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Reaching Higher Newsletter from |
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How to Handle Historical and Political Bias
We regularly get emails like the one below asking us whether our Footprints programmes have a biased perspective of history.
“Next year our children will be in Grade 4 and I would like to explore a South African programme. Is your programme based on the old Apartheid curriculum - that is history according to white people in South Africa or is it more balanced? The sample lesson is about a Voortrekker boy, so that is my reason for asking.”
Whether or not you choose to use one of our South African unit studies or not, you need to know how to handle any possible bias that you might encounter in the materials that you use, as Social Studies especially, is almost always written from somebody’s point of view and subjects like Life Orientation in the state school system also have an ideological agenda.
In recent years, many places, roads, buildings and highways in South Africa have been renamed and in recent months, there was a lot of media publicity about the defacement and removal of historical monuments that certain factions felt were no longer appropriate, given South Africa’s colonial and apartheid history.
How do we help our children understand that kind of thing? How do we help them recognise bias – their own and that of others?
In our online article, Why Study the History of South Africa?, we have an excellent quote that answers the above questions:
“Everybody sees reality in a different way. To really get the facts, we have to look at all perceptions; discover the assumptions, biases, and truths in those perceptions; and then discover ‘the facts.’ …
…Historians, like writers and photographers, influence the way people see the world.
We can prevent people from seeing truth or we can depict truth as close to reality as possible. No matter how truthful and honest, each historian presents a biased
version of the truth. …
…Those who write have a responsibility – to be as accurate as possible, to
understand their biases and attempt to leave them behind. Those who read have
another responsibility – to question when information seems lacking, to
read with a grain of salt, and to demand the whole story.” ~ J. Powers
We have had families from all the colours of the rainbow nation use our programmes and none have complained about the bias – and it is definitely there – we try to point it out wherever possible and make recognising it and understanding it, even if it is potentially offensive, part of the lesson.
It is theoretically impossible to be 100% objective with a subject like history, but we have to teach our children to read widely, to recognise different points of view and to make their own judgements.
“History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.” ~ Robert Penn Warren
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