Problems of Sequence Criteria in History Content Organization

Through several curricular reforms in Korea since Liberation, the achievement of sequence in curriculum has been regarded as one of the most important principles. History subject has been criticized for its repeated similar contents in elementary and secondary levels. Differentiated organizational measures or categorized approach (for example, political history, cultural history, social history, etc) has been tried to deal with this problem, causing more difficulties for students to understand history as such. Nonetheless, the principle of sequence has been continuously applied, because it justified the necessity of curricular reform. In other words, the principle of sequence provided the very rationale for changing curriculum. But from now on, we have to ask if the achievement of sequence is justified or desirable criteria for history subject. Eventually, history teaching is mostly about diverse historical facts. Students in all school levels have to learn about historical facts in anyway. These facts, then, are to be interpreted and explained in many ways in history classrooms, as students move up to higher school levels. In this sense, some repetition of basic contents is inevitable. When we organize history curriculum, the most important thing is to help students to understand the characteristics of history properly. To do this, the nature of historical fact, its meaning, interpretation, and causal relationship should be the main elements of history learning, not the arbitrarily separated topics or categories. This is the reason why the chronological approach should be reconsidered for its synthetic description of past events and efficacy for students’ understanding.