Should gay history be taught into schools?

OP - What relevance has sexuality got to do with history may I ask? For example: Napoleon is a historical figure because of his deeds and actions - not his sexuality. What relevance would his sexuality even have?

Unless?.....................

Say he invaded Russia because he was a 'batty boy' and he heard there were nice 'batty boys' living in Moscow. That would be different, because in such a scenario his sexuality would have been the primary motivating factor.

Sounds more like a college course than something to be taught in schools. It's too recent and specific an area for a school subject that already has thousands of years of events that shaped the entire world to pick and choose from.

looksee wrote: »

Yes of course we should have gay history taught in schools. Along with black history and disabled history and women's history and childrens' history and pacifist history and ... so on. And if you have a gay, black, disabled woman who did something significant, she should get a mention in all four sections.

We could extend the school year, or eliminate Irish or Maths or something to accommodate it.

Nice reductio ad absurdam. A curriculum framed around (a limited) two years of study obviously needs to contain optional components as a student's preparation cannot encompass everything. The present syllabus rotates compulsory topics and leaves the rest up to the teachers and students. There are also early modern and modern papers respectively.

Black history and women's history are already parts of the syllabus in the form of case studies addressing themselves to the suffragette movement, women during wartime or the civil rights movement in the US. A history of antisemitism is unavoidable in treating the Holocaust. The point? Contrary to your strawman, this stuff can be taught in pure right of its significance as a social movement or phenomenon with political and other implications. Not just because someone merely happened to be a gay, disabled, black woman.

Providing some extra components would merely enhance choice and not diminish the quality of the existing syllabus or impact negatively on other subjects. But then, you knew that nobody was suggesting sacrificing Mathematics or a by the numbers history of World War II at the altar of gay history.

If people want to carry the tendentious suggestion that we only teach what they adjudge particularly 'relevant' to its absolute end then really, why learn about any country's political history (say) except through the prism of its relations with the United States? World's only remaining superpower, right? In the hierarchy of importance it's at number one. Ireland's pretty insignificant. Only needs to be mentioned by way of its impact on Britain and furthermore by way of Britain's impact on America.

If you think that's outlandish, you probably don't see much point in learning about Albania's history, do you? Same principle.

But don't get me wrong, I think that, generally, the syllabus could afford to be much, much broader. There's no real church history there (as in a history of Christianity in the West from Constantine onward), no medieval history prior to 1492, no history of Islam/the Muslim world, no history of the Far East (beyond brief mentions of Japan during WWII) and so on. I'm not saying that these should all be taught simultaneously, but merely that they could do with being considered for inclusion and possible selection by students and teachers.

While the medieval world gets a mention on the Junior Cert. syllabus it's cursory at best with absolutely no political medieval history. I mean zero mention of even the major events, battles and state formations/state dissolutions. Instead they teach them about the component parts of a castle. That's mind-boggling.