Ask any Belizean student what is the most important armed conflict in Belizean history, and they'll probably say The Battle of St. George's Caye. And while that was hardly a battle, SJC High School's History Department hopes to change that narrative with an entire curriculum it has designed to teach about the Caste War. The decades long war is the greatest story that's never been told in Belizean schools - and when the Caste War curriculum was launched today, head of the History Department Yasser Musa told us why it's so important:...
Yasser Musa, History Dept. - SJC
"It is important for many reasons: 1) the entire north of our country was shaped by that war. Not just in terms of the people, which is very important. The Maya people. But important from boundary standpoint. That's when the boundary between Mexico and Belize had to be negotiated, because both the imperialist powers, the British on one side and the New Mexican state were in a panic - these Mayans are going in and out, let hurry sealed up the boundaries. So that had to be defined. How can a war which lasted 54 years - 250,000 people dying - hundreds of towns destroyed. How can that be erased from our intellectual, social and psychological memory. So we are not being subversive. The system is subversive. It's subverting the truth. We are trying to say that the things we are presenting now, we are not trying to say that is the truth, we are just trying to point out that the approach we've been taking in teaching history and social studies is a failure. Let us accept that. That's a part of our responsibility as people who are in the system. It has failed and we need to fix it and designed it. But the bigger challenge now is to design it for the digital generation. So while we are wasting our time with foolishness, the world is advancing in front of us and now we have a bigger problem in front of us. How do we teach kids that are into video games that are far more complex than the classroom system? So that's another problem."
But, all this is not just theoretical, the lecturers at the history department have designed an entire curriculum to teach the caste war and are offering it online to students and teachers. Musa explained how you can access it:..
Yasser Musa, History Dept. - SJC
"Belizehistorysjc.com. Anybody can go there. Any teacher. Any principal. Any student and download. For example we just put up our Caste War section and that has over 40 books eBooks free. It has all the infographics, the images that are easy to understand and the designs. It has videos of the residence in the community that we've interviewed. These are things like modules that students can go and do. Student can go and search their own history. So this is just a model and I think that this is the best approach where it is open and it's there. It's no close system."
Reporter
"Apart of the project today, I believe you presented the flash drive to SJC. Talk to us a little about those books."
Yasser Musa, History Dept. - SJC
"Well I presented 1,145 books that are on here, Now the challenge will be for people to go and open it up and read it and engage, because sometimes we get into this frenzy which I now call like a trumpian modality, which is just say, sign it and lets go. The world has changed. But we have to do work. This requires a lot of work and I am just making it very easy for people to open a book. This is a just a gift as a symbolic gesture so that we can reach that bridge I was talking about to the digital generation."
That website again is belizehistorysjc.com.
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