History is very much in the news at the moment, which is great. Plus it's in the news because so many people are debating what should be taught in history lessons, which is even greater. What's taught in history classes is very important. Many people think Gove has got it wrong. It's true that the pace of change on his watch is far too ambitious. A new GCSE, new A levels and a new National Curriculum to boot is just far too much too quickly. Thankfully this has been acknowledged in Whitehall and we should be grateful for small mercies!
In all honesty whenever any Education Secretary says "Here's what we think should be taught in history lessons", they're just asking for trouble. History is so emotive, so subjective, so political. Every time a politician tells us what schools' history should be, we all jump up and yell "Well you would say that wouldn't you, you're biased".
That's the problem with history. Or rather, that's the beauty of history. It is not a narrow subject with a set syllabus that is extremely difficult to vary. There are a million and one topics that children could (and should) learn about in schools. However our ideas on the history curriculum tell people much more about us than history. Our choices depend on what we learnt at school (good and bad), our upbringing, where we live, where we would like to live and which history topics we hated and the ones we loved.
Personally I found and still find the Industrial Revolution as dull as dish water. However even though JHGS is an academy, we decided to keep it in our KS3 curriculum because it is an essential part of Britain's story, or should that be Britain's history? We teach the Cold War after 1945 and this involves a discussion about Britain's post war decline as a great power. Yet as part of this they need to appreciate how Britain became a great power, and how great a power she was.
Also there are so few history lessons in the timetable. Our year 7 and 9 boys get two lessons per fortnight whereas our year 8s get three hours a fortnight. With the best will in the world, there are only so many topics you can fit in the schedule. Also if you want your students to study a topic in any meaningful depth, we end up doing a topic per term. That's just nine topics between years 7 to 9 out of one million and one! African parents have complained to me there's not enough African history in the curriculum, Polish parents may well say the same.
As a HoD at an academy this is largely irrelevant as we are not obliged to follow the National Curriculum. However as a Head of History, the dilemma is still the same - "What DO you teach"? To help answer this question as we applied for academy status, we carried out a survey of all our students on history at JHGS, but the main question was "what do YOU want to learn about"? The results were very interesting. Having dropped the GCSE Depth Study on Interwar Germany, a majority of boys told us they wanted to learn about Hitler. It also informed our decision to teach
Stalin's Russia and Mao's China at A level.
I have some sympathy with the NUT when it says teaching hours should be limited to four per day and that there should be a set amount of hours for planning, marking etc. But how is this viable in the present financial situation? However I do have some sympathy with Gove and his plans to rewrite the History National Curriculum. He 's damned if he does X, he's damned if he does Y, either way he's just damned!
No comments:
Post a Comment