Black History Month: Why is it important to have Black History taught in all schools?

This summer has seen louder calls for BME and particularly Black history to be taught more consistently in schools.

This has seen the emergence of some popular petitions, calling on governments to ensure that happens, e.g. this one in England and this one in Wales. The Welsh petition will actually be debated on the floor of the Senedd on 4th November.

Why do you think so many thousands of people have signed these petitions, and why do you think it is an important topic to be covered? As teaching can vary from school to school, what Black history were you taught in school, and what do you think you should have been taught but weren't? What would you want parliamentarians to discuss if debating these petitions?

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Reply 1

fallen_acorns

Its important because history is really important to how we view our place in the world.

Why is black history specifically important? Because in general its natural and appropriate for countries to teach their own history primarily but within the context of global history. Its really useful to social cohesion for us to have a shared understanding of history and it helps form our communal social identities. These days we are becoming more diverse with more different ethnicity making up British - that means we have to expand what we perceive as 'our history' opposed to 'global/international history'. As the numbers of BAME people increase so does the scope of the group we call 'British' and so does the scope of what 'British history' means, and as we become more connected the lines are slowly blurring from a distinct our history - their history, into all of our history.

To put it simpler - the history of a country is the history of its people, not of the rock itself. As our people become more diverse, so does our history.

I'm not going to make any comments on how its taught.(or how some minority group's history get taught far more than others...). I have my ideological differences to a lot of things that are taught about history, but that wasn't the question. The question was why is it important, and the simple answer is because its important to teach the history of our people, and our people aren't just white any more.

You can't have a multiracial society without having a multiracial societal history.

Reply 2

PTMalewski

Most people don't care about history anyway, so it's also possible that most of them who signed those, only did it because they wanted to look good in the eyes of their friends and neigbours.

Original post by fallen_acorns

Its really useful to social cohesion for us to have a shared understanding of history and it helps form our communal social identities.
Why is black history specifically important? Because in general its natural and appropriate for countries to teach their own history primarily but within the context of global history. Its really useful to social cohesion for us to have a shared understanding of history and

With all respect. Since even professional historians have problems understanding history and agree with each other typicall only on facts they have solid evidence for, I doubt a bunch of uninterested teenagers can understand anything from it.
It would have been better to teach them logic and research methods. Then they would have a chance to understand something when they get interested.

Original post by fallen_acorns

it helps form our communal social identities.

Which is precisely the worst thing about it.
Because people know something from history, but don't understand it, you have White racists who despise Black people for failing to invent a wheel, and Black racists hating White people as they believe all White people are racist.
It's seen elswhere too.

Many nations from Middle and Eastern Europe hate each other madly and it's only for historical reasons.
Not to mention funny incidents like drunk sailors shooting from pistols at statues in Sweden because of wars from 400 years ago. Fortunately nobody was in the building the windows of which bullets also hit.

(edited 3 years ago)

It isnt.

/thread

Universities Forum Helper

I think we should remove a lot of the rote learning from History to make space for important historical topics in a more general sense. The amount of time I [should have] spent learning the exact dates of specific events or some irrelevant physician's entire bibliography(?) could have been spent on more valuable topics, like the Empire and general world history.

Currently, I don't think it would be sensible to make it mandatory - Every topic we covered in History (our school didn't do the empire, although we did some American history to include slavery) was important and valuable; which topics should be removed to make space? WWII? Vietnam? The Tudors?

Reply 5

tsrholicc

It's not important to teach the history of recent immigrants in any European country as a compulsory subject. I can only think of the US as a country where this could be compulsory, since blacks have had a lot to do with it since its inception.

It's not required in canada, australia or new zealand at all. In AUS they should probably teach at least a bit of Aboriginal history... but not black history