Here is your paragraph on historical imagination!
History is the study of past human actions and more particularly with the motives, intentions, purposes, designs and policies which prompted human beings to behave in a particular way.
The human actions of the past societies are not available for direct observation. They can simply be inferred or apprehended through the imaginative powers of mind.
Historical imagination refers to the capacity of an individual to visualise scenes and incidents as narrated to him through spoken or written word. It is also the capacity of an individual to draw inferences about past events to form mental pictures of the past happenings and to try to find the meaning hidden behind past human actions.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
The essence of history teaching lies in the encouragement of the powers of historical imagination of the pupils who are anxious to know about other people, about their lives, personalities, deeds and ideas. It can help them to visualise an atmosphere, entirely different from their own. It can awaken in them an imaginative wonderland excitement about the lives and actions of the people down the ages. And finally, it will help them to create an abiding interest and reverence in all things which are the relics of the past ages.
The cultivation of historical imagination is a difficult task. He should also see that his descriptions of places, persons and things are graphic and are communicated through vivid word-pictures. In fact at this stage of life children usually possess a riotous imagination. The need is to channelize this imagination in desired direction. ‘
ADVERTISEMENTS:
In the upper grades our aim should be to help the pupil not only to see what happened in the past, but enable him to understand why it happened. Not only should he be introduced to the understanding of the causal relationships between different historical phenomena but he should be asked to visualise the intentions, purposes and designs behind those phenomena. This kind of understanding depends on inside view of human nature.
The teacher should try to develop this understanding. “The human mind can understand whatever it has created and the whole historical world spreads before us as a field of human activity, of the realisation of human hopes and the suffering, of misery and frustration by human beings.” He should be allowed to think and re-think in his mind and use his imagination to recapture the spirit of the age.