A new curriculum for Leaving Certificate history is currently under development by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) and the signs are that the course will have a strong, and left-leaning ideological bias.
The draft curriculum [1] is broken into four strands. The first one seems straightforward enough. It looks at how history is gathered, analysed and interpreted.
The second strand examines ‘Critical Inquiry and Interpretation’. (More about this later). Strand 3 looks at Irish history from 1879 until 2009, while Strand 4 looks at world history from 1917 until 2009. These sound harmless enough at first glance, but let’s take a closer look.
The appendices to the draft specification give an indication of what will be taught under strands 2, 3 and 4.
We see, for example, that under Strand 3 (Irish history), students will learn about the “role of religion” in society, an obvious area of interest for me, but the key question is, how? We read that they will also examine institutions such as the industrial schools, asylums, prisons, Magdalene laundries, and Mother and Baby homes.
A great deal will depend on what students will be taught about these institutions and whether their view of religion, and specifically of the Catholic Church, will be formed mainly by the part the Church played in running many of them.
But will they be told that the biggest institutions in the country by far were the mental asylums, which were run by the State? Will they learn that on any given night in 1960, the mental hospitals contained 20,000 patients, often placed there unjustly and against their will, whereas the Magdalene laundries from 1922 until their closure had 10,000 inmates in total?
Will students be told how the industrial schools, the Magdalene laundries and the Mother and Baby Homes originated, and how common these were in other countries, or will these be over-associated with the Catholic Church and Ireland?
In terms of the broader role of religion in society, will this be framed in a mostly negative way or will students also be taught about the huge, positive role the religious orders (for example) played in providing healthcare and education to all sections of society, including the poor?
Will the Church be presented mostly as an authoritarian and repressive force, or one that also provided great solace and material support to millions of Irish people?
Looking at the broader picture, we have seen already that Strand 2 deals with ‘Critical Inquiry and Interpretation’. One heading under this section is called ‘Movements for Change’. The example provided is the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa. Fair enough, but why not Solidarity in Poland which helped to bring down communism? That was at least as important, historically speaking, as the anti-Apartheid movement.
Or what about the pro-democracy movements in the likes of South Korea and the Philippines which, incidentally, had plenty of Church support (just as the Solidarity movement did)?
We read that under the heading ‘Power and Conflict’ in Strand 2, the ‘transport of enslaved people’ will be covered. In this section, will students learn only about the millions seized from Africa and taken to the ‘New World’, or will they also learn about the millions of Europeans taken into slavery by the North African Barbary Coast pirates over the centuries, including those seized from Baltimore in Cork in 1631?
Will they be taught about the key roles played by devout Christians like the Quakers in America, or William Wilberforce in Britain, in helping to end slavery?
For that matter, why does modern world history (Strand 4) begin in 1917? Presumably it is because the Bolshevik Revolution took place that year. Will students be taught how savagely the Bolsheviks persecuted their real and perceived enemies, including religious believers, or will Bolshevism be seen mainly as an anti-capitalist movement for justice and equality that sometimes went wrong?
We read that the world history strand will introduce students to themes like “Communism in different contexts: USSR and China,” “Cold war frontline: the Iron Curtain, Cuba and Vietnam,” and “Decolonisation: Ghana and Algeria.” It also includes highly specific topics focusing almost exclusively on women’s labour, such as “Women and work in interwar and wartime Britain and the USSR,” “Women in work and society in the USSR and China,” and a comparative look at women in East versus West Germany.
I suspect Western civilisation is going to emerge badly from all this and little good will be found to say about it.
In short, what Leaving Certificate students are to be taught about history is shaping up to have a strong, ideological bias. A huge amount will depend, of course, on what history books go into schools when this new curriculum comes into operation in due course. Hopefully Catholic educational bodies will be keeping a close eye on what is going on. Parents need to keep a close eye as well or they will wonder why their teenagers are suddenly chanting ‘Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go’ over the dinner table.
(Picture is generated by OpenArt AI).