Planned switch from GCSEs to Baccalaureate in England 'abandoned'

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. That's what history teachers think - including Gove's own adviser, who was a Tory candidate

In a letter in the Observer signed by the presidents of the Royal Historical Society, the Historical Association, the higher education group History UK and senior members of the British Academy, Gove is condemned for drawing up the curriculum without substantive consultation with teachers and academics. They say that the curriculum as it stands fails to recognise that learning about the past of other peoples is "as vital as knowledge of foreign languages to enable British citizens to understand the full variety and diversity of human life".

Steven Mastin, head of history at a school in Cambridge, who worked alongside historian Simon Schama as an adviser to Gove, said the curriculum bore "no resemblance" to the drafts he worked on as late as last month. Mastin said he approved of Gove's aims in revamping the curriculum, but the proposed version failed to offer children the broad and balanced education that had been promised.

Mastin, who stood for the Tories at the last general election, said: "Between January and the publication of this document – which no one involved in the consultation process had seen – someone has typed it up and I have no idea who that is. It would be scary if we become the only nation in the western world to not teach anything beyond our shores."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/feb/16/historians-michael-gove-curriculum

"If we are talking about cultural literacy, let's ask what an appropriate cultural literacy is for the 21st century," said Professor Peter Mandler, president of the Royal Historical Society. "I would say it is not the same as the knowledge you needed to pass O-levels in 1956."

Mastin added: "There is no world history in there at all except when Britain bumps into these places. And age-appropriateness is something else to worry about. Children are expected to understand the complex problems of democracy, nation and civilisation by the age of six. The idea that they will understand the concept of civilisation by the age of six just doesn't work. I don't think this is a teachable document."

Gove's new curriculum offers children in primary and secondary schools a sweep of history, starting with stone age settlers in Britain, to be taught in the first years of primary school and, ending at the age of 18, with a look at the fall of empire, the rise of the Commonwealth and the country's relations with the "wider world", along with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In between, children at secondary schools can look forward to a romp through the life and times of Disraeli and Gladstone, Clive of India, the abolition of the corn laws, tales of gunboat diplomacy and the scramble for Africa.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/feb/16/historians-gove-curriculum

School history (apart from a cursory glance at ancient Greece and the Russian, French and American revolutions) will be about one state only: Britain. Although the preamble refers to "outlines of European and world history", international affairs are viewed through a British lens. It is Our Island Story for the 21st-century child.

Chronology is obviously high on Gove's priorities – and reasonably so, since the squeeze on history teaching time over the past decade has led to "period-hopping" in many schools. Reconciling the need to offer students the "big picture" of the past, while enabling them to understand key events, has been a conundrum for history teachers ever since the national curriculum was introduced. The 1991 national curriculum restored a sequential approach overall, but gave teachers choice and included in-depth topics, such as black peoples of the Americas, as a balance to the British history core.

Gove's curriculum has none of these subtleties. Primary school children need only study a huge list of "key dates, events and significant individuals", covering prehistoric man to the Glorious Revolution in just four years. This will be impossible in the time allocated in most primary schools but, in any case, few primary school teachers are prepared for teaching it. Can under-12s really digest the controversies of the English civil war (Levellers and Diggers included), never mind the significance of the Glorious Revolution? This looks like Ladybird book history – engaging introduction at best; superficial and simplistic at worst. The outcome will be a generation of children with a patchy understanding of history before 1700, skated over by a teacher pressed for time and lacking in enthusiasm.

The new curriculum, however, leaves a lot of room for the 19th and 20th centuries between the ages of 11 and 14. The industrial revolution, the emancipation of women and the two world wars are already on the curriculum, but with the addition of topics unlikely to engage teenage students – such as Gladstone and Disraeli, the second and third Reform Acts, the battle for Home Rule and Chamberlain and Salisbury. Having got through the repeal of the corn laws, does anyone fancy teaching tariff reform to 13-year-olds? Equiano and Seacole remain and 20th-century immigration to Britain has been introduced, but the curriculum is otherwise Anglocentric.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/16/ladybird-curriculum