Humanities 20:20 by Tony Eaude
A campaign to embed the humanities within a balanced and broadly-based primary curriculum. This is a follow up to my article in the previous edition of Primary First, ‘Rethinking the humanities and why they matter in primary education.’ It describes a campaign called Humanities 20:20, which is supported by NAPE and several other organisations and was launched in May 2019. Humanities 20:20 aims to improve the quality of learning and teaching in the humanities; and in order to do so to: • raise the profile of the humanities in primary schools, especially in History, Geography, RE and citizenship; • empower all those involved in schools to consider how they can use the humanities as a context for educating children for the complex but fascinating world in which they live; and
• provide ways of sharing and encouraging creative, imaginative approaches. This campaign resulted from a long-standing worry that a group of educators (mostly involved with teacher education in the primary sector) had about the narrowing of the primary curriculum and marginalization of the humanities (and the arts). Too often the humanities have little time or priority allocated to them and may involve little more than children being taught a range of disconnected and abstract facts. This concern led to a themed issue of the journal Education 3-13 looking at the state of the humanities in primary schools in the four jurisdictions of the UK; and then a subsequent seminar in 2017. 05