(First of two parts)
In many parts of the world, social studies textbooks are hounded by questions regarding content, learning goals and methods?and politics. For example, Japanese textbook writers have long had to grapple with their country?s role in World War II.
A worried Thai parent laments that her daughter ?feels Burma is fierce and heartless, Cambodia cannot be trusted, and Laos is inferior to Thailand?because the history textbooks teach her so.? More recently, the government of Israel announced that Israeli textbooks for Arab school children would no longer contain the sentence that says Arabs describe the period of the birth of Israel as al-Nakba (?the catastrophe?). The Jews call it the ?Independence War.?
In our own case, Dr. Ambeth Ocampo, a fellow historian and head of the National Historical Institute, asks if there is room in our textbooks for such historical controversies as the execution of Andres Bonifacio.
The debate remains unresolved. Nevertheless, social studies textbooks tend to suffer from what David Tyack calls ?terminal blandness.? M. Schudson asks, for example: ?Why are history textbooks so controversial when they are, by most accounts, so dull??
How to be both factually accurate and interesting thus seems to be a monumental challenge that confronts social studies textbooks.
Several conditions in the Philippine public basic educational system inflate the reliance on social studies textbooks: the dearth of school libraries and poor access to other sources of information; uneven academic training of basic education teachers in disciplinal knowledge; and very heavy teaching load.
Prompted by the heightened necessity for excellent textbooks, we decided to focus our review on the public school social studies textbooks and the 2002 curriculum on which the current Department of Education-approved textbooks are based.
This paper proceeds from the historical dictum that ?facts, while vitally important, should serve as the beginning of historical instruction, not its conclusion.?
Facts are the indispensable raw material that historians use to interpret the past with respect to such immediate questions as causality, agency and effect; and larger (philosophical) questions of claims to truth, the directionality of human events, notions of time and space, and so on. But even before historians employ facts, they evaluate the sources, both epistemologically (e.g., in terms of new evidence or novel interpretations or perspectives) and methodologically (with regard to the source?s authenticity and, more frequently, the credibility and reliability of the evidence offered).
Why is History taught in school? History serves numerous purposes, from the development of citizens as meaningful members of a larger community with which they identify, to the training of the mind in critical thinking and sound judgment. A good citizen is one who, as our elementary textbooks teach our children, obeys traffic lights. A good citizen, too, is one who is able to weigh options and make decisions, including whom to believe and trust, based not on feelings of loyalty or partisan allegiance but on demonstrable grounds. The practical applications of historical skills abound in everyday life, from writing reports and accepting (or rejecting) them as trustworthy, to tracing household payments over time and tracking prices of goods at the market. Yet History as a subject is not highly valued and is best remembered as the one that requires a good memory.
In basic education, History tends to get confused with Civics. But while Civics focuses on norms and values, History traces what happened in the past. Whereas Civics focuses on government (elements of the state, various political concepts) and citizenship (rights and responsibilities), History has a much broader scope, which is situated temporally rather than exclusively in the present. But in our public schools, History as a subject is taught in only one year at the elementary level (fifth grade), and shares the Makabayan subject (Grades 1 to 3) with Civics and Culture, Geography, Music and the Arts, Health Education, Home Economics, and Good Manners and Proper Conduct. In upper elementary school (Grades 4 to 6), History shares the Hekasi subject with Geography and Civics.
High school Social Studies, in contrast, focuses on History: Philippine History in first year, Asian History in second, and World History in third year. In the final year the subject is Economics. Since most Filipino children do not proceed to high school (many do not even reach Grade 5, where History is first taught), our children grow up and take their place in society with little inkling of our past.
(The above are excerpts from the UP History Department?s Policy Paper on the Social Studies Curriculum and Textbooks. Dr. Maria Serena Diokno is a professor of History at the University of the Philippines Diliman, and project leader of the UP History Department textbooks review team composed of Dr. Mercedes Planta, Ruel Pagunsan, Jely Galang, Kristoffer Esquejo and Ariel Lopez. Not one is a textbook writer or contributor. The team wishes to acknowledge the support of Sephis, a South-South exchange program, and the SEASREP Foundation, its affiliate.)
