Teachers education: how do we frame ”the past” and ”science”

 For the past two weeks I have been teaching a course for teacher students who aim to teach the 1-3 third year in Swedish elementary schools (i.e ages 7-9). This has been rather of a challenge to me, since the history curriculum for these school years is mostly about pre-historic societies such as the stone and Iron Age. In a classical understanding of history, this is not really history since historians engage with the time after that written sources makes their entry around 3000 b.c. Still the course also contains a lot of history didactica, making it clear that historians are needed at it. Furthermore, I also think that it is wise that this is part of the national curriculum since if we started in a literate society children would automatically ask the question: but what was before that? 

What I however is not very content with is when I look at the course material and literature towards training teachers at this level. The largest Swedish publishing houses tend to publish material that does not make the students aware of certain subjects. Whilst they do for instance keep interesting discussions of hard historical theory (such as history conciousness), they do fall short on defining history as a subject.

According some of them history is everything that happened in the past, which is a philosophical aspect that can be criticised. Whilst we often utilize ”the past” and ”history” in the same way, it is obvious that those two are not the same thing. History should, at least from a scientific view, be understood as what is part of the subject of history. Not everything that happened in the past becomes part of history, since not everything is possible to record or worth remembering. The past is all of the things that happened before now, history is the selection of what of those that we deeem as worth remembering.

Another aspect is that some of this literature also does not distinguish between history and other sciences. One of the books for instance highlights that historians when trying to figure out what people in the past makes X-rays of well preserved bodies. This is far from how historians work, but a rather true thing about classic archeology. It also define usage of history as rather banale, since it for instance is defined as ”how the past have lived on in the names of days of the week”.

As an educator I am very clear about this criticism and also aims at highering the level. Perhaps statements such as these are way to try to not complicate things for the readers, but in the end this is perhaps not very ethical. None the least since not all students attend none mandatory parts of class. This could in return actually lead to the quality of the teachers education being lowered. Maybe it is time to demand more of leading publishing houses.

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