Here is a further article (From Dominic Sandbrook in the Telegraph) worrying about the decline of history teaching in schools. He criticises the government's "Yo! Sushi" approach to the subject, "in which schools randomly pick unrelated historical topics like saucers from a conveyor belt, instead of studying our national story as a continuous narrative, which is how any sensible person sees it."
He believes students would be better served by a more narrative approach giving a greater overview of our national story, and recommends H E Marshall's "Our Island Story", although this was first printed in 1905. The complete text is now available here on the internet, so please have a look and tell us what you think!
UPDATE! Too busy to read? You can download the entire book for free and listen to it on your MP3, alongside other classic books. Have a look here!
wish while we studied history we could have a literal conveyor belt of food revolving around as we studied
ReplyDeleteAlthough surely it would be difficult to distinguish between what is purely 'British history' and what is unrelated? And is it even right to teach only about our own nation's story? History is not confined to one country, it is the record of past events related to humanity itself. And the last time I checked, humanity was defined by every part of the world, not just Britain.
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