For the last 30 years or so, the concept ‘historical consciousness’ has been frequently used in the discourse of History teaching and learning.The concept has often been linked to ‘heritage’ or ‘collective memory’ and thus sometimes dismissed as ‘non-historian’. It has also been linked to, sometimes equated to, ‘identity’ and it has sometimes been argued that a disciplinary approach to history denies the relevance of students' individual identities and life-worlds – an issue that cannot be brushed aside in a diverse society.Thanks to its vagueness, the concept therefore illustrates what Norwegian historian and history educator May-Brith Ohman Nielsen has called the two poles of historical knowledge: the scholarly/disciplinary pole and the enigmatic/poetic pole where the latter is about existential issues, community, identity, security, comfort – that which goes beyond the rational and cannot be analysed. The polarity does not, however, imply that these two aspects of history are incompatible. By highlighting the polarity, the concept ‘historical consciousness’ can also serve as a starting-point for linking the poles together, returning to Carl Becker’s proposition, put forward 80 years ago:“Our proper function is not to repeat the past but to make use of it, to correct and rationalize for common use Mr. Everyman's mythological adaptation of what actually happened. We are surely under bond to be as honest and as intelligent as human frailty permits; but the secret of our success in the long run is in conforming to the temper of  Mr. Everyman, which we seem to guide only because we are so sure, eventually, to follow it.”References of importance, apart from Becker and Ohman Nielsen mentioned above, include Keith C. Barton, Bernard Eric Jensen, Linda Levstik and the reports from the History Learning Project, Indiana University.