: Most high school students do not like history, fail to see its connection to their own lives, and don’t connect the past and the present. Most students accept the content of their textbooks and what their teachers tell them at face value and tend to express little useful skepticism towards them. History teachers could breathe new life into their history lessons if they were able to emphasize the relevance of the subject matter to students’ actual lives and build a didactic bridge between the curriculum and historians’ ways of thinking.