JONAED

This paper is predicated on the newly developed and circulated 9-year Basic Education History Curriculum which has been sent to the various Junior and primary schools for immediate implementation. This is coming at the hill of several agitations by the Historical Society of Nigeria, academicians and well-wishers in the country, who have yearned for the introduction of History studies at these levels of education long before now. The researchers received this fit with high excitement and admiration, but for every new programme stands to be corrected to make it more standardized, for it to stand the taste of time. This is because anything worth doing is worth doing well. And it is based on this premise that this paper wants to make a critique of the curriculum, to see its strengths and weaknesses, so as to proffer a tangible solution to the programme which will fulfil its purpose of developing the nation’s educational system. This paper is a theoretical one and the instrument that will be used in this assessment is the 9-year Basic Education History Curriculum which has been sent to various schools for implementation. The researchers would use the expository method of assessing documents and also used an argumentative approach for the analysis of ideas and points. From the findings, the curriculum was found to be developed without taking the age and ability of the children at those levels into consideration. It does not adopt the known to unknown strategy of teaching pedagogy and in fact most of those that were invited for the development of the new curriculum were not specialist in history curriculum which is a flaw as the whole document is domicile in education where their inputs would have been of immense help. The paper recommended that the age and ability of the pupils should be considered while planning a curriculum of this magnitude the local history of the pupils or history of the immediate community should be emphasized more than the history of those communities outside their immediate environment so as to have a paradigm shift from the complaints in all educational quarters on the old history curriculum for senior secondary schools.