To be shocked that 16 year old didn't know about apartheid

[biddlybop]

Recently, I was having a conversation with a teen in the family and mentioned apartheid (think we were talking about films and books based on true events). They asked what apartheid was. I explained, and they had never heard of it.

I was genuinely shocked. We were taught about it in school - in both history, and English. I'm 30, so I wasn't educated decades ago.

Is this not in the curriculum anymore, or is it just her school? I think it's really important that young people are taught about these events, especially as racism is still such a problem.

By all means, be in your patriotic bubble and enjoy the success Britain had over the centuries and I doubt not a lot of people won't acknowledge inventions made by Brunel, Stevenson and other great people. But you wear blinders if you can't see that Britain has many faults and encouraged behaviours over the centuries which aren't that favourable.

I would guess that most 16 year olds are more likely to have heard of Mandela than Brunel, just from general knowledge.

Obviously there has been a lot of controversy over the National Trust including information in slavery and empire in their displays, but I don’t think the complaints are coming from teenagers.

@mustlovegin

it was created by politicians, using their interpretations of history, to justify all sorts of things

The sense of belonging to your own group and attachment to the land is not 'invented by politicians'. It's a feeling, call it patriotism if you wish, but it's definitely not a 'construct'

Oh I absolutely feel belonging to several communities and geographical locations, where myself or my family have lived. Some are within the UK and some elsewhere. But none of those communities are ‘Britain’. Britain by its very definition is a political boundary - only a couple of hundred years old at most, and has never been remotely monocultural - so if, as you’ve implied, you feel this personal connection specifically to Britain, it must be to a political construct. Which is why I find patriotism very strange, tbh.

I’m amused you are accusing people of being not objective enough to teach history while at the same time admitting history is by it’s very nature subjective!!

@mustlovegin

the history taught is very white

Mollymoostoo what do you mean by this? Do you mean that it's very 'white' because the majority of the population in Britain is white? It's hardly surprising then.

I'm afraid to say that your whole post illustrates why some people should never be allowed to hold a teaching position in this country as they cannot grasp what objectivity or impartiality means.

British history is the history of colonisation.

From the first human who walked on the land it's history is about the way human tribes colonised. To grow, to gain social advantage, to gain land/ wealth/ power

To pretend that history is objectivity or impartiality written is to pretend history is not written by the victor.

Monocultural is completely the wrong term in my post above haha but you know what I mean - culturally homogenous!!

Nobody wants to ignore mistakes, but why would you want to emphasise them and hammer them down children's and people's throats at a time when our focus should be 100% on much more pressing issues?

Because we keep making the same mistakes, not learning from them. I can't think of many things in what I know of human history, besides genocide, which compares to the misery caused by the forced relocation of peoples. We can sit and watch Syrians fleeing their civil war, Rohingyas fleeing their own genocide or whatever, and wash our hands of it because we didn't personally cause it and it's someone else's problem.

But then we PCP a brand new petrol SUV, and jet off to Barcelona for the weekend. We order a 32 oz steak from the 'challenge' menu at the local Flaming Grill, and don't even finish it. We buy cheap hamburgers for the kids which have come from Brazilian ex-rainforest. We won't insulate our homes because we don't want to spoil our beautiful period property, and would rather continue burning gas to overheat it because heat pumps don't work, do they?

Every single one of those actions, in aggregate, will result in somebody being forced to relocate from 'their land' in the future because of climate change.

‘…so if, as you’ve implied, you feel this personal connection specifically to Britain, it must be to a political construct. Which is why I find patriotism very strange, tbh.’

Why would this be odd? We have agreed to be a nation state and live under the same laws and government. We have a social contract with each other to come to decisions together, to provide each other with healthcare, social care, an income to meet our basic needs, to protect our shared environment, to provide support if one of us is forced abroad or threatened by a foreign state while abroad.

If we don’t feel a sense of personal connection and responsibility to the rest of the nation our society won’t hold together.

History lessons teach people to analyse source material, understand different view points and think about the influences (geographical, political, beliefs, culture) that led to a particular event.

It's not about teaching children that a particular event was good or bad (although there are times when this will be blindingly obvious).

You don't learn about victories and injustices as victories and injustices, you learn about how to make an argument to back up your conclusions using historical data.

A personal sense of patriotism, or lack of it, is rather beside the point.

Merrymouse, yes, I think you have summed all that up perfectly.

History lessons aren’t there to meet people’s political goals.

[quote MadameMinimes]@Ibelieveinghosts

I think it’s important to point out that the whole “Stalin killed more people than Hitler” thing is old Cold War propaganda. The fact is that around 90% or more of the people who went into the gulag survived and the best estimates for the number that died in the gulags is somewhere in the region of 1.5 million over a period of 20 or so years. The nazis killed 6 million Jews and a total of around 11 million civilians, with most of those deaths happening between 1941-1945. Stalin was an awful leader, and his crimes are horrific enough, but during the Cold War the number of people he killed was dramatically overestimated for ideological reasons.

We should not be teaching children that Stalin killed more people than Hitler because it isn’t true. Even if you add the famine deaths to his “toll”, which is a fundamentally different thing to systematically gassing people to death IMO, the numbers still don’t stack up.[/quote]
Well it depends which figures you look at I suppose and what you count as culpable deaths -do you count combat deaths? Deaths arising out of the Cold War era etc? and obviously factor in the different er record keeping systems. The Germans were probably a lot more efficient in this. I suppose we could also compare with Mao. Maybe the important thing to teach Kids is look at all numbers objectively.

Re witch hunts, it’s not about numbers it’s about the way people who could be classed as different are treated. Very relevant to today.

Lies, damn lies and statistics eh?

@Ibelieveinghosts

I mean, you could probably scrape together a number higher than 11 million by adding in all of the deaths from Gulags, famines and all of the combat deaths in the Cold War but the question is why would you? The original estimates of 15 or 20 million deaths in Gulags and through dekulakisation were never based on any figures at all. They came from guesstimates by defectors who based their numbers on hearsay and anecdote.

More importantly, if you use that measure to judge Stalin, then you have to apply the same to Hitler and hold him responsible for all of the 75 million or so people who died in World War Two.

I do teach students to look at numbers objectively. That why I may seem a bit nit-picky over figures that were once accepted as “accurate”. Whether Hitler of Stalin killed more people is not a matter of “which figures you look at”. It is objectively the case that Hitler killed more people than Stalin. You may have been taught differently at school, but the historians then were mistaken. Some things are up for discussion and open to debate, but barring some fundamental new evidence, which of those two leaders killed more people is not one of them. The figures are conclusive.

YABU, I'm in my 30's and I have no idea what it is.

You'll be telling us Solzhenitsyn isn't to be taken uncriticially as 100% accurate gospel next. /s

@ThinWomansBrain

I was at school in the 60's - 70's - aware of it through current affairs in the 70's, but can still recall being shocked to learn a bit about it in later years at primary school; we had these colour coded learning and comprehension cards, and I distinctly remember one about the death of Martin Luther King - but other than that, no formal teaching about it. (Does anyone else remember those SRA reading cards, I used to love them!) Equally, although I knew bits about the war, there was little formal teaching about it - I didn't learn about the holocaust or the occupation of France until mid teens, when on a french exchange stay. Most history featured on Romans, Tudors & Stuarts - with little joining of the gaps in between!

www.mheducation.com.au/schools/literacy/reading-laboratory

Yes I remember the SRA Laboratory Reading Comprehension cards. Encountered them late Junior School as I moved to a new area. I found them quite Americanised.

@WhiskyXray

I wasnt taught about it until I took history A Level voluntarily.

@Twelveshoes

‘…so if, as you’ve implied, you feel this personal connection specifically to Britain, it must be to a political construct. Which is why I find patriotism very strange, tbh.’

Why would this be odd? We have agreed to be a nation state and live under the same laws and government. We have a social contract with each other to come to decisions together, to provide each other with healthcare, social care, an income to meet our basic needs, to protect our shared environment, to provide support if one of us is forced abroad or threatened by a foreign state while abroad.

If we don’t feel a sense of personal connection and responsibility to the rest of the nation our society won’t hold together.

I think there’s a difference between a sense of social responsibility, even feeling glad to have been born into and able to contribute towards a democratic society, and feeling love and pride towards the political boundaries I was born into by chance. I find it odd that people feel so much love and pride for that political entity that they are uncomfortable discussing things people who happened to be born in the same nation state did in the past, to the point they’d try to censor those things.

And all history is about political goals. ESPECIALLY the school curriculum!! Why do you think people get so frothy about it if it’s just about source analysis skills?! School history plays a big role in imparting our national narrative to the population, as determined by whoever is in power at the time. Hence the point of this thread in the first place - what should be part of that narrative is always going to be contested.

‘School history plays a big role in imparting our national narrative to the population, as determined by whoever is in power at the time.’

It really doesn’t. We study very little history at school and there is a great deal of variation between schools.

You can’t make a national narrative out of it.

‘I think there’s a difference between a sense of social responsibility, even feeling glad to have been born into and able to contribute towards a democratic society, and feeling love and pride towards the political boundaries I was born into by chance.’

Not sure what this has got to do with what I said. We can have a sense of social responsibility towards people all over the world.

But our social contract is between us and the rest of the people we are part of a democracy with now. We are consenting to be part of that democracy together and we maintain that democracy.

It isn’t about whether or not you are born into it. It is about contributing to that democracy so that it continues to exist. If you don’t actually care about it anymore than you care about, say, Iraq or Peru, why even bother worrying about the British schooling system in particular?

There is an absolute chasm of difference in the knowledge teens have, people too come to mention it. Some people grow up in households where history and current affairs are discussed all the time, some don't.

@Twelveshoes

‘School history plays a big role in imparting our national narrative to the population, as determined by whoever is in power at the time.’

It really doesn’t. We study very little history at school and there is a great deal of variation between schools.

You can’t make a national narrative out of it.

So why did Gove make such a fuss about reorganising the curriculum to foreground ‘British values’ and tell teachers to stop showing blackadder? Why would he care? There is very little variation in the key topics - Romans, tudors, wwii, Wwi, maybe wwii again. Specifically, the bits of those periods that depict Britain in a certain way (plucky Britain standing firm against huge odds) and encourage us to participate in those rituals of the national story - Poppy wearing, Remembrance Sunday…

@Twelveshoes

‘I think there’s a difference between a sense of social responsibility, even feeling glad to have been born into and able to contribute towards a democratic society, and feeling love and pride towards the political boundaries I was born into by chance.’

Not sure what this has got to do with what I said. We can have a sense of social responsibility towards people all over the world.

But our social contract is between us and the rest of the people we are part of a democracy with now. We are consenting to be part of that democracy together and we maintain that democracy.

It isn’t about whether or not you are born into it. It is about contributing to that democracy so that it continues to exist. If you don’t actually care about it anymore than you care about, say, Iraq or Peru, why even bother worrying about the British schooling system in particular?

Of course, I agree with everything you’ve said, maybe I didn’t articulate it very well. But none of that comes under patriotism, surely? I care about British education because it’s the education system I have experienced, that my taxes pay for, that my kids will go through, that I have a small hope of changing for the better through my vote and my work. Not because of some abstract love/pride for Britain, which is what PP seems to be referring to with arguments that we shouldn’t ‘turn children against Britain’ by teaching them about colonialism.

So why did Gove make such a fuss about reorganising the curriculum to foreground ‘British values’ and tell teachers to stop showing blackadder?

Political grand standing.

I remember doing an essay question on what are British values for a university course. There aren't one set of British values it depends on your individual background, where you live and the people around you.

‘Romans, tudors, wwii, Wwi, maybe wwii again.’

Neither me nor my kids did the Romans at school. DD and DS went to different schools. DD didn’t do WW1. I only did WW1 because I took GCSE modern world history, which was 30 people in a massive school.

DD did WW2 at GCSE and it was all about life in Germany. It didn’t cover the U.K. at all.

Politicians go on about history, English and PSE because it allows them to make nonsense speeches to the public which have nothing to do with reality and don’t involve them having to do anything.

We do the Tudors because the English reformation is really important. It isn’t anything to be proud of in particular unless you are very into some kind of religious sectarian group or like smashing up statues.

@feelingsareweird if you point out to children other Empires that existed at the time e.g. French with the troubles that have stemmed from it and other Empires in history e g. Roman then how can children be turned against Britain?

The statement is illogical.

@RedMarauder

So why did Gove make such a fuss about reorganising the curriculum to foreground ‘British values’ and tell teachers to stop showing blackadder?

Political grand standing.

I remember doing an essay question on what are British values for a university course. There aren't one set of British values it depends on your individual background, where you live and the people around you.

Yes that’s the point. And the curriculum now has to include these nonsense British values as defined by the Tory party. Because school history curriculums all over the world are a direct reflection of political agendas.