To think this was an inappropriate school task

[Lalalabrador]

My year 8 daughter was asked to write an essay today on the question How did India benefit from colonialism and how was it harmed by it? I’m pretty gobsmacked. I’m a professional historian and sad that something so intellectually bankrupt is being taught to young people.

"It asks children to make a moral judgement as to whether railways and an efficient civil service can make up for the disruption of culture and political development and grand theft of resources. "

Does it? Where does it? I don't see where it asks anything about moral judgements or saying all things are equal.

I'm not sure that I agree that history should contain no value judgments. I absolutely want my dd to make value judgments on things like slavery, colonialism, the Holocaust, apartheid etc. Yes, they should be her own judgments, and not those just handed down by the teacher, but I certainly don't want her to have a neutral response to past atrocities. I want her to know that they were wrong.

I would say the function of history is to make students aware of how atrocities come to be, not judgement after the fact that this or that atrocity was wrong. Atrocities are only symptoms. It's more important to examine the disease.

It's useful to present students with primary source material so that they can identify thoughts, ideas, and patterns of reasoning rather than focusing on end results.

@FunkBus

When 12 year olds are presented with a task that invites them to find the good and the bad in anything they tend to come up with lists on both sides of the ledger.

In this case, they are going to mention railways, the bones of an education system, a lingua franca, a functioning civil service and post office, and compare that list with cultural loss, political disruption, economic exploitation (all stuff they probably don't really understand) and the creation of ongoing regional tension with Pakistan. Plus famines. They are invited to make a moral judgement in their conclusion whether they realise it or not. It is unavoidable.

The question might be tackled adequately by students several years older, with a much higher word limit.

Not RTFT but my year 8 child also had this as a project during the Autumn term. (They could choose the country) I thought the whole point of it was to show them that there weren't really any benefits or the benefits did not outweigh the costs. I only took History up to A-Level but I thought it was a good question.

TheSandman

When did the truth become an 'left-wing anti-British stereotype'?

About the same time we were stopped looking at things in a balanced way and taking in the whole picture.

"They are invited to make a moral judgement in their conclusion whether they realise it or not. It is unavoidable."

I don't see how you can possibly come to that conclusion. It's an absurdly sweeping statement with no evidence whatsoever to back it up

@june2007

There was a programme a ear ago that asked this question. One positive. (according to the indian lady.) was the north can communicate with the south. Also in the 70,s when Indians were sent out of Ghana would they have come to the uk for refuge if thre had been no empire?

You mean Uganda.

So you think Indian people being forced to go to Uganda to build railways is a positive. If there was no empire, these people wouldn’t have been forced to go to Uganda to provid extremely cheap labour.

It may be that her conclusion is that they didn’t benefit.

If your view and the view you wish to be taught and understood is that there was no benefit then the word ‘how’ is the only problem here I think.
I would not assume as pp that half the marks would be awarded for benefits and half for harm.
The question as posed allows for ‘benefit not at all and harm lost as follows’ or ‘benefit not at all and these things often touted as benefits really weren’t for the following reasons and harms, as follows (long list).
You would still have a problem with ‘how’ which some, and children more than others, will suppose to mean there were benefits.
I think a lot here would also depend on the post essay feedback/discussion/reflection.

@MoiJeJous I sort of agree with you re the wording, but this is for year 8 so needs to be simple and straight forward, 'explore' means different things to 12 year olds.

As for your question re the holocaust, I am in no way excusing a vile evil set of acts but for some people there were positives / advantages, if yo were suddenly the only baker in town or the only tailor then you benefitted.

For an argument that could be expanded into a thesis then the question, "would the state of Isreal exist without the holocaust?"

Haven’t read the whole thread but I’m assuming someone has said What Did The Romans Do For Us?

The Romans were colonisers.

@Bluesername

Making a balanced argument means you talk about each viewpoint, show you understand what the different arguments are, and explain why you believe them to be correct or not. It doesn't mean you have to believe anything in particular. The question is to get the pupils to think around the subject and decide for themselves how to answer. If there were no benefits, the student can say so. They can also refer to what others believed to be benefits, and say why many people now see it very differently.

This - absolutely.

It baffles me that a practising historian doesn’t know this. I last wrote a history essay 30 years ago and that’s how I would approach this question.

As a teaching tool the question has huge drawbacks because it plants an idea, an implication, that there were negatives and positives in equal measure to the experience of the colonised. Children in Year 8 do not have the intellectual capacity to unpack this question adequately.

Yes, this.

Sashh
But it would be immoral to investigate something that is ideologically evil like the Holocaust and find an incidental beneficial by-product for someone, more trade for some shopkeepers, and ask the kids to consider both together - especially choosing pros and cons phraseology.

You have to encourage children to identify moral crimes as unsanctionable, before any other kind of learning can follow. And, imo, re the OP post, they are just too young in Year 8 to be considering the question on Colonialism which had been set.

I think rather than evaluating the legacy it would be useful or essential, to start looking at democracy and rights and how when there isn't democracy big trading companies can arrive on a distant land mass and do trading deals with the local leaders, which become sanctioned by the European governments ruling the countries the companies come from. Then you get administrations and governance being set up to make trade work smoothly, which can't work well because the consent and democracy wasn't there at the outset. I think it's too advanced a task to be doing pros and cons. It would depend on one's perspective, and this aspect needs to be taught too. Better to work on the core history skills of looking at primary sources/fact and opinion; looking at how the passage of years leads to new bias and interpreting history in the light of new ways of looking at things. Just use colonialism as one example of how things go wrong when democracy and human rights are not the first positives to be put in place.

I would say the function of history is to make students aware of how atrocities come to be, not judgement after the fact that this or that atrocity was wrong. Atrocities are only symptoms. It's more important to examine the disease.

But talking about atrocities as the symptoms of a disease still implies value judgement. If we don't ultimately put value judgments on anything at all, then why does it even matter how anything came to be, and what's the point of studying it?

Surely one of the benefits of studying history is to help us avoid repeating the mistakes of the past? If we are not going to acknowledge anything as a mistake, then what do we gain by studying a collection of facts about stuff that doesn't really matter.

Are you really saying that you don't make any judgment in your mind about the Holocaust in terms of whether it was right or wrong? That you look at it merely as a fact of history, neither good nor bad? Or is that suspendment of judgment just an artificial thing that you expect people to apply in their history lessons, and they then resume normal human reactions when the bell goes?

And yes, maybe I'm being absolutist about it, but fuck moral relativism, it is a normal human reaction to think that the murder of millions of innocent people was wrong, and no amount of philosophical argument will persuade me otherwise.

If you don't look at pros and cons of past mistakes but only the cons, then people will assume in future choices that they are not doing anything wrong because they can see positives

History should help us understand the why if things . You can't do that by making it black and white

I see the OP has disappeared in order to avoid giving the title of her new book.

The question is worded this way because it is thought provoking. You can't pose questions to children the way you do to adults because they won't understand. It appears blunt and inappropriate because the teacher wants the class to debate the issue and for them to take into account they there's more negatives than positives - but they have to consider both sides. It's teaching them to think critically.

This post feels like a teacher bashing thread in disguise.

History should help us understand the why if things

I agree, but the "why" of the British colonisation of India had nothing to do with any benefits for the colonised people. We did not go in there out of the goodness of our hearts. The positives that motivated us at the time were the benefits to the British, which are not part of the analysis in this essay.

To be clear, I'm not saying that we shouldn't acknowledge that there may have been some incidental positives to the colonised countries. My objection is to the way in which the question has been phrased and the judgments that are implicit in that.

I recommend In Defence of History by Evans

Evans shows us why history is both possible and necessary. His demolition of the wilder claims of post-modern historians, who deny the possibility of any realistic grasp of history, seeks to be witty and well-balanced. He takes us into the historians' workshop to show us just how good history gets written, and explains the deadly political dangers of losing a historical perspective on the way we live our lives.

Good for instilling a bit of critical thinking.

AlexaShutUp Before judging from a moral perspective, you need to be able to look at the facts.

To really push the learning of aforementioned school essay the child needs to refer to their broader, factual sources for a balanced view and then analyse and discuss the meaning of 'benefit' and 'harm' because whatever stance you take will depend on the theories and sources they seek to draw on. I think this essay question is an excellent opportunity to question how history is crafted and understood and to deconstruct the essay question.

something so intellectually bankrupt is being taught to young people.
It's intellectually 'bankrupt' not to look at the bigger picture and not to question the prevailing moralising politics of one's times, in our case left and right wing populism.

Before judging from a moral perspective, you need to be able to look at the facts.

I completely agree, but some people seem to be arguing that we should not judge from a moral perspective at all.

I'm afraid I don't think that many year 8 children will have the critical thinking skills to be able to deconstruct the question in any meaningful way. They will merely accept the premise in the question, that there were both benefits and harms. I would prefer to see a question without that flawed premise built in.

You have to be at the appropriate stage on your learning journey to analyse the question which OP's daughter had been set. Year 8 is too young to have the skills to weigh up and balance these arguments. These are arguments and not a matter of certainty, as you could never know what would have happened, what would have been developed and invented, if there had not been that particular colonial administration.

When children grapple with information to big and beyond their experiences - rather than some appropriate and context-based manageable documents as primary resources - they can only make lists of fors and against. I don't think they'll really be able to apply their burgeoning moral awareness re issues, nor their critical skills. It's not like critically appraising an author's use of language by thinking about what effect it has on you the reader. This history task involves critical evaluation with words and ideas to which they are unconnected emotionally and via experience. Well, if their grandparents or great grandparents do experience colonialism, then the ideas of these relations presented by the pupils who are their grandchildren/ great grandchildren, should take centre-stage in the lesson. These testimonies would be useful primary materials.

I do think any critical evaluation is based in a person's own system of ethics/values/ morality. Evaluation involves referencing concepts of what is valuable, as that individual has constructed it in their mind, of what is good/bad or better/lacking.

What kind of historian wants kids taught in black and white, good and evil terms?
You don’t want skewed but you also don’t want anything you personally don’t agree with or deem of sufficient importance to be taught?
You’re at it.

I don't want things taught in black/white, good/evil terms. Of course not. History is complex, and people need to understand multiple perspectives and nuances in order to make any sense of it.

However, I don't want it to be taught with a complete absence of moral judgement either. If none of it matters, then there is no point in studying it. I want children to be taught in such a way that they are able to evaluate the facts and arrive at their own moral judgement.

I don't want them to be asked leading questions in which a particular perspective is implied, at an age when they haven't yet developed the critical thinking skills that will enable them to deconstruct such a question or consider alternative perspectives.

They were benefits too. I come from Mexico and as much as I hate colonialism I can't denied they were benefits even if I hate the way they treated the native Mexicans.

A proper history student should learn to investigate, not accept what their teacher tells them.
How can students be outraged against the moral injustices of the past if they don't actually explore them for themselves?