The problems of teaching history in Spain

Abstract

The teaching of History, in Spain as in most other countries, has always been aimed at achieving those objetives relevant to the needs and values of each particular period. One of the possible implications of the educacional reform that is being introduced in Spain at the moment is that History as a school subject may lose its previous curricular relevance and no longer receive the attention that its aims and specific character demand. The integration of history in a opposed view to teaching it as a subject on its own, this last one being the only way - we think - in which the long established educational aims can be bener achieved. Some of these aims are facilitating the understanding of the present through the explanation of the past, analysing concrete facts and events, understanding the idea of transformability, process, change, as well as the appraisal of the multiple causality of human phenomena.