Being a global citizen is above all ‘very hard work’, said Flemish political scientist Jonathan Holslag a few weeks ago in an interview with NRC† Well, that became clear to me when I saw the history exam that the students of the VWO had to take on Monday.
While my final exam in 1986 was still clearly dominated by the Netherlands during the interwar period and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, you cannot graduate from pre-university education this year without having proven that you know what happened in Europe and North. Africa to China and Japan, from 3,000 BC to roughly the year 2,000.
The questions illustrate how the world of all times presents itself through all kinds of channels in the multimedia age, and the art of historians no longer boils down to collecting information as to weighing and interpreting it.
Over a period of five thousand years, spread over ten epochs, events had to be set, ranging from the struggle of the Berber queen Dihya against Muslim armies in Numidia after the death of the prophet Mohammed, to the persecution of Protestants in England by Maria Tudor and Philip. II of Spain, to the construction of a garden after the Dutch example by the Japanese Empress Meisho.
Characteristic aspects
Over a period of thirteen centuries, the exam candidates had to master 49 ‘characteristic aspects’ of periods. The women were prominent in this exam. The cult around the Celtic Queen Boudica at the time of the British Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) prompted a question about a ‘characteristic aspect’ (revival of the classics), feminist Mina Kruseman and the German RAF leader Ulrike Meinhoff were featured. in questions about emancipation and source criticism.
I liked the much attention for the latter and found it necessary in the multimedia era. It’s just a shame that students were sometimes taken so tightly by the hand. In a diary entry in which the Soviet commissar in the former GDR, Vladimir Semyonov (1911-1992), describes an uprising of dissidents, the critique of his approach was already clear in the question, while the essence of source criticism seems to me to be correct. that the student can produce it himself.
Moreover, the sources were short fragments so that there was no room for a deeper, personal analysis. But that, I already understood from my daughter directly involved in this exam, is not the intention either. The 49 features of the staggering number of epochs that had to be memorized had to be reproduced precisely or it cost points. The modern world citizen must work hard, but apparently not think too much on their own.
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