I’ve often considered the rather defunct education system here in Israel. Over-large classes, underpaid teachers, curriculum that is more than a little influenced by this or that Minister of Education’s personal views… but what truly annoyed me was the rather haphazard approach to history. While the history of the Zionist Movement and the political and cultural reality that created it is all very fine and well, as is the forty-something years of the Jewish Settlement under both Turkish and British governance, I daresay that ignoring over three-thousand years of Jewish history in such a manner is, well, stupid. The past shapes us, and we must also learn from it. It our heritage, questionable and disliked as it may be at times. In comparison, I recently ran into an article that discussed a report by the British Historical Association. Apparently British history teachers of today don’t like teaching “hot potato” topics, such as the Holocaust or the Crusades, preferring instead to focus on making the lessons fun and nice and avoiding possible confrontation. And those who do teach these topics aren't skilled enough to teach properly. Now, I hardly need to relay my personal opinions on political correctness and on how it’s a great big pile of poo that goes a long way in destroying much-required discourse, but what bugs me here is that these are big historical events. Very big. The kind of big that one should never ignore, and also the kind of big that one can and should learn a great deal from, be it simply as what NOT to do or going on to issues of morality, the danger of institutions that stifle thought, and just how nasty mankind can be if given the chance. But then… That’s the greatest failure of all, in many education systems. Education should be first and foremost about teaching you to think, and giving you the tools to learn more. But how do you achieve that?
We also have sports days in England but the kids aren't allowed to be competitive. This is why we never win anything anymore and we have no industry to speak of. When i was at scholl they would only teach us about WWI & WWII, Since leaving I've learnt that things happened before 1900 too. Apparently we've had a couple of thousand years of invaders from abroad.
Maybe I was just luckier in where I went to school (not one considered to be the best in the area), but we were taught about the Tudors & Stuarts; Saxons, Romans, Vikings & Normans and local history before I even got to secondary school. At secondary school (a grammar for clever ol' me), we learnt about the Glorious revolution (William of Orange in England), French revolution and WWI before I dropped history. I don't think it's a nationwide problem, I'm only 23, so it's not like I went to school in some archaic 'golden age' of education. All my sports days were competitive too, to varying degrees of competitiveness. Although, it does appear that schools are becoming more and more focused on test results rather than education, looking from my new position outside of it ,that is...
In sweden the Curricula aren't as ridgid as in many other countires. I believe that the curricula for history is summed up with something akin to 'a student is supposed to learn and understand and to be able to discuss historical events with (at least) moderate accuracy' Makes it much harder on us teachers but it also makes the subject of history that much more interesting. when we're 10-12 years old we're usually taught the history of sweden, the kings and queens and stuff. 13-15 is more concentrated on ancient history (the creation of man, romans and greeks and persians and so on) and recent history (from the french revolution until today) For me WW1 and WW2 took almost an entire year to cover with lectures by jews that had been in concentration-camps and news papers from the time and our teacher truly tried to make us understand what had happened and why. for 16-18 year olds the curriculum is even less desisive. I studied the different eras in history in connection to the place we live, we researched our families and visited the art museum for lectures on the history of art. Inbetween that we did some more serious things... I think. But one of the most important things we discussed was 'what is the most important thing to learn in history class?' we all decided that years and kings weren't that important, it was rather the reasons for people to act as they had that is important and interesting. I got a question on an exam "how could the French Revoloution have been avoided, or at least confined?" So the question is just that, what do we want to learn from history?
I've had an incredible hotch potch of education in history which consisted of nothing up until the age of about 11 when we did ww2 from Britain’s perspective...which involved mainly a society orientated view point of what us poor Brits had to go through at the expense of those nasty Germans (quite interesting considering I'm partially German) Anyway after that I moved abroad and got some lovely American history which was even worse than the British centred stuff. I dually forgot it the moment the year was up. We did some ancient history with Greeks and Romans which was interesting but not particularly useful. After that we moved onto more serious topics… the world wars, the holocaust and so forth. This wasn’t a list of facts however, it was more what caused it, why did it occur, how could it have been avoided. Now my history lessons are really interesting. I have two classes, one on wars and one on China. China is fascinating mainly because it shows the struggle they went through to maintain their ways of life – a struggle which ultimately fails and China is opened up to the west and it is desecrated. A lot of the time history is a moral lesson, it shows us why nations are the way they are, what brought dictators like Mao, Franco, Stalin and Hitler to power, it teaches us the warning signs for another coming to power. History should also be learning how to look at different view points and learning to make balanced judgements…knowing how to look at sources and say, well its interesting and helpful but not necessarily true. History helps us understand the world today, as cliché as it sounds. It helps us judge the world today as fairly as possible. History lessons should include as much information on as many different areas in the world because more and more conflicts from other nations, conflicts in the making for centauries, are conflicting with nations we live in and without the knowledge of their past, we are left in the dark about how best to react. Take China, no one has worried all that much about their history for the past 10 years but suddenly they are a potential major power and suddenly their past has become an incredibly important area of study in order to understand what put them in the position they are in, why they hold certain prejudices. Essentially history should help us understand why.
My experience is pretty much like Ben's. I had some excellent teachers from primary through to A-Level (ages 7-18, in my case). At primary school we studied the Ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Vikings, Victorian Britain, the Tudors and Stewarts, the English Civil War, the British Empire and WWII (focus on the Home Front, but also including important areas such as the Holocaust). At secondary school, we studied English and European history from the Norman invasion through to the English Civil War and aftermath (including the Crusades, and all periods in quite some detail, but particularly the feudal system in England, the Wars of the Roses and the Tudors and Stuarts), the religious history of Europe, including the European and English Reformations, the history of medicine, and the political history of Europe in the age of the dictators (early 20th Century, including extensive study of the Holocaust). At A-Level, I studied the Russian Revolutions, the Wars of the Roses and the Tudors and Stuarts (again!), Europe from 1914-1945 and the political and social history of 19th Century Britain. I suspect the article you linked to, Roman, involves a small minority of non-specialist teachers and some typically Rupert Murdochesque sensationalist reporting. Many of my friends don't remember what they learned at school, but that doesn't mean it wasn't taught. And I hardly think you need worry about whether British children are being taught about the Holocaust. British school children are saturated in Holocaust awareness from a very young age. We also get taught about people other than Jews who were persecuted by the Nazis, the things that the Allies did to the other side in WWI and WWII (Fairyliquid, your teaching on this sounds like it was particularly biased, but I don't know why), and instances of anti-Semitism other than the Holocaust. So I would completely disagree with this: Don't get your news from the Times, Roman. I find it to be a dismal rag no longer worthy of comparison to the iconic broadsheet it once was. Regarding education and teaching children to think... My History lessons were a classic example of those that taught us how to think better rather than simply to know more. The ability to differentiate between fact and opinion is not something that comes easily to most people, but it was most rigorously addressed by History teachers in every one of my five schools. The ability to read carefully, weigh up possibilities and argue a case were all things my History teachers taught. They taught us to consider the source (like the Times, for instance...) and not to simply take things at face value, to be discerning and aware of the bias in everything. My History teachers taught me to be able to think for myself and to understand that truth is a nebulous thing I have to find myself, however much work it takes.
I think I was taught too much Euro-history. Not that there's anything wrong with it with me being European, but I would have liked to also learn about Asian history and a bit more of the history of the Americas - the origins of the native people of North and South America etc. Stuff that I've had to look into on my own, that they didn't even teach me on a history degree.
My sister is a substitute teacher, she told me that some kids basically don't get taught anything about anything these days. I would believe that what Roman found in the Times is in fact going on a lot more often then any one wants to believe. My niece had a teacher who was so ignorant she taught her students that Japan was an ally of the US in WWII. I had one worthwhile history classe when I was in highschool, it was called War, we read about Auschwitz, My Lai and other incidents. My teacher was a veteran, he had a concentration camp survivor tell us about what had happened to her. He told us war is always about money, never about any other higher minded reason, I have never seen anything that made me doubt that, never read anything either. History is about how events are percieved and having teachers decide not to cover parts of history is very disturbing, but it happens all the time, from news stories that are pushed of the frontpage by some sensational but trivial event to coverage of one lost child that is cute and no coverage of one that isn't so cute. Last year I was looking for one of my favorite books from my youth, The Ark, by Margot Benary-Isbert, It was being purged from the library book shelves, people aren't reading it any more. It is an account of life immediately following WWII, of people finding their way back to life after the long hideous nightmare. Of children who were exposed to things they never should have had to know. I would think todays children would be grateful to know that their grandparents had the strength to face hard things, too. It is a story of new life and finding love in the face of long odds, I would think that a book like that would still be required reading, not being forgotten and dismissed. I realize we have only so much time to educate ourselves and our children and new things keep happening, but I hope people can find a way to keep a lot more of our history alive, it is our story, the thing that seperates us from the beasts, it is what we build our beliefs, our lives on. The world didn't come into existence when we first noticed it and I'm sick of people acting like it did.
I would suggest that it varies from country to country, and within countries. What I have seen of education in the US has varied wildly from abysmal to excellent. I have met a lot of Americans with a very poor knowledge of history and some whose knowledge far exceeds my own. But I believe British culture treats history as particularly important. I don't think there is any real threat to the teaching of history in Britain at the moment. Outrage at something like this is usually a sign that it is NOT the norm, rather than that the norm is changing. (And by the way, we also had a week of History lessons where a Polish concentration camp survivor came to talk to us about her experiences - those were definitely some of the most memorable lessons of my school career, along with the visit to meet conscientious objectors from WWI, WWII, Vietnam and Korea.) I agree with Mal about a tendency to Euro-centrism. I learned nothing in school about American or Asian history. Despite extensive coverage of WWII in my schooldays, I never learned a thing about the Pacific front and the Japanese-American aspect of that war. Also, everything I know about the American Civil War has been learned since meeting Garner (marry an educated Southerner and you kind of have to learn about this stuff); beforehand, all I really knew about it was that America had had a civil war at some point. I didn't even know which century it was in. I've also learned a little about Japanese history since meeting Garner (he's one of those Americans with an extraordinary breadth of historical knowledge - mostly from computer games, I think), but I know almost nothing else about Asian history. I only have the loosest knowledge about Indian history, and some of that was covered in my A-Level - although, in my defence, I was busy nearly dying in hospital at the time my class studied it. Anyway, I still think this is sensationalist reporting trying to make out that a minority case is the norm. The notion that there is any threat of the Holocaust not being taught in British schools is basically utter bollocks.
