Which revolution?
“Which revolution should the history curriculum include?” we were asked. Our team at Learning First were supporting a history curriculum writing project. This question gave us pause for thought. For a maths curriculum, we would not need to ask a question of this sort because there is a hierarchy of content, and that content, and its sequence, is fairly uncontroversial. But it is not necessarily so easy to think about what content to include in, say, a geography or history curriculum. In maths, you learn addition before multiplication. In history, there is no equivalent rule. Does it even matter which topics you choose?
In fact, there are a number of very useful curriculum design principles that can be used to help select the content of a curriculum in a subject like geography or history, where content is not hierarchical. We call these cumulative subjects.
Start with ‘scope’
Before considering the role of concepts like revolution, the first basic question is one of scope. A full history curriculum, for example, will need to build:
Across time, from ancient to modern
Across places and peoples
Beyond isolated episodes into a coherent narrative
Across political, social, economic, religious and technological themes
The hope is that this scope would be adequate to give students a narrative framework of the past. Whatever topics are chosen, the scope should be collectively sufficient: together, we want the curriculum to give students a coherent picture and story of the past, an adequate framework. A primary school history curriculum that only covers the national history (e.g. Australian history for Australian schools or British history for British schools), however well taught, is not collectively sufficient. Students would leave with no framework for understanding the wider world.
How concepts are actually learned
After discussing scope and collective sufficiency, we were still not quite ready to answer the “Which revolution?” question. We needed to be clear about how concepts like revolution are actually learned. When we talk about students understanding revolution or understanding empire, we tend to imagine this as a kind of abstract knowledge and perhaps a definition that becomes more sophisticated over time. This can lead to the idea of teaching a single unit on revolutions, designed so students can learn what a revolution is. But this is a misleading way to think about building conceptual understanding.
Cognitive science provides a much better way to think about how we build conceptual understanding. Concepts like revolution don’t sit on their own. They are understood in context and built from, and depend on, a wider body of knowledge. What we call understanding of a concept is, in fact, a schema: a mental structure built up from specific details in specific settings that together give the concept its meaning. Think about how a young child learns what a dog is. Not from a definition, but from meeting actual dogs: big ones, miniature ones, fluffy ones, spotty ones. The schema for “revolution” is built in the same way - as an ever-richer web of knowledge about actual revolutions and related historical concepts such as governance, military organisation, chronology, social change, monarchy, or empire. Each revolution has its own context, causes, consequences, and characteristics. You cannot build that schema from a definition. You build it by encountering real cases in sufficient depth.
Why sequencing matters
Which brings us to the sequencing of the curriculum. A well-designed curriculum does not teach concepts once. It builds understanding of them deliberately over time by revisiting them in different contexts. A teacher might introduce students to social organisation in Ancient Egypt, then ensure they encounter different forms of social organisation in Ancient Greece, Ancient India or in Ancient Rome. It is through a coherent and expanding range of planned contexts and topics that progression in understanding of different concepts is actually built.
This progression is easy to miss. Some people will look at content and think, Do students really need to learn the specifics of trade in ancient Egypt? Why do we need such historical facts? But those facts are building into ever more complex conceptual structures. The problem is thinking of this knowledge as isolated detail in the first place. Progression in history, then, is the gradual accumulation and organisation of historical knowledge in long-term memory. The goal is, on one level, exceptionally simple: to know more history, more periods, more societies, more of the human past. Understanding each of these periods with increasing depth requires growing conceptual schemas that make each new period more intelligible than the last.
If students are taught using isolated snapshots of content extracted from their period or geographical context, the content loses much of its illustrative power, and the risk of anachronistic understanding increases. By examining full historical periods in which important concepts are revisited and expanded, rather than isolated snapshots, students are able to see how a concept exists within its context.
Back to revolutions
At this point in our discussion, it was pertinent to remember the work of Christine Counsell, a curriculum expert, and her advice on content choices. She said curriculum designers should always stop and think: "What is the knowledge doing here?" In other words, what purpose does that revolution serve in your curriculum?
At first glance, the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution might sound like studying interchangeable variations on a theme: a people’s uprising against a monarchy and a radical new order. But even before we get to what each revolution unleashes, we are already in completely different worlds. France in 1789 is an agricultural society convulsed by Enlightenment ideas about reason, rights, and liberty, with revolutionaries arguing passionately in public about how society should be organised. Russia in 1917 is a vast empire staggering under the pressures of industrialisation and a catastrophic world war, where a small, disciplined party with a precise ideological programme seizes its moment. These are not two versions of the same story. And what each revolution then unleashes makes them even more distinct. France sends ideas about democracy, citizens’ rights, and nationalism travelling across the world and Russia produces communism, the Soviet state, and the defining conflict of the twentieth century. And if we add the Industrial Revolution into the mix, we are in different territory again with an economic, not political, upheaval and an upheaval that transforms how people worked and lived, and explains how the modern economy was born. These are three completely different bodies of knowledge and three different sets of prior understanding students need to bring with them.
As a teacher dives into the detail of each event, the word “revolution” is doing almost no work as a category. What is actually being built in each case is a rich, specific schema: a web of knowledge about a particular time, place, set of ideas, and set of consequences. And once you see that, it’s obvious how practical Counsell’s question is. You might include the French Revolution because you want students to understand where modern ideas about democracy and citizens’ rights came from, and how those ideas then spread across the world. You might include the Russian Revolution because you want students to understand the origins of communism and the shape of the twentieth century that followed. You would not choose between them on the grounds that one is a better example of “revolution”. You would choose on the grounds of what each explains about the past and unlocks for students further down the curriculum.
This is why a common curriculum error is to treat a concept, whether revolution, empire, or any other, as the goal of the curriculum, with content selected merely to illustrate it. This gets things backwards. A concept is only usable, only actually understood, when the student has a rich, contextualised schema built from specific cases. The substantive knowledge is what the concept is made of.
What does all this mean in practice for someone writing a history curriculum? It means that the question "which revolution?" is actually the wrong starting point and the questions come in a different order:
First, does your curriculum have adequate scope? Is it collectively sufficient? Does it take students across time and across the world, covering enough different societies, periods, and themes to give them a genuine narrative framework of the past? Taken together, do the topics you have chosen give students an adequate picture of the past, one that will serve them as citizens and as learners for the rest of their lives?
Second, what is the knowledge doing in each topic? A revolution or an empire, or a religious movement may not earn its place because it is a good example of a category, but because of the specific body of knowledge it carries, the prior understanding it builds on, and what it unlocks for students in the topics that follow.
The teacher covering Ancient Egypt is building students' understanding of monarchy, belief, and trade. If those students encounter Ancient Greece, India, China or Rome, they are not starting again. They are expanding a schema, meeting those same concepts in new contexts, seeing how monarchy looks different in different societies, how beliefs shape how people live, how trade connects the world. By the time a secondary teacher introduces the French Revolution, students who already have an understanding of monarchy, belief, and trade from learning about Ancient Greece and then Rome, are ready to understand why the idea that ordinary people could overthrow a divinely appointed king was so explosive, and to understand why those ideas then travelled so far. The curriculum is not a list of topics. It is a carefully designed journey in which each stop builds the knowledge students need to make sense of the next one.
Which revolution? It depends entirely on what the knowledge is doing there.
This Insight is part 1 of a series on curriculum design in history. Part two is coming soon.