History is a joke

[ScatterKitty]

AIBU to wish History lessons focused less on Henry VIII (or British monarchy in general) and more on the history which led to current conflicts and issues which affect current affairs?

Was anyone taught about the Israel/Palestine situation? Or the history of India or Pakistan? Or even Windrush and UK Black history?

How am I meant to explain to my kids what's going on in the world when we were never taught and all they learn about is British monarchy, Romans etc?

I've been trying to find a decent explanation online with no luck. Can anyone help?

Plenty of information online for you to read up on. That's what you could do if you want to teach them something that isn't taught in their schools.

Have you read the primary history national curriculum? Very clearly written by middle class, middle aged, privately educated white men who think the only history to learn is that which created their positions of comfort. Frustrating as a teacher and curriculum leader. We show and discuss Newsround frequently to widen children’s’ understanding.

Having said that, my Year 3s do adore learning about Henry VIII, probably because all of the beheading.

As others have said, at GCSE and A level there are a large variety of modules teachers can choose from, usually to some extent focusing on their own area of interest, which is fair enough. In my school we do a lot of modern, post ww2 history including the first gulf war. In RS we cover 9/11 etc as part of social justice and the (wrongly interpreted in that case) Islamic concept of Jihad.
Schools cannot cover everything in the time available and Newsround for younger children is a great way parents can show their children what's going on, and learn about it themselves if necessary. Why is it up to schools to do EVERYTHING?

To answer the OP, schools do teach those things.

Teaching the Middle East is really hard though. We teach the Edexcel GCSE unit on the Arab-Israeli conflict but it’s really hard to get textbooks. Pearson have now withdrawn their textbooks permanently. After their first edition (that was not perfect but relatively balanced) they faced a huge backlash from pro-Israeli groups and had to issue a second edition that was extensively edited in favour of the Israelis with some really egregious distortions in places. That then had to be withdrawn because of complaints from Palestinian groups. We are still using our first editions but at some point will need to make a choice about whether we can carry on teaching it. It’s just not economical for publishers to make textbooks when fewer than thirty schools teach the unit and they have to keep making revised editions due to complaints of bias.

It’s such a shame as it makes it unlikely that more schools will choose to teach it and we may well see the few schools that do jumping ship to something else.

I think it’s because things that happened here give them context for their immediate surroundings - e.g where we used to live there was an Abbey road, Abbey Gardens, the Abbey school but no bloody Abbey! When you know about the dissolution of the monasteries you don’t need to even question why that is the case.

I do agree though that there should be more teaching of world history that is tied up with Britain e.g Churchill and Palestine. My big bug bear is that they learn nothing about Northern Ireland - I didn’t study this til I did my History degree. It’s totally fundamental to our identity as Brits and most people on the mainland see is as something that happened ‘over there’.

That sounds really interesting. I did history to A Level but the most modern events we covered were JFK, Vietnam etc.

History is a joke.

Must admit, old Henry's codpiece did make us giggle in lessons.

My kids four years ago learned about Reagan and Gorbachev and the fall of the Berlin Wall in their GCSE history. I was outraged that I was a teenager/young adult at the time and was elderly enough to remember ‘history’ ;-)

It's sad to see that so many Brits don't seem to have the first idea of the Israel vs Palestine conflict - seeing that Britain started the whole mess. It was Lord Balfour who convinced the British government of the day (1917?) to give away a country that Britain had no rights over to 'a people without a country'. Never mind all the Palestinians who were already living there. And here we are...

I did my GCSE’s 28 years ago in Wales
and I did the Arab Israeli conflict, and the Suez crisis.

That’s so interesting RE the textbook issue - for what it’s worth I studied the Israel/Palestinian conflict for GCSE History in the early 00s (apparently our exam board required the study of an ‘ongoing conflict’) I now have a Social Sciences doctorate but I still can’t fully follow the news on this topic!

You can just Google and read some articles.

As far as I'm aware British/Irish history isn't taught in schools outside of NI. Might be an idea for that to be taught as well.

I have never experienced a lesson on Henry Viii. Or the British monarchy with the exception of King John and the Magna Carta

Our history was on medicine, China, USA (particularly native americans,) and victorian reformers, in which Queen Victoria was not even mentioned - it was corn laws, work houses, Irish potato famine, etc

I think you are out of touch - there is a lot of history in the world, and obviously schools can only teach a fraction of 1% of it

At A level I did European history, mostly German, such as the rise of the nazis, the siege of Berlin,etc

My DD1 did this for GCSE in 2015.

I couldn't agree more (and I'm a teacher!). Every single time there's a push to make history teaching more relevant there's a real push back from the media - woke lefties want to remove winston Churchill from the curriculum/ wokesters call to 'de-colonise' the curriculum etc.

When in reality it's unthinkable that a German student wouldn't know about the holocaust or a South African student wouldn't know about apartheid, yet we have thousands of people with no real idea of our role in Ireland, the formation of Israel, the boer war, concentration camps in Kenya etc. I've even spoken to people who believe that Britain joined ww2 to stop what was happening to the Jews. The curriculum needs a drastic rethink because knowing your own history (the good and bad) isn't woke nonsense; it's vital to understand things as they are now.

And don't get me started on this bloody push on British values! It reminds me of Americans singing the national anthem - as if democracy and rule of law are specifically British things!

It's sad to see that so many Brits don't seem to have the first idea of the Israel vs Palestine conflict - seeing that Britain started the whole mess.

Are you actually surprised

As far as I'm aware British/Irish history isn't taught in schools outside of NI. Might be an idea for that to be taught as well.

Yep, more may understand what it actually was/is

The Vikings are crucial to our understanding of our own identity. They made English into a global language, and we benefit from that every day. They were a model of integration and multiculturism. They were worldwide explorers and traders. I think they are a very important group of people to understand

I was at school about 15 years ago and in secondary school we learned about the Holocaust, the Empire, slavery and The Troubles in year 9-11. I think we did touch upon Israel/Palestine slightly as part of the Holocaust syllabus. But most syllabus only last a term, some terms are shorter than others and there’s so much to teach.

Things that you have suggested could be been better suited to some of the PHSRE/citizenship/politics but again we only really focus on Britain/Europe in our schools.

Have you looked at the curriculum in your school? If your child is in a secondary school, their history curriculum will have been sequenced and rationalised. There will be no “let’s just teach everyone about Henry VIII, cos we want to” about it. I would be very surprised if your school doesn’t touch on issues that affect modern Britain. As for teaching Israel/Palestine, that is an absolute minefield depending on where you teach and I’m not suprised that schools don’t cover it. Opinions like this really wind me up as they are so clearly ill informed and not based on any sort of reality as to what is going on in school.

Look as adults you are responsible for educating yourselves. You are grown ups with the ability to read, watch the news and documentaries. Take some responsibility.

It was confusing as there was no explanation over what the beef is over.

A level History in 1984
British History from 1906 to the present day
European History from 1870 to the present day.

Didn't even do the Elizabethans / Shakespeare for English Lit. That was modern too.

It’s easier to get kids to pass exams if you just teach them the same things over and over again and just add more details as the exams get harder. In Scotland I am sure I studied the Scottish Wars of Independence every single year in secondary school, you can imagine how raging I was to have to take a module in it at Uni.

On the other hand though I do think the curriculum could have been worse. For example I remember doing a project on Martin Luther King Jr in P6 and then we did the civil rights movement as part of standard grade history. I also remember modern studies having a huge project on the Vietnam war, and a project on the war on terror and then a project on China which was really insightful.

Surprisingly we didn’t do any WW2 topics, instead we did the rise of Nazism in Germany which again was an important topic as was the first time I had the idea of propaganda explained to me.

That being said history and modern studies were my favourite subjects at school and my best teachers taught those subjects. I went on to do them at degree level, so maybe I do look back on them positively.