Ensinar História com pés e cabeça

Ao que parece, Niall Ferguson estará a ser sondado para planear os novos programas de História no ensino liceal britânico. Aceitando a existência de planos únicos para todo o país, ao menos a escolha de alguém com cérebro para o fazer é já uma boa notícia.

Fica aqui o excerto de um artigo seu, no Financial Times, com cerca de dois meses, precisamente sobre a questão da pobreza do ensino da História:

«(...) Now, nobody wants a return to the kind of mind-numbing history that used to be taught a generation ago – those strings of facts and dates, one damned thing after another, half-memorised by comatose pupils and famously lampooned in WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman’s 1930 classic, 1066 and All That.

It’s no coincidence that the most boring teacher at Hogwarts in JKRowling’s Harry Potter books is the history teacher, Mr Binns, whose lessons about the goblin wars are so tedious that he himself has died of boredom without noticing.

Yet when you find out what most of today’s teenagers are taught as history, you realise that decades of educational reform have made matters worse. Most strikingly, there is no meaningful connection between what is taught to students in the early years of secondary school (called Key Stage 3), at GCSE and at A-level. “Our island story” was far from ideal. But now there is simply no narrative arc at all. (...)»