FriendlyGhost
Haunting history in a good way
[continuing down the off-topic tangent, just because it's interesting...]
Lest anyone thinks I'm casting aspersions purely at history teaching in England, it wasn't much better in Scotland when I was a child (70s in my case). If the only history I'd ever learned were that formally taught in school, I'd have come away with the impression that the world wars immediately followed the industrial revolution , which came just after the vikings, who were immediately after the Romans , who appeared just after the Stone Age . Luckily my parents made sure I learned a lot more!
I agree. It took my parents going to see the rector (headmaster) for me to be able to study German along with my other more scientific subjects (Maths, Chemistry and Physics - and English because it was mandatory). The fact that a lot of chemistry books from the early 20th century were written in German was what swayed it apparently, the argument being that German might come in useful to me when studying chemistry at university - which it never did, ironically, though Polish would have been extremely handy, given what I ended up doing for my dissertation!I suspect that this sort of curriculum layout problem is a major, secret reason for the poor performance of UK pupils at learning languages for decades.
There does seem to be a pervading view that British history is just English history with a couple of footnotes. For example, one of my major bug-bears is the blind assumption that 'Tudor' history is relevant to the entire UK and relegating 'Stuart' history to some also-rans who followed them, when in fact the Stewarts were the longest-reigning royal house in UK history, having been around for over a century by the time the Tudors came on the scene (1371 vs 1485) and then surviving them by a century as well (1707 vs 1603).Certainly English schools were very Anglocentric and hardly noticed the existence or history, let alone culture, of the 'Celtic' nations , which is probably a major reason for the long-running Anglocentric attitude of the English/ London governing elites.
That's another bug-bear of mine. Even leaving aside that 1066 primarily affected England, not the other nations of the UK (at least directly - of course there were secondary effects, sometimes very major ones!), so that history for those nations shouldn't be 'centred' on that date...like I say, leaving that aside, there are whole generations of students who don't know, for example, that the king called Edward I was actually the third King Edward of England or even that England didn't magically spring into being when the Romans left!History was all post-1066
Lest anyone thinks I'm casting aspersions purely at history teaching in England, it wasn't much better in Scotland when I was a child (70s in my case). If the only history I'd ever learned were that formally taught in school, I'd have come away with the impression that the world wars immediately followed the industrial revolution , which came just after the vikings, who were immediately after the Romans , who appeared just after the Stone Age . Luckily my parents made sure I learned a lot more!