Just finished reading Fintan O'Toole's article in yesterday's
Irish Times denouncing the current proposal by the
National Council for Curriculum and Assessment to remove history from the list of compulsory Junior Certificate subjects:
In a memorable decade, why throw history out of the window?
Here's an extract:
'What happens if you dismantle this basic structure and bundle history into some general package of “social sciences” or “humanities”? As it happens, we don’t have to speculate: we can simply look across the water. Exactly this notion has been imposed on children in Britain. The result was spelled out recently by the English historian (and now Labour MP) Tristram Hunt.
Writing in the Observer , Hunt noted that “in most schools, the average 13-year-old is lucky to get one hour a week of history, making it difficult for even the most gifted classroom performer to develop a strong narrative arc. And when it is taught, history is too often batched together with other subjects into a vapid and generalised ‘humanities’ course which fails to do it justice. This state-sanctioned amnesia is becoming acute in some of our most deprived communities.”
Hunt pointed in particular to the way, in Britain, history has become the preserve of the well-to-do. Families who are already well-educated will want their children to study history, and will find a way to insist that they do. In working-class Knowsley, just outside Liverpool, 17 per cent of kids study history. In wealthy Richmond upon Thames, in suburban west London, the corresponding figure is 45 per cent. State-sponsored amnesia isn’t for everyone. It’s only for the masses.
There is surely no conspiracy here, but if you did want to further disenfranchise those who are already on the outside, making them historically illiterate would be a good plan. A sense of history is also a sense of possibility, of change, of community, of collective memory.
Movements of oppressed people – wage slaves, women, racial and national minorities – have always drawn on history for courage, inspiration, identity. Taking that away helps to keep people powerless, disconnected and steeped in the soporific belief that nothing ever changes.
An attack on historical literacy is also an attack on the idea of citizenship. We in Ireland know only too well that public historical narratives can become fossilised into tribal myths. But the answer to this problem is not less history but more. What happens when you cut people off from a sense of their own history isn’t that they cease to have a relationship to the past. It’s that their hunger for that relationship is fed with all kinds of crude and often dangerous nonsense. The current Junior Cert syllabus doesn’t just teach kids historical facts. It gives them an idea of historical method, of the ways in which evidence is gathered and assessed. It provides some protection against the manipulation of emotions by distorted and selective histories.'
Do you think history is unimportant enough to be left as an option in Irish schools for the Junior Cert? Should it really only be the preserve of those whom O'Toole argues will come from the more "educated" sections of society?
