I can’t find it in myself to feign shock. I have spent a reasonable amount of my life learning history; indeed I have a degree in it. In seven years at ‘big school’, I was taught the following:
- Year 7: Anglo-Saxons and Normans (mainly motte and bailey stuff);
- Year 8: Tudors (divorced, beheaded, she died, etc);
- Year 9: agricultural and industrial revolutions (“Smash the Spinning Jenny! Burn the rolling Rosalind!”);
- Years 10-11 (GCSE): the rise of fascism and communism (Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini - yay! - videos to watch);
- Years 12-13 (A-level): the rise of Nazism (another two years of the chap with the moustache doing a poor Charlie Chaplin impersonation); and Europe, 1815-1914 (that’s Europe *excluding* the UK - the history syllabus was way ahead of Ukip).
If history teaches us anything it is that nothing is inevitable, and life is messy, fragmented, kaleidoscopic. To make any sense of it, historians divide our continuum into periods - but, of course, it’s not as if a switch was flicked, and folk suddenly realised the renaissance was happening all around them. Any more than it was pre-destined that the ‘geographical expression’ which is Italy should ever have existed.
But unless you have some grasp of chronology, it’s impossible to understand how incomprehensible history is. To teach history in disparate, bite-size chunks - dotting about between Tudors and Nazis - without ever trying to contextualise or connect is senseless.
Nor can it be healthy for this nation’s history to be so ignored. For me, British history stopped in 1603, with the death of Elizabeth I. In my 16 years of formal education, I was never once taught anything about what happened here in the UK in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries (other than the popularising of the crop rotation system). That just can’t be right.
And it is truly bizarre that the imperial role of the English/British in Ireland, the Middle East, USA or Africa over the centuries should be wholly absent from our curriculum. It is hardly as if such issues are no longer relevant, or even that young people would not be interested in our involvement.
I don’t buy into the dismal cliché that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it - because people usually learn the wrong lesson. But I do believe that to comprehend the present you must have some understanding of the past. It’s perfectly possible. Or, as Marie-Antoinette almost certainly never said, “It’s a piece of cake.”
1 comment:
I think you are partially right, an understanding of history is important if people are going to place themselves in their culture (however as history grad I would say that). However I don't think you expect your average GCSE kid to have a decent handle on all the key dates since 1066 (and who decides what they are anyway) and also have enough in depth knowledge of a period to be able to do some proper analysis.
I think it is more important that pupils are tought enough 'facts' to allow them to learn how to think critically about the past (and therefore the present). Personally I would look to spread the geographically range of the sylabus away from Europe and cut the chronological range. Whats more important that your bloke in the street understands what happened during the War of the Roses, or the mess we made in the Palestine Mandate?
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