The rhetoric over “which history” should be taught to school students has always been a contentious issue. The debates generated in the process are understandable and imperative, as what young students learn about their past has a direct bearing on how they view their own identity, cultural heritage and nationality. Governments across the world have therefore sought to influence their school history curricula, with the prime objective of shaping or reshaping notions of the countries’ national identity. In the context of the Indian classrooms, what is baffling is the inability to tread a fine balance between what students should know about the past to how they should know.
(This article was published in Economic and Political Weekly, November 4, 2023. For further details check out in: https://www.epw.in/author/Sima-saigal)
Our obsessive preoccupation over the polarised debates on National History Standards has diverted our attention from the “places that matter most—the schools where young people learn and the colleges where teachers are taught’’ (Wineburg 2001: 5). We have churned out citizens who, in the slightest irreverence to historical events, individuals or monumental structures, are instantaneously provoked in committing heinous acts of violence. In this sense, we do seem to be fixated in our historical narratives, albeit sans the knowledge of knowing how to navigate the complexities of a past we have never experienced. At the other end of the spectrum, in the large number of schools across the country, where history should really matter, its status in the overall hierarchy of school subjects is abysmally low.
Deemed secondary to the teaching of mathematics, science and literature, even the relevance of the subject to the contemporary world of work and day-today life is often questioned. How many history (school education) seminars, webinars, workshops, projects and courses do we hear of, in contrast to the subjects under science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)? How many research articles, books and educational tools do we have in history? And most important of all, are we even aware that history is not just about disseminating stories and events of the past?
The History Dilemma
There are two fundamental aspects to historical knowledge. One is the first order or substantive knowledge, that is, contents of the past, which most of us assume the subject to be all about. The other is the second-order or procedural knowledge, popularly known as the “historical thinking skills,” where students are introduced to the historian’s craft: to understand the process through which historians come to acquire and develop knowledge of the past (Levesque 2008: 16). For students, this is where history begins to make sense, as they imbibe skills and competencies which change the way they look at the world and fellow human beings. In India, our focus has been primarily on the substantive knowledge to the abject neglect of conceptual understanding and competencies.
Developments in the West
In striking contrast, in the Western context, particularly countries such as the United Kingdom, North America, and Australia, there has been the attempt of history educators to balance the national debates with an extensive focus on exploring the epistemological concerns on how, at best, school students are able to process historical narratives in a meaningful way. The trigger was an article by Mary Price (1968) in the late 1960s, “History in Danger.” The Government Social Survey report, initiated by the Schools Council (London) in 1966, to look into the attitudes of young school learners towards their education, and quoted by Price, showed a disturbing scenario in terms of history. Over 9,000 students, who ended their school careers at 15 years of age, were questioned and in their answers, they showed that history was not considered a popular, interesting or useful subject. In a list of “useful and interesting” subjects, history was placed at the bottom, while it was second from the top of the list of “useless and boring” subjects (Preston 1969: 87). This was a matter of grave concern and since then what took off as a cascading impact in school education can be outlined in two broad trends.
The first trend hinged on the notion that the uniqueness of history as a subject of study rests on its disciplinary foundations (Lee 1983). What could be understood as specific to history in relation to other subjects taught in schools were the key issues rigorously pondered over (Thorp and Persson 2020: 891). This led to the development of a “new history” from the early 1970s, which placed emphasis not only on chronology and historical knowledge, but also on the cultivation of conceptual understanding and skills (Arthur and Phillips 2018: 135). The rigour of defining “historical thinking” and establishing specific identifiable benchmarks culminated from several pioneering history projects in the West such as the British School Council History Project, launched in 1972, the German field of history didactics in the 1970s and historical consciousness and the Amherst Project (1960–72) in the United States (US).
History education reform projects continued in the US, based on the Stanford History Education Group built around the work of Sam Wineburg and his students (Seixas 2015). In Canada, Peter Seixas, founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness, who influenced the Historical Thinking Project, presented a list of six key concepts or ideas to be used to further historical thinking in history education. These were: historical significance, primary source evidence, continuity and change, cause and consequence, historical perspective and the ethical dimension (Seixas 2009). While there are varied models of historical thinking, the one presented by Seixas gained immense traction.
The second trend, which ran simultaneous to the first, was the phenomenal developments in research and development that were infinitely varied, from in-depth interviews to ethnographies of classroom life, from anthropological and psychological tasks to fi eld-based experimental research (Stearns et al 2000: 3). The defining feature in this approach was the attempt to tap into students’ voices as equal co-partners in this paradigmatic shift, aimed at a closer look on how historical cognition among students unfolds (Wineburg 2001).
The new approaches in school history did not go unchallenged. Cynics immediately jumped in to argue that the complexities inherent in historical thinking were not possible for learners below the age of 15 years to grasp. That apart, the drastic changes emphasised in the history school curriculum to include procedural knowledge in addition to substantive knowledge continued to hold ground, and backed by extraordinary research, which reinforced the idea of maintaining a coordinated balance between content knowledge and methodology. It needs to be mentioned here that the early protagonists of the new approach were much influenced by the exceptional works of Jerome Bruner, the noted American educational psychologist. New findings in educational psychology confirm Bruner’s idea articulated in The Process of Education (1960), that students are capable of learning the fundamentals, provided it was introduced in a meaningful way appropriate to their stage of development (Levesque 2008: 11). Later, Seixas and Tom Morton (2013: 13) made a more persuasive argument in direct relation to history:
The Science curriculum does not work this way. Students learn about the scientific method and do increasingly complex experiments so they can understand the basis of scientific claims. The mathematics curriculum does not work this way. Students learn to solve math problems at a young age and over the course of their schooling, are expected to become increasingly sophisticated at doing so. Why shouldn’t the history classroom have comparably high goals?
History Education in India: Expectations versus Reality
In India, the trajectory of developments, for history teachers, students, and teacher educators is far different from its Western counterparts. For many decades, post independence, the overriding concern over nation-building thrust teachers in didactically instilling Indian political history to passive students. The prime emphasis was on testing the domain of lower-order thinking, thereby subjecting students to the tedious process of simply remembering or recalling huge chunks of historical facts, aimed towards reproducing them in written examinations. A research study by V K Raina on instructional strategies used by Indian history teachers in Rajasthan also echoed these views. With 239 respondents, the results indicated that “practically no changes have taken place” in the various instructional strategies used by the teachers. The proclivity of teachers to rely predominantly on the lecture method alone outweighed the use of alternate methods in classroom transactions (Raina 1992: 27). The significance of history in our lives, or why history matters, was never ingrained into students, including the skills and competencies inherent in historical thinking. How do we separate facts from opinion, analyse sources, and understand the phenomenon of causality, continuity, change, contextualisation as also cross-culturalism, which, in the 21st century educational jargon, may be termed as global citizenship? In the absence of thought provoking and meaningful transactions in the classroom, it is not surprising that the status of history dwindled to a hopeless low, with the oft-repeated phrase, “what is the use of history?”
The turning point, or supposedly, was the National Curriculum Framework 2005 (NCF 2005), a highly comprehensive document which intended to bring about an epistemological and paradigmatic shift in school education. The most conspicuous change was seen in the presentation of textbooks which were drastically overhauled. The history textbooks, for instance, presented a delightful change with the inclusion of colourful pictures, cartoons, newspapers clippings, primary sources in sidebar boxes, in-text questions, captions, activities, maps and so on. The purpose here was to provide the teachers with sufficient add-ons to engage the learners in an interesting and meaningful journey into the past. The Syllabus for Classes at the Elementary Level, National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT 2006), outlined the objectives categorically:
This component has been devised in a way that would help students develop a historical sensibility and awareness of the significance of history. The assumption has been that students need to see history not simply as a set of facts about the past—economic, social, political and cultural—but that they have to learn to think historically. Students have to acquire a capacity to make interconnections between processes and events, between developments in one place and another and see the link between histories of different groups and societies.
Some Field Observations
However, a decade down the line, something was still amiss. Societal perceptions on the subject of history (school education) had not changed. The availability of pioneering fi eld research on classroom transactions and students’ understanding of key concepts were almost negligible. Most students’ were not able to differentiate between primary and secondary sources, let alone important cognitive attributes related to evidence, causality, continuity and others. Students accepted facts at face value without any need to question, reason or understand. Overall, the main focus of classroom interactions was on the “endpoints, the termini of historical cognition,” to use the term of Sam Wineburg (2001: xi) in a different context, “rather than what goes on in the middle.” In many instances, the elaborate add-ons in the text were simply overlooked.
These views are based on my repeated interactions with teachers, student teachers and students, in addition to fi eld research conducted in 2012 and 2015 among 500 students of secondary level (Saigal 2017). The findings of this study cannot be generalised for the country as a whole, yet it did suggest the need to look further into the realities of the history classroom and embrace the student’s world view. For instance, in the second part of the research conducted in 2015, about 207 students were approached. On being asked to rate their subject preferences in social sciences, only 13% selected history. In contrast, 47% selected geography, 14% ticked their preference for economics, 17% for political science, and 9% had no response. The reasons given for subject preferences were interesting and honest, which are as follows:
“I like geography because it is about the modern world and names and dates are less.”
“It (geography) tells us something about our surroundings which makes us understand easily.”
“I like economics because the chapters are easy and not very lengthy and it is related to the future, but in history we have to remember all dates, events. In economics we don’t have to remember dates, events. We can write our own answer relating to the future.”
“I do want to know about the past, but I want changes, otherwise I feel sleepy. I hope you will make the necessary changes.”
The repeated emphasis by students about dates and names is surprising, because this is what the new textbooks sought to eliminate. Moreover, at the secondary level, the thematic approach has been adopted for selection of topics, which generally pre-empts repetition of dynastic histories. Perhaps the problem arises because although the textbooks were overhauled, the pedagogic transactions in the classroom were by and large still based on traditional methods.
So where did we go wrong? The answers are actually quite obvious. First, is the absence of training in historical thinking skills for the teachers in preservice teacher education programmes. This leaves the trained graduate teachers (TGT) at an immediate disadvantage. Moreover, in the teacher training colleges, the rigour of historical thinking skills is still overlooked. It should be axiomatically clear that historical thinking is not “a natural process nor something that springs automatically from psychological development.” In fact, “it is much easier to learn names, dates, and stories than it is to change the fundamental mental structures that we use to grasp the meaning of the past” (Wineburg 2001: 84). This requires not only rigorous training, but also equipping the history educators or teachers with the necessary tools—books, modules, educational kits and constant exposure to new ideas in seminars, webinars, conferences, and so on—which unfortunately are severely lacking.
Second, and importantly, the question papers in the board exams, during the research period, did not reflect competency-based questions. So why would the teachers, who are already hard pressed for time and who have to prove themselves through students’ performances in the examinations, do otherwise? It is the normal tendency of teachers to teach on the basis of how the question papers are structured by respective school boards.
The Way Ahead
With the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, it is hoped that history receives its deserved place in the hierarchy of subjects in the school curriculum. The overarching aim of the document is the “revamping of all aspects of the education structure … aligned with the aspirational goals of 21st century education, including SDG4,” rooted “upon India’s traditions and value systems” (NEP 2020: 5). It is important to note that the recommendations outlined arise from a universal consensus in educational systems across the world, on the glaring disjunction between what is taught in the schools and what students require in the real world around them. The document therefore categorically emphasises that education must move “more towards learning about how to think critically and solve problems, how to be creative and multidisciplinary.” In this context, our students need to learn “how to think- to reason, analyse, weigh evidence, problem solve and to communicate effectively,” all of which are “essential survival skills” of today (Wagner 2014: xxiii). Simultaneously, this also implies that we need to take into account the research and evidence-based approach in the fi eld of education, to historical literacy and teaching of history.
For teachers and teacher educators in general and for history teachers in particular, what are the implications of NEP 2020?The fi rst aspect is that complacency is no longer an option. In fact, path-breaking initiatives have already been launched since 2019 to shift the focus of our educational system such as the National Initiative for School Heads’ and Teachers’ Holistic Advancement (NISHTHA) programme, for both offline (upper primary) and online (NISHTHA 2.0 secondary); learning outcome documents for elementary and secondary level, developed by NCERT. Many changes in the pattern of questions papers for CBSE board exams and National Achievement Survey (NAS) have also been proposed, focused on mapping competencies.
Second, if we are to create global thinkers of tomorrow, then we need to be creative thinkers ourselves. The NEP 2020 has undoubtedly placed special emphasis on history, but without addressing the fundamental gaps and challenges, the basic objectives of the document may be lost. As teachers and teacher educators, it is therefore necessary to introspect and to devise ways and possible means to actualise the recommendations of the NEP 2020. In history, we have, for long, drawn an impenetrable wall between what we learn and what we go through in our day-to-day lives. We need to gaze through the walls and connect with our young learners in asking the right question, in developing our power of observation, judgment and making the right connections, collaborating, discovering, and understanding the intrinsic worth of empathy. These are all 21st-century skills which are integral to the procedural aspect of history and for a peaceful and sustainable future. The need of the hour is transformative teachers, driven with a constant desire for research, innovation and creative learning in the classrooms.
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AUTHOR: Sima Saigal