Academic/General Training Module by Adam Smith First Published in 2015

 IELTS
 JOURNAL 
 
145 
world. The ongoing tension between Christianity and Islam, for instance, requires 
some knowledge of patterns that took shape over 12 centuries ago. Indeed, the 
pressing need to learn about issues of importance throughout the world is the basic 
reason that world history has been gaining ground in American curriculums. Historical 
habits of mind are enriched when we learn to compare different patterns of historical 
development, which means some study of other national traditions and civilizations. 
The key to developing historical habits of mind, however, is having repeated 
experience in historical inquiry. Such experience should involve a variety of materials 
and a diversity of analytical problems. Facts are essential in this process, for historical 
analysis depends on data, but it does not matter whether these facts come from local, 
national, or world history—although it's most useful to study a range of settings. What 
matters is learning how to assess different magnitudes of historical change, different 
examples of conflicting interpretations, and multiple kinds of evidence. Developing the 
ability to repeat fundamental thinking habits through increasingly complex exercises is 
essential. Historical processes and institutions that are deemed especially important to 
specific curriculums can, of course, be used to teach historical inquiry. Appropriate 
balance is the obvious goal, with an insistence on factual knowledge not allowed to 
overshadow the need to develop historical habits of mind. 
Exposure to certain essential historical episodes and experience in historical inquiry 
are crucial to any program of historical study, but they require supplement. No 
program can be fully functional if it does not allow for whimsy and individual taste. 
Pursuing particular stories or types of problems, simply because they tickle the fancy, 
contributes to a rounded intellectual life. Similarly, no program in history is complete 
unless it provides some understanding of the ongoing role of historical inquiry in 
expanding our knowledge of the past and, with it, of human and social behavior. The 
past two decades have seen a genuine explosion of historical information and analysis, 
as additional facets of human behavior have been subjected to research and 
interpretation. And there is every sign that historians are continuing to expand our 
understanding of the past. It's clear that the discipline of history is a source of 
innovation and not merely a framework for repeated renderings of established data 
and familiar stories. 
Why study history? The answer is because we virtually must, to gain access to the 
laboratory of human experience. When we study it reasonably well, and so acquire 
some usable habits of mind, as well as some basic data about the forces that affect our 
own lives, we emerge with relevant skills and an enhanced capacity for informed 
citizenship, critical thinking, and simple awareness. The uses of history are varied. 
Studying history can help us develop some literally "salable" skills, but its study must 
not be pinned down to the narrowest utilitarianism. Some history—that confined to 
personal recollections about changes and continuities in the immediate environment—

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