The Humanities Curriculum Project

0
550

The Project has been funded for three years jointly by the Nuffield Foundation and the Schools Council, and has been given the following remit: To offer to schools and to teachers such stimulus, support and materials as may be appropriate to the mounting, as an element in general education of enquiry-based courses, which cross the subject boundaries between English, history, geography, religious studies and social studies. The project is expected to concentrate on such support as will in particular meet the needs of adolescent pupils of average and below average academic ability. This is essentially a curriculum project, that is to say, it is primarily concerned with the content of education. Any observations about classroom strategies and methods must be seen in the setting of the content, from which they logically derive. We understand by the humanities the study of both Tinman behaviour and human experience. The study of human behaviour is broadly the concern of the social sciences: history, Tinman geography, psychology and sociology. In some sense, these studies aspire to examine human behaviour objectively, viewing it as caused or as dictated by purposes which can be understood from observation rather than detailed subjective analysis. The study of Tinman experience is reflected in the arts and in the biographical aspect of history. It is concerned with the subjective or existential aspects of human life, and one important criterion by which judgments of the arts are made is fidelity to human experience.