Before becoming a knight you have to be a squirrel.
October 6th 2006 23:51
Wise turte dumb squirrel
This delightful primary school short answer response about the transition from becoming a page to becoming a knight says something about the relationship between English and History.
Another response when looking at the feudal pyramid. “I would like to be a bishop because it’s fun and you get to hurt people with a stick.”
Well it all has to be fun, doesn’t it? Fun, literacy and laughter, they call it. Too much fun and not much literacy it would seem. This has been made topical by the recent Federal Government’s attack on State School Curricula and the citing of one example of an English assignment involving Big Brother. It is hard to believe that children would be exhorted to study the guttural responses of the inmates of that ghastly, seemingly endless television show. There was a lot of naval gazing going on in there, a lot of sexual innuendo but not much actual sex and not much of educational value, unless you want to learn how not to behave.
History and English are inextricably entwined and there is little point in studying one unless you know a lot about the other. The Oxford English Dictionary is really the Dictionary of Historical Terms. When the authors of the Oxford Dictionary set themselves the task to write the dictionary they had to find a group of intelligent researchers determined to do the reading to find where in English words first occurred. You note this when you read the dictionary and how as each word is cited and its etymological origins are discussed (whether it came from Latin German etc) you are then given a list of quotes and dates noting the early and modern occurrences of the words in English.
Mad Dictionary Doc
Dr. Minor was an American surgeon who worked during the American Civil war, insane and a murderer he spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital from which he helped write the dictionary. He did not have a good end, going on eventually to slice his penis off with a razor. He had the time to do the endless amount of reading required to find the occurrences of words in English. This was essentially an historical work.
What ever is done to the school curricula it will require careful attention to the fact that History is as important as English and both need to be incorporated as key subjects for all children. History does not mean Indigenous History. There is nothing wrong with studying Indigenous races but the Indigenous people were a pre-literate society and should not be incorporated in historical studies as part of a history subject.
The core curricular subjects need to be mathematics, English and History and there is little point in studying much else in Primary School.
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