“Professor Matthews attributed this to the way history is taught in schools: ?Children playing games, role playing, drawing pictures, engaging in group discussion, trying to imagine what it feels like to be a medieval peasant or studying a range of historical source materials?? He identified the drive to teach ?historical skills? rather than history itself as a key cause of the problem. This ?skills versus knowledge? debate has plagued state education for over half a century ? not just in the teaching of history but in all subjects, from science and maths to languages and geography.”

Teaching in bits and pieces, as I call it. More so with history, where students walk out of grade 12, without knowing the types of political government systems. Without knowing, how the political governments of the 21st century have involved starting with ancient history. And so, as in one comment, writes, “Thatcher’s Child wrote earlier:

quote
Yeah, I remember that well known historical period when huge numbers of white people were shipped off their continent by black people to go and work as slaves on another continent, and were generally treated as subhuman. I also recall that that continent had been recently colonized by said black people, who were in the process of killing off the native population and destroying their culture. These days they live in poverty blighted reservations.

I do forget the exact details though. Perhaps you could fill me in and compare these actions to the African slave trade and devastation of the Native American peoples by whites.
unquote

I elevate it up the timeline as I don’t think people realised he/she was being subtle. There was, of course, a period when white people were enslaved in large numbers and shipped off to another continent. The people who did it were not exactly black, they were, however, blackish by the definition that racists use. Whole villages in Corwall and Devon were emptied, large patches of land in Ireland were emptied as people fled from the coast, terrified by the corsair raids from North Africa. Cervantes himself, the author of Don Quixote, was held slave for five years by the Bey of Algiers. It is true that the scale was different, but that may be because the northern rulers did not cooperate with the slavers and were not willing to trade their own people for trinkets.

I think that Thatcher’s Child was demonstrating how important it is to know facts as opposed to just emoting about the past without a basis of facts to anchor that emoting in reality, because otherwise we end up with a Braveheart view of history, a world where we project unsuitable feelings onto people who had totally other motives, and where, e.g. the notion that Scots fought against the Stuarts becomes literally unthinkable.”

I thought it was worth a discussion, given the optics and realities of 2012. Many, too many have some very funny ideas and erroneous knowledge of history, that translate into teachers opposing knowledge, and in favour of the how to learn. “...Wouldn?t it be better to teach children ?how to learn?, so they are equipped to discover for themselves the knowledge they need?”

The cherry picking begins, and no one student actually learns the history, the necessary knowledge, to understand the present political and societal events. All about feelings, but not the underlying events that has led to the front page news of the Middle-East, or why the operations of the Canadian schools are in a state today, of rising expenditures for fewer students.