What should we learn about in history? - Writing Wednesday
Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,
The question of what we all should be learning about in history has been a popular question for a long time. If I were to go into one of my history lessons now, even my history teachers would be saying, "I wish you could learn more about this" or "It's a shame that we can't cover this topic," etc, etc.
However, never before has the question been more asked than most recently, as with the whole Black Lives Matter movement, people are beginning to really question whether or not what we are learning about in history has a good representation of what most of the different sides of the larger story are. As I've seen on Instagram, there's been a lot of videos going around about all the influential black people that have been forgotten about in history. Today, I'm going to give my personal take on this, in the hopes that it will provide you with a better understanding.
Before I go on further, I think it's really important to point out why it is difficult to learn the different parts of history as I think that this will help you to understand what we should be learning overall. (i) There's a lot to cover in such a short space of time. Although once you hit secondary school, history lessons are included from the moment you start in year 7, (A) after about year 9, some people may not choose to study history anymore and will therefore miss out a large part of the history course and will only be reliant on small amounts of basic knowledge they've gained before. (B) Once you begin your proper history lessons for GCSE, if you choose to do so, there's only a 2 year time space for teachers to teach a whole entire history course so they can't physically fit everything in. This would help to explain why there could be some gaps in historical knowledge now. (ii) Whilst teachers and a school have the freedom to choose a specific curriculum that they would like to follow throughout the school exam years, they can only mostly cover what the requirements of the chosen exam board cover and so are limited to what they can teach.(iii) If we were to apply this to every year group in secondary school in general, it's difficult to choose what is important to learn about in history, as there are so many different and interesting events a teacher can talk about, it can become easy to stray off topic.
With that being said, I would have to agree with quite a few people that what we learn in history is not the full picture. If I were to give a rough percentage in terms of what I believe we could be learning about in history, 50% of that specific subject matter isn't included in the lessons. That means that we are probably learning about half a course, if you take in all the extra events that we could be learning about. This means that whilst in year 9, although I learnt about the Abolishment of the Slave Trade in Britain and some of the unknown African people who actually played a huge role in helping to make that happen, I would probably only be able to really remember the British man who campaigned to end the slave trade and not necessarily what those less known people in Africa did to help too.
You may think it's absolutely terrible that black history is so little talked about in school that people are forgetting about it. However, in my personal opinion, the case of black history is nowhere near as unique or individual as people are making it out to be. There are loads of other topics that are separate to this that we don't talk about either. This is mainly due to the 3 points I talked about earlier. For example, I was reading George Orwell's book, Homage to Catalonia and since it was an account of the Spanish Civil War, I had to do my research on this event because I hadn't learnt about this before. This was due to the fact that when I was doing GCSE history, I was learning more about Nazi Germany, an important topic, and Spain hadn't played a huge role in those events at the time so it wasn't really a relevant topic to talk about. Another example of an event that isn't really talked about is the Irish slave trade. It basically said that many people in Ireland were sold as white slaves to the New World, even before the black slave trade even occurred or came to being. This moment, in my opinion, is just as pivotal as the black slave trade yet it is hardly talked about. This is perhaps due to the fact that there is little time for teachers to include this in their curriculum because although it is significant, it doesn't follow the theme of most of the content covered in lessons.
It is mainly for these reasons that I can't argue with what is already being covered in our history lessons today. Overall, it is difficult to talk about all the different parts of history for the reasons that I've just specified. Black history is not the only part of history that is not really talked about and not every part of history is covered because either the teachers can't fit it in or it's not necessarily relatable to the whole course.
I would even go as far to say that the history courses that I've covered so far are not necessarily racially manipulated by the teachers or the government, but have been cleverly organised so that I have the foundational knowledge to learn more. Since I've learnt about communism in Russia, I have had the foundational knowledge to find out more about the early stages of communism in Spain. I'm also interested to find out more about these influential black people from the past because although I've forgotten a few things I know they existed because of my foundational knowledge on the slave trade. We have a plethora of information on the internet, I think we should use it to educate ourselves more.
Do you believe that what you learnt in history was useful? Is there anything you would improve about what we learn in history? Let me know in the comments below and I'll be sure to reply to them. I ♡ hearing from you!
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Bye,
XOX, Juliette
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