It is part of a wider public debate which quite properly demands that the school curriculum explains and justifies itself. What is the contribution of history to this debate? It is part of a wider public debate which quite properly demands that the school curriculum explains and justifies itself. What is the contribution of history to this debate?
My answer is based on some assumptions which are not specific to history. First, in Britain we live in an open and pluralistic society, one of whose characteristics is public debate about issues over which we disagree.
Are You Ready For Some Controversy? The History Of 'Redskin'. Some credit Dietz with. Many dictionaries and history books say the term came about in.
Second, we live in a bewilderingly information- rich world which puts a considerable premium on skills which help us select, categorise, evaluate and apply information. One object of these skills is to give a firm foundation of knowledge, understanding and procedures to help us make choices between alternative points of view and courses of action. Third, schools cannot avoid controversial issues. Pupils of all ages will ask questions about them unprompted. Many will have direct, and sometimes desperate experience of the impact of these issues – one parent families, drugs, the prospect of unemployment, racial violence.
Thus the question is not whether controversial issues should be tackled but when, how and with what resources.
Finally, the testing of fundamental values, as well as their preservation, lies at the heart of the educational process.
These assumptions mean that the curriculum must attempt to help young people to be progressively less ignorant and less uncomprehending about the contemporary world and some of the controversial issues which characterise it. These assumptions are consistent with views of the curriculum expressed by the Department of Education and Science in Better Schools (1. Her Majesty's Inspectors in Curriculum Matters 5- 1. The role of history has been specifically identified by Sir Keith Joseph, until recently Britain's Education Secretary, in his speech to The Historical Association in February 1. Her Majesty's Inspectors in History in the Primary and Secondary Years: an HMI View (1. The part that history has to play lies first in the controversy that lies at its very core and secondly, in its contribution to the teaching of controversial issues themselves.
There was a time when the content of most school history syllabuses was not controversial, when they were dominated by chronological surveys of British history, based on shared assumptions which were rarely questioned much less publicly debated. But a World War and the end of an Empire urgently reminded us of the insularity of this tradition.
Other internal changes drew uncomfortable attention to the fact that the old syllabuses ignored, in the main, whole groups – women, blacks, the poor – that syllabuses emphasising political and diplomatic history, based on sources written for the most part by famous, literate and predominantly affluent Englishmen, ignored many of the cultural achievements and social diversity of our past and, certainly after about 1. Thus there were demands not only to widen the horizons of content but to bring it up into the present. History teachers have accepted with great understanding the pressures to increase the range of content, although they react with pardonable impatience when faced with time and resources which remain static. Thus the problem of selection and its criteria has become central.
National agreement on detailed content seems unlikely and undesirable, but agreement on the criteria for its selection has become crucial.
If you go up to the observation tower on. The Hidden History of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In exchange the government of the USA is ready.
- Controversy erupted over the Dixie Chicks in 2003 following a.
- Thank you for downloading beyond velikovsky the history of a public controversy. Ready Ny Ccls Practice.
- List of controversial issues. Other articles not yet classified as 'controversial' have some edit conflict issues. Christopher Columbus.
- Whispersync for Voice-ready. Prof Larson gives a concise account of the controversy and to some. Where does The Theory of Evolution: A History of Controversy.
- What is the contribution of history to this debate? History and Controversy in the Classroom.
Whole areas and periods will have to be sacrificed, as they always have been. But declared criteria, publicly discussed, at least help to ensure that those sacrifices will be explicit and planned and not covert and arbitrary, imposed by the clock or by chance. The selection of people, problems and places for study recognises their importance and confers status on them, just as those excluded have their importance questioned and status diminished. Thus the act of selection is a value judgement.
It ought to be a matter for debate. Content is controversial.
While there has been a sea, and sometimes stormy, change in the content of history syllabuses, there has been an earthquake in the methodology, pedagogy and above all, in the learning of history by young people in schools. Pupils are now being asked to evaluate source material critically. They are asked to enter into a degree of understanding of the attitudes and predicaments of people who are different from them, because they lived a long time ago, or were poor, or rich, or had a different colour, or religion, or sex, or aspirations. They discover that historical statements are ultimately not concerned with the transference of agreed facts but are nearer to the making of informed judgement. They are appreciating that such statements are often tentative and provisional and that contrasted and equally valid conclusions may be drawn from the same evidence.
This, of course, is not relativism.
History still demands that statements must be based on, and consistent with, available evidence and that conclusions drawn from it must be based on rational and logical thought. However, this 'new history' as it is sometimes called, does remind us that at the very heart of its methodology is discussion, debate and controversy.
Young historians in schools are no longer being asked just to know about the past (and thus sometimes be imprisoned by it) but are having to think historically about it. As with the selection of content, these procedures are neither value- free nor objective. The intellectual rigours of history which demand the questions 'How do I know this is true?' and 'What was it like to be (someone that I am not or someone that I disagree with)?', and insists on evidence and reason to support conclusions are not consistent with closed or authoritarian intellectual systems, nor likely to be welcomed in a closed or authoritarian society, whether a state or a school.
History also makes crucial contributions to the understanding and study of contemporary controversial issues. First, it places such issues in the historical context of change over time.
Strikes, Northern Ireland, law and order, the Arab- Israeli conflict, arguments about defence, the changing status of women, patterns of employment and unemployment, a culturally mixed Britain, as they are today, were not always so. A search for origins, speculations about cause in the context of change not only contributes to our understanding of these issues but helps towards anticipating their possible futures.
Second, language, particularly many of the concepts used to describe controversial issues, needs to be used historically. A dictionary will give a good working definition of 'communism', 'democracy', 'strikes', 'racism'.
But as Peter Lee has reminded us, 'a temporal' part of what communism is must be found in what communists have done (or democrats, or strikers, or racists for that matter). Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class.
Finally, the contribution of history to the study of controversial issues lies in its procedures. If the subject cannot offer us value- free syllabuses or objective content, it does demand objective procedures. Thus they offer possible routes through sensitive areas so that professional and academic integrity may be preserved'.
They are procedures which insist on supported conclusions, reject stereotypical thinking and resist an uncritical plundering of the past to make glib comparisons with the present. They provide infertile ground to those who seek to plant biased evidence or reap indoctrinated minds.
Of course, scepticism survives. There are still those who believe historians should not engage in unseemly tussles in controversial fields. It is a prim and coy view. It wishes, in Marc Bloch's words 'to spare Clio's chastity from the profanation of present controversy'.
But if historians remain tight- lipped spectators of the present, there will be other subjects and influences ready to fill the gap.
Other critics will express doubts about the ability of teachers to consider controversial issues with any degree of balance or objectivity. I have already suggested the procedures of history and the demands of historical thinking not only offer guidelines to teachers but reassurances to the sceptics.
Even with those reassurances there are still some who doubt whether historical skills are within the capacity of any but the most able and older pupils in schools. But if society wants school curricula, including those that are vocationally orientated, to help young people better to understand the rapidly changing world that they live in, then the part that historical thinking can play is crucial.
However, many of the sceptics have not enjoyed the benefits of actually seeing what happens in real classrooms. The views of HMI are not based on inspirations alone. They are founded on the evidence of what the good history they see is achieving and what teachers and pupils are now demonstrably able to do.