- This paper makes a comparison between the teaching and learning of history by 12-13-year old students in Japan and England. The research is based on field work conducted in 1995-1996 in three Japanese junior high schools in Yamanashi prefecture and three English comprehensive schools in Cambridgeshire. First the author sketches the Japanese educational structure and looks at the teaching of social studies in the two countries. Then he sets out the basic assumptions of a recent comparative study on the development of historical skills and knowledge of Japanese and English students. Next to this starting point, the research team prepared a questionnaire to investigate the pupils attitudes towards history and history teaching. English students and history teachers seemed to consider history as a debatable story of the past, created from a range of sources of historical evidence whereas Japanese students were inclined to contemplate it as a subject to be learned by heart. History was farThis paper makes a comparison between the teaching and learning of history by 12-13-year old students in Japan and England. The research is based on field work conducted in 1995-1996 in three Japanese junior high schools in Yamanashi prefecture and three English comprehensive schools in Cambridgeshire. First the author sketches the Japanese educational structure and looks at the teaching of social studies in the two countries. Then he sets out the basic assumptions of a recent comparative study on the development of historical skills and knowledge of Japanese and English students. Next to this starting point, the research team prepared a questionnaire to investigate the pupils attitudes towards history and history teaching. English students and history teachers seemed to consider history as a debatable story of the past, created from a range of sources of historical evidence whereas Japanese students were inclined to contemplate it as a subject to be learned by heart. History was far more regarded as a fixed story of the past. The author believes that if the Japanese wish to reform their factual knowledge centred teaching and learning of history, they have to face the critical role that empathy and the creative reconstruction of the past can play in history instruction.…
