Is the school curriculum failing to deliver on history? (From Bournemouth Echo)

Is the school curriculum failing to deliver on history?

10:14am Wednesday 10th March 2010 in

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WELL, what is the name given to the lines on a synoptic chart?

What do you mean, you don’t know?

That’s typical of the sort of GCSE question our children are expected to answer, so surely we adults should be able to do so as well.

This is the week in which the nation has had a stern “Must do better” written on its report card... not once but twice.

David Dimbleby, presenter of The Seven Ages of Britain on BBC1, accused the school curriculum of having failed to deliver on history.

Then a survey by the online version of Encyclopaedia Britannica (yes, I did have to check how to spell that!) revealed that parents asked to help with homework must expect not just to be asked about the past but quizzed across the entire range of academic subjects.

When the poll asked 500 parents a selection of science, history, geography and maths questions from typical GCSE exam papers, the lacklustre results would have got most of them sent straight to the back of the class.

Proving trickiest of all was the one above, with only 13 per cent of them able to come up with the correct answer.

But before you come over all smug, see how well you do with some of the others they were quizzed on:

1) Which gas has the highest concentration in dry air?

2) Who was Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister?

3) What did Crick and Watson discover in 1953?

4) Which measure of average can have more than one value?

5) What was the Nazi Party in Germany first called?

Dimbleby, the 71-year-old Question Time host, thinks there is a thirst for knowledge about our past that simply isn’t being quenched in schools.

He cites the popularity of not just his own programme, The Seven Ages Of Britain – which takes viewers on a journey through the history of the country through its art and treasure – but of other factual history series such as those presented by Andrew Marr, Simon Schama and David Starkey.

He told Radio Times: “The success... suggests to me that there is a great, and perhaps growing, interest in our history.

“Maybe we are filling in the gaps left by the less impressive treatment of history in the school curriculum.”

So it seems if you want to sort your Yorks from your Lancastrians, your Anthony van Dycks from your Dick Van Dycks, the place to go is not the classroom, but home.

However, it might be an idea to avoid the parents and turn to the box in the corner of the living room.

ANSWERS

1) Nitrogen

2) Ramsay MacDonald

3) DNA

4) Mode

5) The German Workers’ Party

PS: The lines on a synoptic chart are isobars.