History as a core subject is being written out of history. As of this September, it will no longer be a compulsory subject in secondary schools. President Higgins has expressed his concern over this change, as has Diarmaid Ferriter, Professor of Modern Irish History at UCD, who joined Sean O'Rourke to explain why.
Speaking of the diverse range of subjects being discussed on Today with Sean O'Rourke, Diarmuid said, "These are all drenched in history. People need to be exposed at a young age to history as a core part of their being, of their learning, of their lives."
"You've got to consider also when it comes to the status of history, what it is saying about ourselves and about our priorities. Given all the concerns that we have in this era about information overload but not knowledge orientation, if you consider all of the cutting and pasting that goes on, if you consider the way in which people absorb what's out there, what's on the web, an era when an awful lot of certainties and absolutes are being expressed, it is precisely this era where we need a sustained exposure to truth, to evidence, to sift competing evidence, to try and come to some kind of conclusions about how we've got to where we are."
Diarmuid cites the case study of Britain, where history is compulsory only to the age of 14.
"What happens after that, and there is a lot of research being done into this, is that history becomes more associated with wealthier schools, with areas of greater social advantage. This becomes a class issue… There are those who have called in the UK for history to be made compulsory up to the age of 16 because they regard their experiment as having failed."
Diarmuid also worries that our powers of discernment would be affected by a lack of understanding of our shared history.
"If you go back to the Council of Europe in 1996, it was making the point that people had a right to their past, that is was a civic right and that it needed to be a civic skill and in the absence of that, people were more vulnerable to political manipulation and other kinds of manipulation because that's when the myth and various myths are allowed to breathe, are allowed to become fossilised into some kind of accepted narratives or certainties when they're nothing of the sort."
Click here to listen to that discussion in full.