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Why
Teach World History in School: Curriculum Reform in German Secondary Education
Eckhardt Fuchs
University of Mannheim |
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This short essay provides an introduction into the
present debate on history curriculum reform in Germany. After a sketch of
the background of the history curriculum in Germany, which includes a short
analysis of the newly introduced history curriculum in Baden-Wuerttemberg
(one of the sixteen German states), I will examine the relationship between
history teaching and identity formation in a global world, based on recent
empirical studies. This will be followed by some observations about the
position of history compared to other subjects at high schools, and the
definite problems in curriculum revision posed by history as a subject.
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| History
curriculum in Germany |
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Despite the recent “cultural wars” over
the introduction of National Standards in the U.S. and the fact that neither
standards nor textbooks show much reflection of the transcultural, global,
and comparative approaches of world history research, from the German perspective
the U.S. world history curriculum development since its beginnings in the
early nineteenth century looks like the story of an easy success. The impressiveness
of world history teaching in the American classroom, especially after the
introduction of AP courses, makes the neglect of this subject in German
secondary education all the more obvious. Although Germany can look back
on a long tradition of world history writing, it never really reached the
school curriculum except in two cases. First, during the nineteenth century,
textbooks on world history had been written and used in schools, but this
practice ceased once the imperial age arrived. Second, in East Germany world
history in the shape of Western Civ – albeit based on Marxist theory
and with different ideological aims – was part of the school curriculum.
But in general, a nation-centered view has dominated the German history
curriculum. Although the biased nationalistic and chauvinistic curriculum
changed after World War II, neither the abandonment of all Nazi ideology
in textbooks nor the overall reform of the history curriculum led to a replacement
of the nation-orientated history instruction in Germany. Only as a result
of the European unification process and the numerous attempts to revise
history textbooks by the Council of Europe did a thematic broadening of
the curriculum since the 1970s occur. The conferences of the German ministers
of education in 1978 and 1997 decided to set up guiding principles aiming
at the creation of a “European consciousness as pedagogical task of
the school.” But world history has still not found its way into school
curricula.
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Before elaborating further on this phenomenon,
a few words on the structure of the German school system are necessary.
To begin with, this system is very heterogeneous due to the fact that the
federal government has no regulatory authority over the schools; each of
the sixteen German states develops its own system. Primary school generally
starts at the age of six and goes to grade 4. Based on merit, the students
are then sent to one of four secondary schools that end either at ninth
or tenth grade (secondary level I), or the twelfth or thirteenth grade (depending
on the state and encompassing secondary levels I and II), with the best
students continuing the longest. History is obligatory from the sixth through
tenth grades and two classes a week are taught. Depending on the school
type, it can be combined with other subjects. Traditionally, curricula are
issued by the state government and are input-oriented, and there is a free
market of state-approved textbooks. Beyond grade 10 (i.e., secondary level
II), history is no longer mandatory.
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As a reaction to PISA and to a general school reform
debate reflecting the international discourse on general education, school
quality, autonomy, and assessment, among other topics, various German states
are reforming their curricula. One example is the new history curriculum
of Baden-Wuerttemberg, which was introduced as part of the so-called Bildungsplan
in 2004. With respect to the Gymnasium (which is the secondary
school type for the best students to grade 12 in this state) this new curriculum
reveals at first glance a change in the traditional approach. As an output-oriented
curriculum focusing on standards and school autonomy it means a shift away
from the traditional curriculum. The introduction of specific school- and
subject-related standards, the definition of a core curriculum, a specific
school curriculum autonomy, which can be set up by each school individually,
and the merging of different subjects into one seem to offer new ways of
teaching history. The basic goal of history instruction is now stated as
such: “The acquisition of basic knowledge about important events,
persons, developments, structures, terms, and epochs of regional, national,
and European history, as well as world history, is indispensable for history
instruction.” |
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If one has a closer look at the history standards,
however, it becomes obvious that world history is hardly treated and that
a transformation from a nation-centered perspective to a global approach
has not taken place. From grades 6 to 9 the curriculum is characterized
by a chronological, Western culture-based survey; grade 10 deals with contemporary
history of the twentieth century. After national history, European history
has a second narrative line. The advanced courses in grades 11 to 12 –
so-called Leistungskurse that are comparable to the American AP
courses – focus on Modern Europe and neglect non-European history,
decolonization, and other global topics with the exception of the Chinese
Revolution. Problems of globalization, migration, environment, economy,
and trade are treated in the Fächerverbund (the merging of subjects
into one curriculum) of geography, economics, and social studies. Altogether,
the new curriculum turns out to be only a trimmed version of the old curriculum
and formulates standards on a very abstract level. In contrast to the general
goal of history teaching cited above, world history is only treated peripherally,
and problems of globalization are assigned to subjects other than history.
By no means does the new history curriculum incorporate a change of the
basic narrative. Recent studies on the history, geography, and civic instruction
textbooks and curricula carried out by the Georg Eckert Institute for International
Textbook Research in Braunschweig confirm that the national approach still
prevails and that non-European perspectives are only integrated selectively.
Europe, however, does tend to play a more visible role in teaching. |
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| World
History Teaching and Historical Consciousness |
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Thus, the U.S. debate on the history curriculum
revision has not yet arrived at the German schools. Only in the past two
years have educators started debating the revision of the history curriculum.
Whereas the introduction of the U.S. National Standards could be justified
by major changes within American society and was promoted by various pressure
groups, the impulse of a history curriculum reform in Germany is based on
the idea of the general mission of history instruction: to produce knowledge
about the past and to develop a historical consciousness and identity that
provides a basis for orientation in society. History, in short, plays a
major part in the historical-political socialisation of adolescents. Since
the globalization process has changed life and world perspectives dramatically,
the nation-centered history is no longer sufficient to guarantee the identity
and orientation function of history instruction and, therefore, does not
correspond to the needs of youth in a global world, according to the advocates
of world history in Germany.
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These normative assumptions are not yet proved empirically,
however. The international comparative study “Youth and History”
of 1995 investigated the historical consciousness of some 32,000 ninth-grade
students in 27 European countries. Without going into the details of this
study, one of the results identified was that “connections between
conceptions of the past, perceptions and evaluations of the present, and
expectations for the future are visible but not strongly developed.”
It is evident that the impact of daily experiences on the historical consciousness
is much stronger than vice versa. This means that the supposed orientation
and identity function of history has to be seen rather as a confirmation
of experiences than a cognitive processing of the past. Other studies reached
similar results, for example the sociological studies on the effects of
the European unification process on a “European” consciousness
and identity.
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Recent empirical investigations in the field of
youth and adolescence research show, however, that youth cultures are influenced
to a large extent by global developments and that they react to them in
various ways. Furthermore, the twelfth Shell Study (“Youth 2002”)
confirms that adolescents reflect globalization and its challenges in a
very realistic and pragmatic way. It seems to be evident that life experiences
and future expectations shape the social actions of young people more than
historical consciousness does. It is therefore an empirically open question
as to what degree history instruction in general and world history instruction
in particular contribute to the socialization process of youth in comparison
to family, tradition, culture, and peer group. It is not really known what
the needs of students for orientation and identity in a global world are
and how they reflect globalization, or whether a world history-centered
curriculum can serve these needs better than a traditional one. Further
research needs to be done on what exactly constitutes a “global-oriented
historical consciousness” and what kinds of skills – cognitive,
social, methodical, or subject-related – have to be developed to transform
historical consciousness. These are important questions for a prospective
curriculum reform.
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What models should Germany look to for reforming this
nation-centered curriculum? Simply adding non-Western civilization courses
into the curriculum does not seem to be very successful, as the history
of Western Civ courses at U.S. colleges indicate. The method of implementing
a separate world history course besides the traditional national history
course – as in the case of the AP courses – carries with it
the danger that there is no link between the two narratives. The alternative
path of teaching national history within the context of world history has
not yet been attempted. Regardless of how one tries to implement world history
into the curriculum, it poses the additional question of how to define world
history.
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| History
as a Subject in the Schools |
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Such a justification seems to have become a crucial
point considering the competition with other subjects that history has to
face, and in the U.S. this competition is also present. The discussion about
core curricula and knowledge standards will have effects on how much space
subjects will be allotted in the curriculum. The position of history is
by no means secure. A glance at the specifics of the German school system
and the fact that history at the highest secondary level (grades 11 to 13)
is voluntary confirms that the impact of history instruction on identity
should not be overestimated. In addition, studies on the preferences of
students reveal that 25 percent of all students dislike history courses
and that it is ranked third after mathematics and physics in the scale of
unpopular subjects. There is also a significant difference between teachers
and students regarding the goals of instruction. Whereas teachers assume
that the “explanation of the present through history” and the
teaching of “democratic values” are most important, students
put “knowledge of important historical events and care of traditions”
first.
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The low rank of history among school subjects coincides
with the lack of appropriate teacher training. This problem is more pronounced
in the U.S., as Diane Ravitch has recently shown. In Germany the education
of high school history teachers at the university is not undisputed in the
context of a general discussion on teacher training but it does follow a
certain curriculum and is, as teacher training is in general, divided into
two parts: academic (within the university) and pedagogical-practical (at
teacher seminars). However, since world history has not been institutionalized
at German universities, there is no special training in world history.
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Finally, if history can defend its position within
the school curriculum and if world history is able to justify its implementation
into the history curriculum, the question remains how such a curriculum
change might look and what kind of curriculum definition one refers to.
Setting aside the German debates on what constitutes a curriculum, it can
be stated that most experts agree that learning goals and teaching strategies
are content-directed elements of the state’s control of instruction
and that the curriculum therefore serves political strategies of legitimization.
The term curriculum itself can be interpreted in several ways:
as the totality of learning experiences of all actors participating in instruction;
as material for instruction; as instruction unit; and as administration
rule; but also as “realized” curriculum in the way of the output
of the learning-teaching process. Another approach emphasizes five dimensions
of the curriculum that make up the totality of the learning-teaching process:
a normative dimension, which covers values and ethical norms; a functional
dimension, which aims at developing certain abilities according to the school
type; a contents dimension, which states what parts of history will be taught;
the organizational dimension, which deals with didactics; and the control
dimension, which measures the outcome. Given these various meanings, the
problem that has to be discussed is: At which of them does the introduction
of world history aim? Should world history lead to normative goals and social
skills, such as the idea of world citizenship, human rights, and solidarity,
or to the extension of historical knowledge in order to broaden the student’s
world view? Studies on civic education in the U.S. show that a link between
history instruction, the teaching of political and cultural norms, and the
life experience of adolescents leads to greater success in the development
of a historical consciousness and identity than traditional curricula and
textbooks.
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It is, therefore, crucial for world history teaching that
life experiences of the students in a global world correspond to the knowledge
they receive in school in order to act responsibly in society. But what
place can world history take in this context? Do students need a global-oriented
historical consciousness, as Susanne Popp argues, or rather a global-oriented
general consciousness that is constituted by a blending of abilities in
the economic, geographic, cultural, and historical realms? If so, one has
to get rid of the traditional understanding of history teaching and curriculum
and reconstruct the subject by – for example – contextualizing
(world) history within (global) geography, politics, and economics? As to
the problem of the cognitive and psychological dimension of (world) history
for adolescents, it must be stated that there are hardly any empirical studies
yet on the individual, real, and realized curriculum – that means
on the application of curricula and their effects in the classroom. This
is not just a German issue, as the problem of world history assessment in
the U.S. indicates. |
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| Conclusion |
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First, learning goals are more and more defined
through output-oriented standards and not curricula anymore, although there
is an international tendency towards integrative, “didactical,”
and “curriculum-orientated” approaches, which means teacher-
and result-orientated approaches. The reform debate about the introduction
of new educational standards has not yet reached the field of history didactics,
despite the fact that the existence of history as a subject in school might
become questioned in the aftermath of PISA. In this context educators are
challenged by the problem of how the dichotomy of the assessment of instruction
quality and the pedagogical-normative goal of the development of a (global-oriented)
historical consciousness can be resolved. This means that the debate on
standards in history has to lead to a self-reflection about the choice and
canonization of the kind of historical knowledge that is necessary for the
cultural memory of society. Such a choice is only possible by selection.
And this selection is the link between a standard-oriented assessment on
the one hand and the specific logic of the development of a historical consciousness
on the other. |
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Second, any curriculum change therefore has to
go beyond a traditional curriculum or textbook revision. Standards are defined
within a knowledge- and social-related context and aim at the development
of certain competencies. A world history curriculum has to define what specific
abilities ought to be developed. The general normative foundation of orientation
and identity formation is not sufficient and must be complemented by arguments
based on cognitive and psychological research, which means that curriculum
research has to be connected with research on the learning-teaching process.
Just the question of from what grade on world history makes sense is not
even raised yet. |
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Third, there is also the problem of whether a consensus
about a standardized curriculum and unified learning goals and teaching
strategies in a postmodern society with its permanent change of values and
steadily expanding knowledge is possible at all. How can a consensus on
world history be reached? The U.S. case shows how politicized such a debate
is and that the idea of a national curriculum is not realistic. But if one
considers that 900 curriculum commissions with almost 4,000 members worked
in Germany between 1980 and 1984 and that in 1995 a total of 2,000 school
curricula existed ; that every ten years curricula are revised and that
between 30 and 120 employees work in the respective institutes, then just
from the pure economic perspective a centralization of curriculum revision
seems to be justified. Regional cooperation is possible, as experiences
have shown, and the governments of the German states have already set up
nationwide agreements for educational standards at the secondary level I.
With regard to history instruction, however, performance standards, content
standards, and opportunity-to-learn standards still have to be negotiated,
implemented, and assessed. Those professional standards have to be worked
out by the respective institutions. |
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Fourth, according to the new Bildungsplan
teachers have the possibility to create their own curriculum for one-third
of the instruction. Here is the chance to implement world history perspectives
and to integrate regional, national, European, and world history. This,
however, requires an adjustment in teacher training at the universities.
World history therefore has to become a research subject within academic
scholarship. It also has to be discussed which part of teacher training
– the academic, the didactical, or the educational – ought to
play the major role in the readjustment towards world history. So far only
a few countries, such as the U.S. and Japan, have tried out the incorporation
of a world history curriculum at high schools. German educators should be
cautious in abandoning the American model of a separate world history course,
as has been recently suggested. There is no empirical data yet that indicate
that the integrative concepts, which are favoured by German experts, are
more successful with respect to the development of identity and a global
historical consciousness. |
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Fifth, as the new Bildungsplan in Baden-Wuerttemberg
shows, problems of globalization are treated mainly in geography and social
studies and intend to develop a close link with history, including the establishment
of Fächerverbünde. Interdisciplinary longitudinal sections
and thematic approaches can be innovative ways to overcome traditional boundaries
between subjects and to connect everyday-life experience with historical
learning. |
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It is necessary to incorporate these kinds of questions
into the discourse on curriculum reform and to consider empirical research
in pedagogical psychology and sociology, as well as in general curriculum
studies, in order to justify the implementation of world history into the
curriculum. Curriculum and textbook revision have to include a reform of
teacher training and presuppose a self-refection at the professional academic
level on what constitutes world history and what the goals of studying and
teaching it are. This must not lead to “cultural wars” but requires
a certain political sensibility and a transformation of the public mind.
Even though there are various differences in the structure of history teaching
between Germany and the U.S., an international exchange might help give
new impulses for discussion on both sides of the Atlantic – be it
for Germans on the curriculum level by the introduction of advanced world
history courses or for the Americans on the concept level by considering
approaches such as transnationalism. |
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