• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content

Terry Haydn

  • Home
  • About
  • Learning to Teach History
    • PGCE Student Teacher
    • ICT in History Teaching
    • Time and Chronology
    • Assessment
    • History and Citizenship
    • Evidence
    • Causation
    • Substantive concepts
    • Empathy
    • Drama and Role-Play
    • Significance
    • Values and dispositions in school history
    • Class management
    • Interpretations
    • History and newspapers
    • Purpose of School History
    • Inclusion and diversity
      • Parent’s story
      • Claire’s full story
    • CPD
  • Managing Pupil Behaviour
    • The Haydn Scale and ‘The Right to Learn’
    • Levels of Control
    • Links to the research
    • How to get the class quiet; what do teachers say?
    • ‘Coping’; how do teachers handle things when they are not in complete control?
    • It isn’t quick or easy…
    • Sending pupils out; what do teachers say?
    • Moving pupils; what do teachers say?
    • Classroom rules; what do teachers say?
    • Why do some teachers become better than others at managing pupil behaviour? What do teachers say?
    • Complex and sophisticated skills
    • Mistakes: what do mentors say?
    • Zero tolerance: what (some) heads and deputies say…
    • Some of the Variables that influence Classroom Climate
    • Refusal
    • What use is the Scale?
    • Links to Other Useful Resources
  • NEET in Norfolk
  • Pupil Disaffection
  • Blog
  • Contact
You are here: Home / PGCE History at UEA / Empathy

Empathy

Empathy: the concept that dare not speak its name?

Why is empathy a contentious aspect of school history?

Because several commentators questioned its validity, and argued that it was a form of “dumbing down”; vague and sentimental imaginative writing instead of command of “the facts” and rigorous historical analysis. Although it was incorporated into the criteria for the GCSE exam in the late 1980s, the assault on it was so high profile in the national press, that there was a tendency in subsequent documentation to actually avoid the word “empathy”, (hence Peter Clements’ article in Teaching History No. 85, 1996: pp. 6-8, ‘Historical Empathy- R.I.P.?’)

(Below) Audrey Hepburn explains empathy

Although the word empathy is not mentioned explicitly in the most recent curriculum specification for history, the National Curriculum does say that:

‘pupils should be taught to describe and analyse the relationships between the characteristic features of the periods and societies studied including the experiences and range of ideas, beliefs and attitudes of men, women and children in the past.’ (KSU 2a), and ‘to analyse and explain the reasons for, and results of, the historical events, situations and changes in the periods studied.’ (KSU 2c)

Limits on word length meant that it was not possible to include a developed section on the empathy debate in the book, so this section is just to provide a bit more detail on empathy, as it does seem to be an area that interests some PGCE students, judging by the number of assignments on the topic.

Critics

Advocates

An example

An example at GCSE level

Reading

Copyright © 2025 | Terry Haydn | All Rights Reserved