Encouraging
consciousness raising through teaching History in FE.
Progress,
far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness.
When
change is absolute there remains no being to improve
and
no direction is set for possible improvement: and when
experience
is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.
Those
who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
The first point to consider when
teaching History to learners in FE is their level of emotional maturity and
their ability to appreciate the complexity surrounding sensitive topics. This
is the reason why topics pertaining to World War One or the Holocaust are not
generally taught on the National Curriculum until Key Stage 4 (The T.E.A.C.H
Report). The rationale governing this choice to delay teaching such topics is
that essentially the full extent of the depravity humanity has exhibited,
particularly over the last century, is uncomfortable to acknowledge and the
teaching of such modules must be done in earnest.
George Santayana’s immortal words
‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ are often cited
erroneously, yet his meaning his unquestionable; learning from our mistakes is
a crucial skill we attribute to self-awareness and advancement. Yet without
fully appreciating the past, both individually and as part of wider society, we
cannot hope to learn from our more deplorable epochs any more than we can hope
to be inspired from our greatest accomplishments. Learning lessons from the
past can also provide us with a unique perspective on how to react
to contemporary world issues. For example, the denunciation and
criticism leveled at Islam in the Western hemisphere since 9/11 is
comparable to the persecution of Catholicism in England in the Seventeenth
century after the Gun Powder Plot. Therefore from studying the past, learners
can truly appreciate that there are no unprecedented events occurring in the
world today; there is always an historical precedent to compare them to because
all human activity is driven by unchanging human nature. Therefore, it can be
argued that the past may hold a great many answers to the pressing questions
being asked today. And in terms of sociological advancement, before prevention
must come prediction – if we can identify the reasons behind our less palatable
annals of history then we can at least attempt to preclude similar events from
occurring again. In short, it is worth remembering the epitaph ‘Lest we forget’
from the poem of Rudyard Kipling; learning from history involves digesting the
good with the bad, and teaching History involves teaching learners to take
collective responsibility for its entirety so that ultimately the messages we
need to remember are passed from generation to generation in memorium to the
humanity that is so often overlooked in the pages of a textbook.
Teaching a module such as black Civil
Rights in America often proves popular with learners and teachers alike; the
enthusiasm learners have for this topic is correlative to the period being
relatively recent, with key events in world importance happening within the
last half century. According to one senior lecturers in History whom I have
worked with and whom have taught the topic for many years, the difficulty for
today’s learner lies in grasping that within our own lifetime, some people, in
one of the most powerful nations in the world, a country that prided itself on
being the world’s defender of liberty, did not enjoy basic civil rights. From
our Twenty-first Century perspective we are unaccustomed to thinking back on a
period where such bigotry and intolerance was rife in society, and not only
this, was seemingly supported and endorsed by the law. Through the use of new
and emerging technologies in the class room, learners are able to view primary
sources from the period, most notoriously perhaps are the photographs printed
concerning the murder of Emmet Till, a young boy who was kidnapped and brutally
murdered while on a visit to the South for simply conversing with a white
shopkeeper. His mother’s choice to display her son in an open casket took full
advantage of the new media of television and photography, and the horrific
photographs that featured in many news reports helped to formulate public
support against such a heinous crime, and in doing so brought the Civil Rights
movement much needed momentum. Similarly, today the same images are capable of
having a profound effect, stirring emotion in the learner and helping to bring
a human face to the events documented in the textbooks. As the Civil Rights
movement is still relatively recent, the events transpiring within our
lifetime, there is a general consensus gained by teachers and learners that
this history is still being written today; the full effects of racial
discrimination in the USA in past decades are still influencing news coverage.
In 1992, the beating of Rodney King led to the Los Angeles Race Riots, and in
2008 the United States elected its first black President in Barack Obama.
Therefore the topic can best be described as a type of living-history, where we
are teaching about a period that is still very relevant and issues that are
still very prevalent in the world today. According to one learner I
interviewed, studying the topic expelled her ‘complacency’ relating to her own
civil liberties and allowed her to realize that a lot of the freedoms
we take for granted had to be fought for and won during a bitter campaign amid
oppression and social degradation, so it is fitting that Civil Rights is still
taught almost in homage to the men and women, from Martin Luther King and
Malcolm X, to the unnamed, unsung members of the Civil Rights movement in
America, and through studying a panoramic assessment of social challenges to
racism, legal challenges and political challenges, learners can begin to
evaluate how successful society has been in eradicating racial discrimination
in recent years.
Another module which strikes accord
with learners if the Suffragettes. Having had the opportunity to teach the
topic to learners in Greater Manchester, it was interesting to see the impact
that this had upon them, particularly the female members of the group. Like
Civil Rights, there was a reaction of shock and repulsion from the learners who
had difficulty accepting that the prejudicial attitudes of men towards women
were so disproportionately executed in law and that less than one hundred years
ago, women in our own country did not have the right to participatory democracy
through the vote. Learning about the strife of women in this period, and the feats
accomplished by the likes of Millicent Fawcett and Emmeline Pankhurst, enthuses
female learners when they realize the lengths that women had to go to
in order to achieve the same legal stature as men. And what truly reinforces
the sense of injustice among learners is the realization that even
today, women are still barred from some professions in the armed forces etc.
and receive less pay for doing the same work as men in others. This helps
learners to realize just how relevant these topics are to today’s
society and hopefully inspires them to continue to support different campaigns
for an end to social injustice.
Therefore with regard to subject matter
it is clear that teaching modules in History relating to concepts of injustice,
intolerance and prejudice can go a long way to help remedy these problems by
informing learners of the historical struggles large groups of people have
undertaken for equality, whether it be tackling prejudice based on race,
gender, sexuality or religion, and how their struggles should inspire us to
continue their campaign for tolerance and liberty. Another element of teaching
History that is capable of motivating and inspiring learners is the teaching of
local history. With relation to the Suffragettes, teaching such a module in
Manchester, the birthplace of pioneers such as the Dickinson family, allow
learners to retrace the footsteps of these inspiring individuals and visit the
places they did. It is a very human fascination we have with regard to tactile
stimulation and being able to touch and feel the same things and walk among the
same places that our historical heroes have. And although, as Marx maintained,
‘the history of all hitherto society is the history of the class struggle’,
teaching local geographical history gives the learner a sense of more direct
involvement with the topic, and the possibility that perhaps their ancestors
were part of these campaigns for social justice and improvement.
When recognizing the enormous
lengths local people went to in order to campaign for greater equality it
hopefully inspires and motivates learners to participate more in their local
community as history can often be our common heritage. It is our ties to the
past that binds us together in the present and they should continue to do so
with the teaching of local history. Therefore, History as an academic subject
has the potential to aid with community cohesion by reminding our learners of
our shared inheritance from local groups in the industrial North, such as the
Suffragettes and the Chartists. And with particular regard to
offender learning, teaching social history to this group of people has the
potential for enormous benefit; there is a therapeutic aspect to learning about
the struggles of others that can aid with rehabilitation as history can
increase awareness and enlightenment and put our
own misdemeanors into perspective.
To conclude, teaching History provides
us with an opportunity to not only inform our learners of the factual
information that has occurred in times gone by, as this would be irrelevant
without focusing on the issues surrounding them. Appealing to attitudes of
social justice, liberty, the denunciation of prejudice and the struggle for
social advancement underpin all basic human endeavor and give these
areas of history a relevance to all. Teaching about topics such as World War
One and the Holocaust allow us to pass down important messages to each
subsequent generation in the hope that we can prevent such horrors from
occurring again and out of veneration to the ordinary men and women who have
made it their life’s work, such as the Suffragettes and members of the Civil
Rights movement, to improve the standard of living for all. When teaching and
studying some modules of social history a key message emerges: all of us are
born into a world that is divided in one way or another. Some of us have the
strength to seek to heal those divisions – figures of adulation such as Martin
Luther King and Emmeline Pankhurst. And while it is all too often a bittersweet
and poignant reality that these figures do not live to see their visions
accomplished, hopefully their stories inspire us enough to make sure that we
continue their goal of a world united and free from intolerance. The British
statesman Edmund Burke once said that ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of
evil is for good men to do nothing’. Hopefully, through the teaching of social
history in the classroom, we can pass on the message that wherever we witness
intolerance and prejudice it is the responsibility of us all to challenge this
and to seek to eradicate it.
Edmund Burke, as cited in ‘Edmund
Burke’ by Connor Cruise O’Brien (2002). Vintage. London.
Rudyard Kipling (1897)
in Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. The Oxford Book of English Verse:
1250–1900
Karl Marx (1844),
‘The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto’,
England.
George Santayana (1905), ‘The Life of
Reason, Volume 1’.
The Historical
Association. (2007) ‘A
Report from The Historical Association on
the Challenges and Opportunities for
Teaching Emotive and Controversial History 3-19. London.
