Sustained public campaign for history’s return to the school curriculum paid off recently when a ministerial directive did just that. Its notional existence for about three decades has been deleterious to both the country and the generation buried in the valley of ignorance of the subject.
The Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, gave the order that the subject be compulsorily taught at the basic level while addressing the 71st meeting of the National Council on Education (Ministerial Session) in Abuja. To this end, Social Studies, which supplanted it, will be disarticulated. He said, “It is only the study of history, our own history, that can explain and give meaning to our very humanity and that is why we must study it and teach our little ones.”
Such renaissance will delight not only historians, but devotees of the subject such as the Nobel laureate in literature, Wole Soyinka, and a former Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, Emeka Anyaoku, who lately joined the advocacy train for its teaching in schools. The subject’s return should also be extended to the secondary school level. Wondering how this void came to be in the first place, Soyinka, in a philippic tradition, asked, “…Can you imagine that? What is wrong with history? Or, maybe, I should ask, what is wrong with some people’s head?” The answer is the amnesia our educational policymakers suffer.
Normatively, history is the study of past events, a discipline invented by Herodotus, in order to preserve Greece’s heritage and achievements as well as to enquire why the country was always at war with her neighbours. History, therefore, is society’s memory, the way human memory is to man. Imagine an individual without it! Such a person will simply be a study in abnormality.
The past, present and future, organically linked, is a chain that, once broken, spells disaster for the society. Nigeria has failed to grapple with this fact; therefore, our present seemingly headless generation is paying it back in equal measure, not knowing where it is coming from, or headed. Thus, nation-building, patriotism, social cohesion and national pride, all values history inculcates in the youth, have been lost.
History began its descent into an abyss way back, when it was erroneously believed that science and technology were the only knowledge worth teaching in schools. The knowledge of history does not take anything away from any child; rather, it makes him/her a better learner, able to sharpen writing skill and deepen the rational and analytical faculties. Chinua Achebe was as brilliant in the sciences as he was in the arts at Government College, Umuahia, Abia State, where he made distinction in all the subjects in his School Certificate Examination. He got a scholarship to study medicine at the University College, Ibadan, in 1948, as he dazzled the examiners in the entrance examination. But he switched over to the arts.
In spite of the advances of Western nations in science, technology and innovation, they have not abandoned their history. In fact, in the United Kingdom, history is compulsorily taught in public schools up to the age of 14; and Richard Cairns, of Brighton College, Sussex, says it is a disgrace that it is the only country in the European Union where this happens. That British youths know little about the subject, the Tories say, is an “outright scandal.” This is why an erstwhile Shadow Education Secretary, Tim Collins, once advocated that the subject be made compulsory for pupils up to age 16.
When the United States declares the third Monday of every January as a national holiday, in honour of Martin Luther King Jr, who was assassinated on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee, it opens a chapter in its history, especially for the youths to learn the imperative of a multi-racial society, justice, courage, truth and non-violence.
Similarly, the Holocaust and the Nazi epoch are mandatorily taught in German schools up to the 10th grade, in two regular hours a week. The pupils periodically visit Adolf Hitler’s Concentration camps and museums. According to Lars Rensmann, who teaches political science at the University of Munich, students who reflect on the criminal aspect of Germany’s history, especially the genocide against the Jews, “… tend to develop cosmopolitan and universalistic ethical values….”
Unfortunately, the opposite is the case in Nigeria, where a civil war was fought between 1967 and 1970. The young ones are denied knowledge of that tragedy, and invariably its lessons have been lost. However, George Santayana, the American philosopher, reminds us that “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
It is ridiculous that on October 1 every year, Nigerian schoolchildren trudge to their state capitals and the 774 local government area headquarters for parades to mark the country’s independence in 1960, but are intellectually barren of what the ceremony represents and the chain of events that preceded it.
Where this lacuna exists, the late Ade Ajayi, the eminent historian who had initiated the campaign for the restoration of history in the classroom, alarmed that “…such a nation cannot achieve a sense of purpose or direction or stability; and without them the future is bleak.” Nigeria sits astride at this crossroads.
Though Adamu’s pronouncement is a good step forward, it is not Uhuru just yet until he moves from rhetoric to its enforcement. After Ajayi led a team of patriarchs of the discipline that included Tekena Tamuno and Ebiegberi Alagoa to visit former President Olusegun Obasanjo on this knowledge vacuum in our today’s education, he ordered that history be returned. But it was a farce. Former President Goodluck Jonathan also paid lip service to it. For the Adamu initiative to be real, the Historical Society of Nigeria should liaise with him on how to design a national implementation strategy. There are pedagogical concerns and content volume, which scare students away from the subject.
History is a critical tool in economic planning, conduct of diplomacy, strategic studies and war execution globally. Accurate diagnosis of some ailments begins first with doctors debriefing patients about their family’s medical history. History has served Nigeria well. The achievements of pioneer historian, the late Kenneth Dike, Nigeria’s first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ibadan, and Ajayi, at the University of Lagos, Akoka, as vice-chancellor, eloquently testify to this fact. It was not for nothing, therefore, that the Nigerian Academy of Science established an annual memorial lecture in Dike’s honour.
If Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill are not strange political figures to the youth in the US and UK, why Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello appear as fictional characters in tales from the moonlight to pupils and youths in Nigeria, merits serious attention. History simply matters. In it, Churchill says, “lies all the secrets of statecraft.”
