Does teaching and learning History matter?
Aruni Samarakoon
… I sing of Israel and Palestine:
The world as neither yours nor mine
How many different men will fit
Themselves how fast into that place?
A Woman’s body as the universal shelter
To the demon or the sweet as paradigm
Of home that starts and ends with face to face
Surrendering to the need that each of us can feed or take away
Amazing as the space created by the mothers of our time
Can we behold ourselves like that
The ribs the breathing muscles and the fat of everything desire requires
For its rational abatement? ….”
– June Jordan: Poetry for Palestine
June Jordan is an African American poet and activist who holds the pedagogical agency to explore the ground realities of class, gender, race, immigration, and the political complexities of representation generated by the capitalist structure. The above poem was written in 1982, following the killing of Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila, near Beirut, Lebanon. In this poem, Jordan not only expresses the pain of the Palestinian people but also highlights the courage of Israeli human rights activist and educationist Shulamith Koenig, who challenged the Israeli government’s violent approach. She transforms the realities of pain and the bravery of women into a powerful stance against the militarisation and violent approaches of both the Israeli and Lebanese governments—governments that, at the time, consisted of 112 men and only eightwomen in the Knesset (Parliament) and no female representation in the Lebanese government. Through the symbolism of mothers and the creative power of women, she portrays how women create remarkable spaces from their own wombs, holding their sense of self and embodying the courage to confront and challenge the realities of violence. Readers might then ask why June Jordan matters and how her pedagogical methodology is relevant to the Sri Lankan context.
Therefore, this article is divided into three sections: Section One explores feminist scholarship and how it redefines the teaching and learning of history through everyday lived experiences. Section Two explains why and how reforms to the pedagogy of history are necessary. Section Three presents the conclusion of the article.
The historical pedagogy of June Jordan emphasises reading historical events through the lived experiences of grassroots communities, as these communities are often the subjects of events rather than the agents who create them. In other words, her pedagogy foregrounds the ‘everyday experiences’ of ordinary people to interpret historically organised and ongoing events. Through this lens, Jordan identifies the arbitrary military expansions of the USA and its alliances in the Middle East as part of a neoliberal, gendered project dominated by men of particular races or ethnic groups.
Jordan’s scholarship is further reinforced by socialist feminist scholars such as Angela Davis, Cynthia Enloe, Nancy Fraser, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, who elaborate on how these military approaches and alliances reflect neoliberalism. According to these feminist scholars, the gendered dimension is not only because men predominate in these structures, but because these approaches involve the exercise of power, enforcement, and the systematic disempowerment of grassroots communities.
These scholars also argue that the influence of neoliberal states extends beyond military strategies to reforms in sectors such as education, health and welfare, housing, and environmental policy, which often develop without adequately representing the everyday experiences of grassroots communities. Consequently, the representation of these experiences is increasingly shaped by the intersectional dynamics of class, race, and gender, resulting in histories that are classed-, race-, and gender-biased.
By looking at the context of Sri Lanka, a significant political debate has occurred extensively on virtual platforms after the current government decided to introduce certain education reforms, including making History no longer mandatory for some grades. This decision has generated widespread public engagement online. While much of the discussion is confined to whether teaching and learning History should be mandatory, the more critical questions concern why, what, and how History is taught, and whose everyday lived experiences become central in constructing historical narratives.
History, in general, contains gendered and ethnic biases and often reflects the voice of those in power. As Cynthia Enloe notes in “Twelve Feminist Lessons of War” (2023), feminist historians always explore, question, and examine historical content in relation to the lived experiences of both power holders and those without power. This perspective raises critical questions for teaching and learning Sri Lankan history: How has the protracted civil war been constructed in historical learning materials? How are the lived experiences of that war represented? How have scholars like Rajani Thiranagama, who foregrounded these lived experiences, been situated in history curricula?
Furthermore, how has the war’s outcome—framed as a victory through neoliberal alliances—been centralised in narratives, creating further space for militarisation, as Enloe and Jordan explain in their scholarship? Exploring these questions connects the lived experiences of people affected by history to an analysis of who speaks and what is represented, demonstrating that history is gendered, raced, and classed, as it often presents a one-sided view framed as ground realities.
Reforms to the Pedagogy of History
At the end of any war, a government’s next focus is often on the development of both materials and human capital. When it comes to human capital, this primarily refers to the development of a labour force with employable skills that align with post-war neoliberal market needs. Consequently, the National People’s Power (NPP) now faces the challenge of improving the skilled labour force to meet the neoliberal economic agenda, which aims to address structural economic issues such as poverty, rising unemployment, maintaining welfare policies like free education and healthcare, and managing the pressures of an aging population.
To address these structural economic issues, the NPP has emphasised reforms in the higher education sector, focusing on training skilled labour, particularly in Information, Communication, and Technology (ICT). However, the production of skilled labour alone does not resolve structural economic problems, which are rooted not only in a deficit of skilled workers but also in the uneven distribution of profits and economic benefits. These issues are further linked to partial taxation policies—decisions about whom to tax and how to tax.
If the NPP aims to produce skilled labour, then at the very least, these workers have the right to be made aware of contemporary social issues, which the NPP should address in its educational reforms. In particular, topics such as menstrual poverty, hygiene education, and menopause should be included in school textbooks, as these are natural processes inherent to women’s bodies—and women constitute a significant portion of the labour force.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I assert that teaching and learning History is most meaningful when aligned with critical methodologies that aim to understand ground realities. These ground realities are connected to everyday lived experiences, and the holders of those experiences represent intersectionalities that raise the critical questions: whose voice becomes history, and which voices are taught and learned in historical materials.
If pedagogy fails to incorporate everyday lived experiences, History risks becoming a descriptive subject of idealism, with teachers and learners confined within the existing power structures that shape knowledge and historical narratives. It is essential to recognise that fundamental educational reforms must address the structural issues of neoliberalism, rather than viewing educational crises as arising from education itself. This perspective, informed by June Jordan and other feminist scholars, emphasises understanding the underlying structures first and then analysing how they produce current crises—such as uneven distribution of resources, migration, identity representation, recognition, and climate change impacts.
The COVID-19 pandemic has acted as a catalyst, intensifying these structural problems and stimulating the rise and organisation of Left revolutionary consciousness in both the Global North and South. This demonstrates that reforms alone are insufficient; sustainable solutions require the teaching and learning of History that foregrounds lived experiences and critically examines the structures shaping them.
