A Better Secondary School History Curriculum
There are three years of compulsory history in secondary school. That’s just nine terms. If history at primary school is about awakening the love of learning, and more advanced study is about in-depth study and the development of historiographical skills, the best way of using these three years is by ensuring that everyone who goes through them as a broad overview of the sweep of human history and how different historical events and their legacy contribute to making the world in which we live today.
There will be some who say that studying history should be about studying certain topics in depth. By all means do that with those who’ve chosen to study it in more depth, at GCSE, A-Level and beyond. But as someone who stopped history after Year 9, two of my nine terms were spent studying the French Revolution. An important part of history, certainly, and very interesting I found it at the time, but if I’d not been the sort of person to be reading outside school, how much use would this in-depth study of an arbitrary period been? That’s not to mention the amount of time spent in school on the Tudors and Stewarts and on the Second World War. It’s crazy that I could finish my formal study of history literally without even hearing the words Byazantium, Islam, British Empire or Cold War in a history class.
So below is my history syllabus for Years 7 – 9. he traditional topics aren’t excluded, but they’ve been cut down and other things added in their place. Its centre point is British and then European history – I believe it’s important for people in any country to study the history of the country and region in which they’re situated – but puts this in a global perspective, as well as highlights some of the key developments in the history of today’s major nations and the world as a whole. Most importantly, rather than isolated snippets, it attempts to convey a sense of the overall development of human history.
Year Seven – Ancient and British History
Term 1: Ancient Civilisations
First half term: an overview of the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Persians and Chinese
Second half term: in-depth study of one of Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, Ancient China
Term 2: British History: The Dark Ages and the Mediaeval period
Romans, Saxons and Vikings
The Norman conquest and Norman England
The stirrings of democracy: Magna Carta, The Peasant’s Revolt and the Black Death
The Hundred Years War
The Wars of the Roses
Term 3: British History: Tudors and Stuarts
The Tudors (including Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, the English Reformation)
The Stuarts
The English Civil War, Cromwell and Parliamentary Democracy
Year Eight – From the Ancient World to the Modern Age
Term 1: The World After Rome
The Byzantine Empire
The Rise of Islam
The founding of the Holy Roman Empire
Term 2: Religion and Nationhood
The Reformation, the European Wars of Religion and the Treaty of Westphalia
The Ottoman and Mughal Empires
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite: The Enlightenment, The American and French Revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars
Term 3: The Age of Discovery
The great voyages – Columbus, Magellan, Vasco de Gama, Cabot
The colonisation of the Americas
The growth of global trade – focusing on the Portuguese and Dutch trading empires and the early years of the East India company.
The slave trade and abolition
Year Nine – Modern History
Term 1: Industrial Revolution
The agricultural revolution
The industrial revolution and its impact on society
Political reform: the 1867 Reform Act, the rise of the trade unions and women’s suffrage
Term 2: Empire
The British in India
The Scramble for Africa
The Latin American wars of independence
The Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion and the Meiji restoration
Term 3: 20th Century History
The First World War
The Second World War
The Cold War (focusing on the USA, USSR and China)
The end of history? The fall of the Berlin Wall, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms and 9/11.
What do you think? What would you include?
Byazantium -> Byzantium
[T]he traditional topics
I like your aims, and agree that an overview is helpful before diving down into methodology and detailed study of an individual period. (I'm a little nervous about limiting knowledge of bias and evaluating sources to GCSE students only (which I think was the case in our day and today). Similarly I not only think we should teach supply and demand in Geography, but we probably ought to teach it before GCSE - it's so fundamental to how the world works that probably everyone ought to know it.)
However for my part I think you're being much too ambitious in the scope covered here. Remember that kids are only getting 1-3 hours of history a week! As a result my changes are all about what I'd drop, not what I'd add
7.1 Drop Ancient Egypt (cool, but of little lasting importance), and cover Persia very briefly. Love the inclusion of China.
7.2 Drop British Romans - cover what you need in 7.1. We probably need to drop one of Democratic stirrings, 100 years war and War of the Roses, but I can't decide which.
7.3 I don't think you should do the English Reformation divorced from the Reformation. This is going to spoil your scheme, but as you enter the Early Modern period, British history becomes too intertwined with European history, so we're going to have to swap 7.3 for 8.1, and then pull material from 8.2 in. (Good thing to, 8.2 is drowning in material.)
8.3 Drop the great voyages as seperate topics (obviously you still spend 5 minutes going 'this happened, and ushered in [actual topic]'
9.2 There is too much here! You have to have the British in India. I think you scrap Boxer and Meiji.
9.3 There is way too much here! You definitely scrap the end of history and make the fall of the Berlin Wall an epilogue to the Cold War. Doing 1st and 2nd World War back to back is depressing, and tends to lead to blurring as to what belongs in each one. I'd seriously consider reducing WW1 to background for WW2, and then sneaking some methodological stuff into the Cold War.