History is more vital than ever

THIS week, your columnist waded into the debate on the abolition of history as a core subject on the Junior Cert from this September. While for the vast majority of secondary schools, history has been a core Junior Cert subject, it was never compulsory in vocational schools.

Nevertheless, as I said on Twitter this week, it was an act of vandalism to remove it as a compulsory subject in those schools where it was always taught. Fifty years ago last week, the great lost hope of the 1960s Robert Kennedy was gunned down in California. A few years earlier he stated: ‘There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.’

This is the history of the Brexiteers who yearn for a Britain that never existed, of the Bolsheviks who only taught one version of Russian history and of the fascists of Germany and Italy who did something similar in their morally bankrupt lands in the 1930s.

In this island of contested histories, it is more important than ever that we give our young people a grounding in historical investigation.

That is the reason history should be compulsory in all secondary schools at Junior Cert.