"The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there." This often-recited quotation from the novel The Go-Between sums up many people's attitudes to history. For them, the past is a bleak place full of bloody battles, obscure treaties and endless dates.
As far as many of us are concerned, once we leave school the past becomes a foreign country. With the economy booming, Irish history seems out of kilter with its dark tales of conflict, rebellion and endless hardship.
Looking at the decline in the numbers of pupils taking the subject at Leaving Certificate level, students appear to hold similar sentiments.
The retreat from history at second level has been dramatic. At recently as 1989, over 30,000 students took it; this year the number has fallen to 12,602, with only 7,838 students taking it at higher level.
As the Teachers' Union of Ireland has stated, history seems to be "a subject in decline". To put it into perspective, almost twice as many students are attracted by the cooking and food science elements of Leaving Cert home economics.
To make matters worse, those taking history are finding the examining standards very exacting. This year almost 25 per cent of those who took the pass paper failed. This was one of the worst rates of the 31 subjects in the Leaving Certificate.
Dr Dermot Keogh, modern Irish historian at UCC, says that the demands of the Leaving Certificate paper are excessive. "Students are asked to do five questions in three hours and 20 minutes, and this does great violence to the academic quality of their answers."
The questions, which can at times ask a student to give a veritable potted history of a huge historical figure such as Parnell or Hitler, can have a negative effect.
Teachers of the subject are also demoralised, Dr Keogh says, because their students are given "serious misinformation" that taking history has no vocational value. In other words, there are no jobs in history.
However, the Government has been supportive of the subject. The last minister for education, Micheal Martin, was a historian and took a keen interest. The Department is also working on a new curriculum, now in its sixth draft.
The experts agree that this curriculum needs to broaden the history syllabus, which tends to focus more on political history than on social and economic history. As one historian put it: "We know about the Civil War, but we tend to know less about the social conditions of the people who lived through it."
The disappointing figures this week, at least in the lower-level paper, are made worse when one considers that Irish people can exhibit a lively interest in history. The recently-screened RTE series, Seven Ages, about Ireland in the 20th century, attracted an average of about 400,000 viewers, according to Dr Keogh. He points out that a large number of these were young people.
Dr Keogh says that the Internet and CD-ROMs, for example, contain masses of important and accessible historical information which can be utilised by students. In other words, any new medium or fresh approach to delivering history offers the best hope of attracting new recruits.
Prof Hugh Gough, of the modern history department in UCD, says that the steep decline in the numbers of students taking history is most likely because they see the course as being long and arduous.
The attention span of students now is regarded by many teachers as short, so taking them through the various twists and turns of the land war is a draining task. The new syllabus will have to try to change this and give history a new, more secure, future.
eoliver@irish-times.ie
