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?

Yes it does.

Traditionally academics saw history as one generation past. The world moves so quickly now I think most people would agree 10-20 years is sufficient

What I meant was that English school students learn no Scottish history . Except for Mary QoS. In a very biased way...

There's an actual rule for school specs. DS not here to check with but I think it's 40 years.

Oh, English schools not paying attention to anything Scottish ....tjat doesn't surprise me.

Thats not correct. There are parts of the GCSE specifications that go all the way to the present day. The breadth studies cover history right to the present. I teach migration and it includes Brexit.

Henry Vlll is far more interesting though!

Yeah, seconded. This is brilliant as is 'You're Dead to Me.'

We teach our primary children about Windrush. It's Black History Month and we have a very multi-cultural demographic.

But that's our choice as a school. The primary history curriculum is dire. Very fact-driven and dry.

Oh right. This was A level. But I bow to your wisdom.

Ds curriculum for history is about as varied as you can get for over 2 hours per week!

They look at things around slavery, anti semitism and civil rights movements amongst other things.

but schools can only do so much.

Well it would be quite hard to teach the entirety of human history, or even just British history, well. For me, any subject at school is just the briefest of introductions. If you're sufficiently interested, you'll continue learning outside the classroom or return to it in later years.

I did gcse and a level history. I cant rememeber exactly which years I did things but I remember learning about civil rights movement in the US. The romanovs and other Russian history, I'm sure my a level paper was on Russian leaders. Henry VIII. Cold War. Ww2, not just europe, Vietnam/japan. Jack the ripper. In primary im sure we did more general, vikings, Egypt, Romans etc.
I think the year after us they changed exam boards and had to learn local history for one paper.
To be honest I think it makes sense to learn about your own history before you branch into others.

Not sure about the UK as I'm not from the UK, and I only went to uni in the UK (in a subject not related to history), but in my home country I had great history classes.

However, this might be an unpopular opinion, but school can't teach you EVERYTHING you have to/want to know. There is a lot of information available on anything - online and books, so when I want to learn something new, I read a lot.

No it probably should not but you have to wonder at people who claim to know nothing about the world around them. If genuinely interested do something about it. Whatever you think of how the history curriculum is drawn up how does that stop people watching the news, reading papers or books? Also, it's impossible for schools to teach everything.

You could teach history in different ways. You could focus on what you think would engage kids to trigger a love of history. You could focus more on the psychology of key players in history to make it interesting for those who like to understand people. You could decide what history still resonates strongly today. You could just teach what we have always taught.

I personally think History should be engaging to trigger the love of history but what engages will vary.

"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?"

Are you really saying that you can't explain something to your own kids because nobody ever taught you about it?

You are a grown adult with all human knowledge literally in the palm of your hand. Look it up.

Good grief op, unfortunately it is just impossible to teach everything. The history of what we call civilisation - along with debates about what that word consists of - has been pushed back to deep in the Neolithic. No doubt conflicts go back that far too. The number of peoples living in that junction of 3 continents is extraordinary. There is no such thing as ‘original’ owners of land: perhaps that is what needs to be emphasised.

But how and when? An awful lot of primary education is about making memory and analysis possible and the three r’s, not actually retaining complex information forever. If you want to join the small army of people trying to get teens interested in anything beyond mating and status rituals, I’m sure they’d be grateful.

I also think it helps children a lot when parents say “I don’t know, let’s find out together” and help their child find the answer.

not all information will be handed to you on a plate but now more than ever it is easy to find information if you try!

It’s possible that it used to be the case but when the new A Level history specs came in there was an option that ended in 2007, which was less than a decade old at that time. Schools might choose not to study more recent stuff but it is an option in the specs. I think it was also the case when I did my a levels in 2005, I had a friend at another school that I’m sure did the Cold War up to 1991.

He did his in 2022! Maybe his teacher was wrong. It might have been less than 40 tbh. Can't remember but he had a definition of what history was and delightedly telling me my childhood is History.

We had a rather well planned multidisciplinary scheme of work where History and RE complemented and intertwined with other subjects.

For example, we'd just completed Judaism and Early Christianity in RE when we were studying the end of the Roman Empire. As we were at the end of the Dark Ages, we were studying Islam in RE (with Art teachers joining classes on Islamic Art). By the time we were past Domesday and onto the Crusades, we knew a lot more from RS & Art than we would have done without them. We'd also started a significant proportion of algebraic work in Maths and Physics/Science and knew that it wasn't something invented by Europeans - Biology/Medicine and Chemistry both had topics that intertwined - using Da Vinci's sketches, chemical reactions and alchemy, Astronomy and Galileo...

We had historical Antisemitism during the Medieval Period and the Renaissance. Once we got into the Tudors, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the Elizabethan Era, we were also covering South America in Geography, so that when we got to exploration of the New World, we could link knowledge from History, Art (drawing all those bloody peppers and tomatoes), RE, etc. And Music covered a lot of post Renaissance history, religion and political thought.

When covering modern history (as per specification 1830-Present Day), we were looking at slavery, colonialism, the Race for Africa and the consequences, all also integrated into RE, Music, Geography, English...

Throughout, we also had lessons upon identifying bias, politics, What Could They Gain From Saying This? Identifying fakes and lies was linked into interrogating data to see if the claims were substantiated by facts - how changing scales on graphs in Maths created different impressions.

We covered the use of biological/chemical warfare from dumping plague victims' bodies, the devastating impact of smallpox, the atrocities committed against native Americans during colonialism, knew that concentration camps were not a German invention and that famine was not always caused by bad weather, but could also be used as a weapon of war.

Considering it was supposed to be the worst school in town (and I don't think they were far wrong), it had a huge amount of cooperation and planning to ensure we had a broad and consistent body of knowledge and, very importantly, a bloody good bullshit detector.

We had a Deputy Head in charge of the timetables and lesson schemes who taught multiple subjects himself and always, always wanted us to understand, to question, to link together knowledge from lessons for.

And then the National Curriculum came in after I left.

Henry viii and the break from Rome is pretty major in terms of our development and played a role for centuries. But I agree with your principle that history should be a bit broader. I always thought history was king's and queens but it's so much more than that. I did do India at GCSE.

If anyone is interested I thoroughly recommend listening to Empire. I'm at the end of S2 which is about the Ottomans. I had NO idea. Didn't even know they were in WW1.

If you want to join the small army of people trying to get teens interested in anything beyond mating and status rituals, I’m sure they’d be grateful.

And in a country where those mating and status / power rituals are actually more important too, as evidenced by the wages of (usually female) support staff in schools who are left to hold the classes together while the teachers are on strike. Valued about as much as cleaners.

The decline and break up of the Ottoman Empire is pretty much what started WW1.

@NeverDropYourMooncup that sounds amazing.

It's very often under modern studies as it pertains to recent international relations.

I teach history, we're allocated one whole lesson a week..

We cover the slave trade (at some length), the British in India and Mary Seacole as well as more abstract themes like 'is history written by the winners?', and 'what is the purpose of history?' as well as stuff like Hastings, the Black Death, the Reformation, the industrial revolution..

I think we do pretty damn well in our weekly allocation.