A history lesson

 

"This video was produced as part of the Scottish Government's Read, Write, Count campaign, which seeks to encourage parents and families of P1-3 pupils to include reading, writing and counting in their everyday activities. This video focuses on the walk home from school."

 This is Smarter Scotland switching on the nation. (See the lightbulb logo)

The Scottish government believes that encouraging parents to take their children`s learning into everyday activities such as the walk home from school is one way to address the educational attainment gap.

It won`t work. Bright children from poor backgrounds have always learned to read, write and count. What they often fail to do is build on that experience. 
Then have a look at the skills being developed in the National 3 History Course .(Curriculum for Excellence)

"It is expected that learners will develop broad, generic skills through this Course. The skills that learners will be expected to improve on and develop through the Course are based on SQA’s Skills Framework: Skills for Learning, Skills for Life and Skills for Work and drawn from the main skills areas listed below."

"These must be built into the Course where there are appropriate opportunities."

1 Literacy
1.1 Reading
4 Employability, enterprise and citizenship
4.6 Citizenship
5 Thinking skills
5.2 Understanding
5.3 Applying

All I can say about this list of skills is that it squeezes the history out of HISTORY.

It is quite shocking that this has been done to children`s education.

http://www.sqa.org.uk/files/nq/CfE_CourseSpec_N3_SocialStudies_History.pdf

It is not going too well in Australia either according to Gregashman:

"I have been worrying for some time about the results of the Australian Curriculum review. Despite encouraging signs, the end result is deeply depressing in at least one aspect; the new collapsed "HASS" curriculum involves teaching children hardly any worthwhile content. In this post, I raised the following concern:"

"We need to be aware just how horrible `Humanities and the Social Sciences," could be in the wrong hands. We could have Dewey-inspired approaches that start with the child and their place in the world etc. rather than learning about the Romans or the Egyptians or about the countries of the world.`"

"Well, that’s what we’ve got..."

"Students will be investigating the Inquiry Questions, `How has family life changed or remained the same over time? How can we show that the present is different from or similar to the past? How do we describe the sequence of time?`"

"And of course, this is all written-out in a confusing and unusable way, complete with loads of little icons to indicate general capabilities such as ‘critical and creative thinking’ that the more sensible submissions to the review sought to do away with due to the fact that they cannot really be taught."

"So a complete win there for Deweyan ideology; the idea that social studies have to start with the child’s immediate universe and work outwards. This, in turn, represents a total rejection of the scientifically-based Core Knowledge argument that knowledge of the world aids reading comprehension. So it also potentially hobbles any gains available through the new curriculum’s much vaunted emphasis on phonics."

"Moreover, it is a boring and woolly curriculum for young children to follow..."

"What a complete waste of everyone’s time."

Read more https://gregashman.wordpress.com/2015/10/20/the-new-australian-curriculum-is-profoundly-flawed/

Exactly.

And if children do not know about the past they cannot understand how society arrived at its present predicament or learn from history`s mistakes.

But I guess that`s the idea.