The modality of historical thinking in the latest Greek primary school curriculum and the new challenges in history education

Abstract This paper refers to the concept of ‘historical thinking’ as it appears in the three versions of the recent Greek History Curriculum for primary school. It is a comparative study of the discourse of the three versions of the recent history curriculum for primary school. The methodological approach of this study was founded on Critical Discourse Analysis. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the meaning and context of this term as presented in the three versions of the history curriculum and to compare the findings of the study with corresponding references in the international literature regarding the terms of ‘historical thinking’. This study demonstrated that this term is not the same in all three versions of the curriculum. In the first version of the curriculum the term ‘historical thinking’ is mentioned autonomously and we also separately identify the term ‘critical thinking’, while in the second and third versions a synthesis of the term is observed, which eventually becomes ‘critical historical thinking’. As a result of this observation, the use of the terms is critically and comparatively studied. The main conclusion is that the term ‘critical historical study’ refers much more to the development of general skills and competences with cognitive characteristics and much less to the critical understanding of the historical past. Furthermore, the conclusions of this study suggest a perspective for historical thinking in contemporary curricula with new challenges such as the relationship of historical education with artificial intelligence and children's representations.