A new curriculum for Leaving Certificate history is currently under development by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA). It seems certain that Western civilisation will get short shrift, world and Irish affairs will receive the ‘oppressor’ vs ‘oppressed’ treatment, with the West always the bad guys, and the Catholic Church looks likely to be cast as a villain as well.
In fact, the aim is quite explicit. The background brief for the proposed new history course announces the rise of “nationalist and extreme political movements and ideologies”. It highlights the “various movements campaigning for climate action, social justice and equality have also emerged, striving for the advancement of rights of those who have been victims of discrimination or injustice historically.”
Note the positive and negative language used in the quotes above: “Extreme political movements and ideologies” vs “movements campaigning for climate action, social justice and equality”. It is obvious where the NCCA’s sympathies lie.
Then the brief announces: “The importance of supporting young people to acquire and develop the historical consciousness and sensibility to explore these phenomena, and the conceptual understanding to interrogate them critically, is more acute now than ever.”
This is history with an agenda. Students will not be equipped with the facts of history and then allowed to come to their own conclusions. Instead, they are to be transformed into campaigners for “social justice” and “equality”.
Right at the start of the draft curriculum we see the agenda at work when it declares that “students vary in their family and cultural backgrounds, languages, age, ethnic status, beliefs, gender, and sexual identity”, and that “every student’s identity should be celebrated, respected, and responded to throughout their time in senior cycle.”
This is a doffing of the cap to identity politics – and we see the same thing at work in other parts of the draft curriculum, which is divided into four strands.
The first one seems straightforward enough. It looks at how history is gathered, analysed and interpreted.
The second strand examines ‘Critical Inquiry and Interpretation’. (More about this later). Strand 3 looks at Irish history from 1879 until 2009, while Strand 4 looks at world history from 1917 until 2009. These sound harmless enough at first glance, but let’s take a closer look.
The appendices to the draft specification give an indication of what will be taught under strands 2, 3 and 4.
We see, for example, that under Strand 3 (Irish history), students will learn about the “role of religion” in society, a big area of interest for me, but the key question is, what will they learn? We read that they will also examine institutions such as the industrial schools, asylums, prisons, Magdalene laundries, and Mother and Baby homes.
A great deal will depend on what students will be taught about these institutions and whether their view of religion, and specifically of the Catholic Church, will be formed mainly by the part the Church played in running many of them.
Will students be told how the industrial schools, the Magdalene laundries and the Mother and Baby Homes originated, and how common these were in other countries, or will these be over-associated with the Catholic Church and Ireland? Will they hear that the biggest institutions by far, the mental asylums, were run by the State?
Looking at the broader picture, we have seen already that Strand 2 deals with ‘Critical Inquiry and Interpretation’. One heading under this section is called ‘Movements for Change’. The example provided is the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa. Fair enough, but why not Solidarity in Poland which helped to bring down communism? That was at least as important, historically speaking, as the anti-Apartheid movement. But Solidarity probably does not make the cut because the victims of communism were very rarely picked on the basis of race and were far more likely to be killed or imprisoned on the basis of their social class.
Once upon a time the left was very concerned about the ‘class struggle’ but now seems far more concerned about race, gender, and sexual identity. I wonder if the writers of the draft curriculum really want students to know how many were killed in the name of social and economic ‘equality’ in the 20th century?
We read that under the heading ‘Power and Conflict’ in Strand 2, the ‘transport of enslaved people’ will be covered. In this section, will students learn only about the millions seized from Africa and taken to the ‘New World’, or will they also learn about the millions of Europeans taken into slavery by the North African Barbary Coast pirates over the centuries, including those seized from Baltimore in Cork in 1631?
Perhaps the white victims of slavery do not count in the world of identity politics, which might actually be racist when you think about it.
For that matter, why does modern world history (Strand 4) begin in 1917? Presumably it is because the Bolshevik Revolution took place that year. Will students be taught how savagely the Bolsheviks persecuted their real and perceived enemies, including religious believers, or will Bolshevism be seen mainly as an anti-capitalist movement for ‘justice and equality’ that sometimes was a little over-zealous in its pursuit of the egalitarian dream?
We read that the world history strand will introduce students to themes like “Communism in different contexts: USSR and China,” “Cold war frontline: the Iron Curtain, Cuba and Vietnam,” and “Decolonisation: Ghana and Algeria.” It also includes highly specific topics focusing almost exclusively on women’s labour, such as “Women and work in interwar and wartime Britain and the USSR,” “Women in work and society in the USSR and China,” and a comparative look at women in East versus West Germany.
Again, we see very little curiosity about the often-appalling conditions facing working-class men in the past, once again showing how the left seems to have forgotten about them. Indeed, these days working class men are more likely to seen as enemies of ‘progress’ because they tend to favour lower immigration levels and to be nationalists, not supra-nationalists.
I suspect Western civilisation is going to emerge badly from all this and little good will be found to say about it. Will students be told that the very concepts of universal human rights and dignity that are used to attack the West, arose mainly in the West (and from Christianity at that)? Will it be explained why democracy arose in the West, or modern science, or free speech? Will the West be credited with anything at all, or will it simply be cast as the major villain of history and little more?
In short, what Leaving Certificate students are to be taught about history will have a strong, left-wing ideological bias. Catholic educational bodies will need to keep a close eye on what is going on in their schools. Parents need to do the same or they will wonder why their teenagers are wearing Catherine Connolly badges at the dinner table while chanting ‘Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go’.
(This is an amended version of an article that originally appeared on the Iona Institute website. David Quinn is on X as @davquinn.