Teaching Students To Think, Not What To Think

The purpose of history education should not be to cultivate a particular political consciousness or identity. Rather, its purpose is to equip students with the tools necessary to understand the past.

Photo by Ivan Aleksic on Unsplash

That virtually every account of history is a construction is a fact widely accepted by serious and credible historians.

Historians select sources, decide which events are important, choose analytical frameworks, and inevitably bring certain assumptions to their work. In this sense, no historical account is entirely objective, and naive objectivism is certainly not a common position within historiography.

Having said that, acknowledging that history is constructed does not mean that all historical constructions are equally valid. History as an academic discipline remains constrained by evidence and standards of historical inquiry, and any respectable historical construction recognises these constraints and operates within them.

A good historian approaches the past through a particular lens, but they still engage seriously with the facts and incorporate credible evidence into their work. By contrast a bad historian simply ignores the facts or tries to bend them in an attempt to support a preconceived, ideological narrative. In some cases, they invent evidence or events altogether.

The primary reason for this tendency is typically a radical, emotionally driven form of historical relativism that assumes all constructions of history are equally valid. This relativism stands in direct opposition to naive objectivism, which treats all historical constructions as neutral recordings of facts.

History is constructed, but not arbitrary

It is against this backdrop that an article by Godsell, Maluleka, Shabangu, and Wasserman in the Daily Maverick (”Proposed school history syllabus focuses on Africa as the main story, not a sidebar to Western history”), which defends the proposed changes to South Africa’s basic education history curriculum, should be understood.

The authors spend considerable time preaching to the choir about how the dominant constructions of South African history, which they characterise as “Eurocentric”, are not entirely objective. They then strawman critics of the proposed curriculum changes by implying that they regard these Eurocentric constructions as objective. This eventually allows them to present their preferred corrective: “Afrocentrism”, which they frame as a legitimate ideological lens within historical scholarship.

This calculated diversion is intended to elevate Afrocentrism and create the impression that anyone who criticises it is either motivated by blind prejudice or is historically uninformed. None of this is accurate, and anyone who has been following the public debate closely knows this. The real issue is that Afrocentrism, as it is being incorporated into the South African history curriculum as a foundational lens, lacks sufficient scholarly rigour and, in some respects, borders on a distortion of the past.

The real question in the curriculum debate

More fundamentally, however, the debate is not really about whether Afrocentrism is a legitimate historical lens. Historians routinely approach the past from different perspectives, and there is nothing inherently objectionable about examining African history through an African-centred framework. The more important question is whether any ideological framework should serve as the organising principle of a school history curriculum.

The purpose of history education should not be to cultivate a particular political consciousness or identity, whether that identity is Afrocentric, Eurocentric, nationalist, socialist, liberal, or otherwise. Rather, its purpose is to equip students with the tools necessary to understand the past critically and independently.

History is valuable because it teaches students how to evaluate evidence, identify bias, assess competing interpretations, understand causation, and distinguish between stronger and weaker explanations of historical events. These skills enable students to engage with the past as active investigators rather than passive recipients of approved narratives.

When a curriculum adopts a particular ideological framework as its foundation, it risks transforming history from a discipline of inquiry into a vehicle for affirmation. Students are no longer encouraged to interrogate historical claims on their merits. Instead, they are encouraged to interpret events through a predetermined lens. The danger is not that African history receives greater attention. African history deserves serious study and should be integrated wherever the evidence supports it. The danger is that history ceases to be centred on evidence and debate and instead becomes a tool for advancing a preferred political narrative.

Why evidence still matters

It is no secret that one of the main challenges in constructing the ancient histories of many Sub-Saharan African societies has been the relative scarcity of surviving written records. Unlike a region such as Western Europe, which developed a strong tradition of historical writing, many societies in Sub-Saharan Africa transmitted knowledge primarily through the oral tradition.

This does not mean they had no polities, institutions, or links to wide-ranging trade networks. Rather, it means that reconstructing aspects of their histories has been challenging for historians, who have had to rely on a combination of oral sources, archaeological evidence, and written accounts by largely Western observers.

To illustrate this point, there is no question that the ancient kingdom of Mapungubwe once existed. The discovery of artefacts such as the golden rhinoceros points to a sophisticated polity that was a hub of trade and innovation. Yet historians have also acknowledged the difficulty of reconstructing its history in the absence of surviving written records. Much of what is known about Mapungubwe stems from a combination of oral sources and an extensive archaeological record.

The oral tradition is a vital source in historiography and cannot reasonably be dismissed entirely. However, it also has serious limitations that cannot be ignored in the name of including marginalised voices in dominant historical constructions. Chief among these are its susceptibility to distortion over time and the difficulty of independently verifying its claims.

When stories are passed down through generations of storytellers and praise singers, historical details can be forgotten, embellished, selectively remembered, or incorporated into broader cultural myths. This does not render oral traditions worthless, but it does require historians to approach them with caution and to corroborate them wherever possible with other forms of evidence.

The irony is that the standards of evidence used to evaluate oral traditions are not uniquely Western standards imposed upon African history. They are the same standards historians apply to all sources, including written documents. Written records can be biased, incomplete, propagandistic, or outright false. Historians do not accept them uncritically simply because they are written down. They subject them to scrutiny, compare them against other sources, and assess their reliability. Oral traditions should be treated no differently.

Teaching students to think, not what to think

This is why the central issue in the curriculum debate is not whether African perspectives should be included - they should. Nor is it whether existing historical narratives contain biases - they undoubtedly do. The issue is whether history education should prioritise the pursuit of historical understanding or the cultivation of a particular worldview.

A history curriculum worthy of the name should expose students to multiple perspectives, competing interpretations, and the complexities of historical inquiry. It should encourage them to think historically rather than ideologically. The goal should not be to make students proud, ashamed, empowered, decolonised, patriotic, or politically conscious. Those outcomes may emerge as by-products of studying history, but they are not the discipline’s primary purpose.

The primary purpose of history education is to help students understand what happened, why it happened, and how we know what we know. Any curriculum that loses sight of these risks replacing historical inquiry with historical activism.

Ayanda Sakhile Zulu holds a BSocSci in Political Studies from the University of Pretoria and is a Policy Officer at the Free Market Foundation.

Nicholas Woode-Smith is the Managing Editor of the Rational Standard and a senior associate of the Free Market Foundation. He writes in his personal capacity. You can follow him on X: @NWoodeSmith.