Dump History for Twitter Teachers Told

[gIant]

Children will no longer have to study the Victorians or the second world war under proposals to overhaul the primary school curriculum, the Guardian has learned.

However, the draft plans will require children to master Twitter and Wikipedia and give teachers far more freedom to decide what youngsters should be concentrating on in classes.

The proposed curriculum, which would mark the biggest change to primary schooling in a decade, strips away hundreds of specifications about the scientific, geographical and historical knowledge pupils must accumulate before they are 11 to allow schools greater flexibility in what they teach.

What rubbish is this!! I cannot believe that they want to dump history which is important and ask kids to learn about Twitter and Wikipedia and the internet.

In my mind history is vital to tell kids how our society developed and of important events e.g. world wars. However, when I was at primary school we also learnt about ancient history, the middle ages and such, which appear to have already been dropped from the curriculum.

Kids have computer studies as part of lessons anyway. They can learn about the web and different sites as part of this. So why dump history and put something farcical in its place. They talk about giving kids a chronological idea of history, but this basically means teaching them to parrot dates without actually knowing what the incidents they correspond to mean.

Furthermore teaching kids to use a spellchecker is not going to make them learn to spell. I can see the point in teaching kids about health and wellbeing, but most of this seems to be focused on computers. As the article states, there is no encouragement for kids to read.

Grrrr

[riotgrrl]

I'm with you gIant in that I'm a huge fan of teaching people history. Everyone should know the basics.

What I objected to about how it was taught at my school was that it was topic-based - we 'did' the Russian Revolution, we 'did' the World Wars, etc. But what was missing was some kind of overview of history - it was only by private study in adulthood that I kind of started to understand how societies moved from tribalism to feudalism to democracy kind of thing . . .

I'd like to see more history taught, and it to be taught far more broadly - how can you understand anything in the modern world without understanding empires for example, both colonial ones like the British but also geographical type ones like the Ottoman.

History explains politics. You cannot understand politics without understanding history.

I'm sure history also explains other subjects like architecture and art and literature.

We should INCREASE the history taught (and do away with maths.)

[Flatypus]

When you read it through, history is there but they're putting the emphasis more on sequence than on details of any specific period out of context. I can't remember whether we did any history at Elementay or not. I do know we did 1485 to 1715 in Secondary (and it's the other O level I failed apart from Scripture). These are little kids under consideration with not much grasp of long term time, so it may be better for them to get a grasp of overall development, ideally world development, than try to deal with short periods of national history out of context and really depending on details beyond their understanding unless they know the broader picture. To an extent it sounds like undoing some of the over-emphasis on simple facts without much background that came in under Thatcher.

[Patrick]

It is interesting that the article has a crusty top to set the "I Don't Believe It" vein throbbing only to disabuse the ideal further down. It gets it read though! Hopefully the relaxation on what can be taught will give the teachers back the opportunity to "Teach" in the way that we used to be? To spend afternoons on Nature Walks in the woodland around my school (for instance) or making cakes, or learning basic French! (Thirty years before Government thought about it).

Personally though I would rather they taught children to read, write and spell through the old fashioned methods before giving them a background on how easy it will be to look up their GCSE essays using the internet - rather than the other way around!

Employers are already complaining that new recruits, supposedly with degrees are arriving at their office unable to spell! Or even construct legible sentences - this will just increase with these ideals surely?

[Flatypus]

I read it that way. Details can come when they're old enough to understand details. Otherwise you're teaching propaganda, not history. What did surprise me was just that Dreary Wail headline and opener in, of all things, the Grauniad! It sounds no more than a return to teaching with use of all methods to hand, instead of rote indoctrination.

[stephan]

Perhaps politicians,world leaders and all those in `power` might like to reflect on this.

I`m sure many `studied` history-but how many have learned from it??

[Flatypus]

One person who evidently didn't learn was whoever wrote and sang that Vietnam song 19. There's no comparison.

My favourite anti-war song though is this one: And the band played 'Waltzing Matilda' because it's so easy to forget that they didn't fight for fun.

This is slower than I'm used to but if anybody has the right bitterness it's Shane McGowan.

[housesparrow]

Mar 25, 2009 13:39:11 GMT Flatypus said:

When you read it through, history is there but they're putting the emphasis more on sequence than on details of any specific period out of context..

That's how we did it and I think we'd worked our way from 1066 to Charles II by the time I'd left aged 15. It was very dull, all dates and battles and religious/political power struggles with very little social history, which was really the only part that interested me. I can't say I really came out much the wiser.

I

[jean]

At secondary school we started with the Sumerians and finished somewhere in the nineteenth century.

I don't remember learning any history at primary school at all .

But at an early stage in my life I acquired a copy of Little Arthur's History of England, which I still have, and which is very useful for sorting out the characters in Shakespeare's more complicated history plays.

[Flatypus]

Mar 26, 2009 8:49:24 GMT housesparrow said:

Mar 25, 2009 13:39:11 GMT Flatypus said:

When you read it through, history is there but they're putting the emphasis more on sequence than on details of any specific period out of context..

That's how we did it and I think we'd worked our way from 1066 to Charles II by the time I'd left aged 15. It was very dull, all dates and battles and religious/political power struggles with very little social history, which was really the only part that interested me. I can't say I really came out much the wiser.

I

Like I said - History was one of the O levels I failed. We covered 1485 (Henry VII) to 1715 (Anne) and it made very little sense because so much of it depended on international history by then. Unless you knew the complexities of relations between the Holy Roman Empire and France, half the wars that Britain got drawn into don't make a lot of sense, likewise the way England was to Spain in 1500 as it is to America in 2000 explains a lot about why they were at each other's throat in the 1580s (so maybe there's hope yet!) and similarly Holland in 1600 at war by the mid-1600s. I wanted to do 'Ancient History' (actually England 600-1066) but only thickoes were allowed. I forget what we did instead - could have been Technical Drawing option against Geography which I wangled to Classical Greek.

I did have to do Roman history Death of Sulla to death of Nero - ie how the Empire wuz dun and that was great fun - like Chicago 1920-1940 but longer.

As a result I love historical novels set anywhen in the Ancient period or the Middle Ages and I thoroughly recommend Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolò multinational business intrigue heptalogy set 1460-1480 everywhere except England - from Reyjavik to Timbuktu, Tehran and Moscow but mostly Bruges and Edinburgh and Colleen McCullough's First Man in Rome (Marius to Caesar's assissination)

I've learnt far more from well-researched novels (and stuff about early Christianity) than school, partly because there's so much sleaze that schools didn't want to teach (but don't believe everything Suetonius wrote)

[Patrick]

Well well...............

" History will remain a 'central part' of England's primary school curriculum, Children's Secretary Ed Balls has said.

The idea children would learn to use Twitter and social networking sites at the expense of the Victorians and the Tudors was "just complete nonsense".

On the history content of the primary school curriculum, Mr Balls said: "It is important for me to set the record straight."

There would be no either/or choice between learning history and learning information technology, he said.

"But it's also absurd that children are stuck in a dark age of technology when they learn history", he said.

The sooner children learnt computer skills, the better, he added.

Children will be taught the broad chronology of major events in Britain and the wider world - from ancient civilisations through the Romans, the War of the Roses, the industrial revolution and the world wars to the modern day.