AN ASPECT OF LEARNING HISTORY RELATED TO LEARNER.

HISTORY education; LEARNING

There is an aspect of the learning of history which makes more history easier to learn and which should be pointed out to the student. Most students would agree that what they learn in a history course is the material itself; they accept that this knowledge gives them a concept of a past historical phenomenon. It is often advisable for the teacher to encourage them to look further--to identify what was being learned. As to the question of learning the past, perhaps the student did or did not grasp some historical outlook of a period. Possibly a more basic learning was involved that the student overlooked. What, if the students were in class over a range of a semester, happened? Surely more than a futile effort to learn something possibly unaccessible. If the student did not learn only data, what else was learned? Study habits? Hopefully. Mistakes of the past to predict the future? Surely not. How to think better? Regardless of the answer, what was enabling the student to learn anything? Wkat aspects of his mind were changing so that he was changing? Obviously, the student was learning about himself, whether by discussion or however. History has a self-exploratory importance to the student--it reveals our culture through the inevitable idea the student has upon hearing new or freshly presented material of the historical past. How then is this learning identified? Perhaps by a scrutiny of what has taken place in the classroom. The focus of the learning was not the material although the learning was inevitably tied to the material. The learning began when the material was subjected to idea--not the professor's nor the author's--but the student's. Whether this idea initially was interest or non-interest, the student learned by reacting to the material and this reaction, hopefully to be idea, is the beginning of the self-learning in history. It correspondingly indicates the ahistorical historical milieu which makes history inevitably present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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