Historical and Moral Consciousness highlights how ethics can be understood in the context of History education. It analyses the qualitative differences in how young people respond to historical and moral dilemmas of relevance to democratic values and human rights education.

Drawing on a four-year international project, the book offers nuanced discussion and new scholarly understanding of the intersections between historical consciousness and moral consciousness within research. It develops new theoretical tools for history teaching and learning that can support teachers as they endeavor to educate for democratic citizenship. The book includes a meta-analysis of research within history Didaktik and around historical events with a moral bearing, and presents a comparative study of Australian, Finnish, and Swedish high school students’ moral understandings of historical dilemmas.

Raising important questions about how our learning from the past is intertwined with our present and future interpretations and judgements, this book will be of great interest to academics, scholars, teachers, and post graduate students in the fields of history education, democratic education, human rights education, and citizenship education.

We are at a time in world political history that seems to be on a precipice. Over the past decade, it is difficult to ignore the global growth in popularity for autocratic governments, also in some countries which for decades were either strong democracies or moving towards stable democratic governance. The current Russian attack on Ukraine brings into stark focus the political instability many citizens are facing—historical problems are causing, or used as a pretext for, current conflicts. History educators across many sectors—primary, secondary, university, and in public spaces such as museums and galleries – are curious about how these and other current events and issues can and should be approached. The events raise anew the questions of whether and how we can learn from the past, what we value as good and bad in the past, and how these insights might affect our present and future judgements. In relation to this it becomes vital to ponder how educators and members of the public can communicate the situation in Ukraine and similar events to others, while avoiding the bias that presentism can bring.

Using the history classroom as a context for ethics and moral education is a long, but also contested, tradition. Recently, more emphasis has been put on how to incorporate ethics education, with this paper exploring the spaces of ethics and moral education in the history classroom. It is argued here that insights from moral philosophy and theories of historical consciousness, but – importantly – also moral psychology and the study of moral emotions, are needed to realise the potential of history teaching and learning to support ethics education. Following this line, three spaces of ethics education in the history classroom are identified in this paper, including: reasoning about the moral quality of historical actors’ conduct; the use of historical empathy (perspective-taking); and reflection of the past’s moral meaning to the present and the future. As an example of how to implement this, a set of stimulus activities is presented that is designed for the classroom and a qualitative analysis of students’ responses that explicate expressions of students’ moral reasoning, perspective-taking, and historical consciousness.

History is often invested with moral messages. When asked what history for them is, 15-year-old Europeans have strongly supported the option that history is instructive stories of good and evil, right and wrong. But what do they actually think of the potential of history as a moral guide? Do they think history can communicate what was, or would have been, the morally good choice of action in specific historic circumstances? Do they think moral questions should be discussed in a History classroom? Do young people in different countries answer these questions in the same way, and if there are differences, what are they? This paper aims to give some answers to these questions, using Swedish and Finnish Year 9 students’ responses from a survey and interviews that focused on their reasoning on moral questions in relation to history, and their ability to deal with moral dilemmas situated in a historical context. The focus is on how the students see historical knowledge as different from, or related to, moral judgment and what patterns are discernable in this respect. This is done by analysing what functions the students give to history and what arguments they use in justifying the answer. The data provides an opportunity to locate similarities and differences between Finnish and Swedish students’ responses. Tentative conclusions on the basis of the findings are discussed.

Historical consciousness is regarded as an important means to stimulate moral citizens through history education. This article conceptually examines the moral dimension associated with historical consciousness by revisiting the paradigm wars between natural science based on positivism and human and social sciences during the 1960s–1990s as expressed through the voice of Gadamer. More specifically, the article explores:(1) the moral arguments that Gadamer put forward for introducing historical consciousness and (2) the epistemological and ontological building blocks for approaching morality in history education that his arguments brought to the fore. In general, moral consciousness in relation to historical consciousness draws attention to: (a) people’s life conditions, (b) that moral reasoning and practice are influenced by feelings and reason, (c) that reflections on past events can help to interpret our ways of being towards others in the present and future, (d) that a plurality of people, thoughts and history are important to acknowledge and (e) that every person is part of creating history and responsible for weaving the past/present/future web in ways that acknowledge others.

In light of current tendencies, where appreciating plurality and uphold everyone's equal value is being questioned from different directions, there is arguably a need to revive the ethical dimension of history education as a way of learning about difficult histories, including traumatic pasts. Since the 1970s historical consciousness has played an important role in articulating an approach to history with an ethical mindset. Although many theories suggest that there is a connection between ethics and historical consciousness, a deeper understanding of this link is generally absent. This article discusses selected key texts by major researchers in the field, namely Rusen, Seixas and Morton, Chinnery, and Simon. Their texts reflect four different perspectives, which, in this article are kept in dialogue with one another as a way of stimulating and sharpening ethical understanding and judgement in history education through the theoretical toolbox offered.