Student, professor say there's more to address in N.L. curriculum than cutting art and music

A junior high school student says she's breathing a sigh of relief following the province's decision to pause changes to curriculum that would allow students to partially opt out of courses like social studies.

Matilda Carr, a Grade 9 student who shared her initial concern over the proposed changes with CBC, said she was glad to see the about-face made by the Department of Education.

"One of the goals was to increase student engagement, but I don't think they would have done that. I don't think that just changing how much time subjects get is going to make students more engaged," Carr said Wednesday.

"I'm especially glad to see that they were looking at the feedback from everyone ... both positive and negative."

The proposed changes would have allowed students at 14 schools to choose some of their classes by partially opting out of social studies and core French, and completely dropping art and music. Education Minister Krista Lynn Howell said the province will hold off on implementing those changes next school year and is continuing consultation.

CBC News asked Howell for an interview, but the department didn't respond before publication.

Rather than the proposed changes, Carr said she'd like to see the province explore changing how some subjects are taught to foster greater engagement and update the curriculum to remove outdated information.

Memorial University associate professor Sébastien Rossignol hopes the province can improve how it teaches history in particular.

"I think we were a little bit alarmed at seeing the kind of very significant reduction in time devoted to social studies. In fact, we've been kind of concerned for some time about the lack of history instruction in the schools," Rossignol, the department of history's undergraduate programs director, said.

"We would like to see that as an opportunity to talk about that and to think about possibly not only having more time devoted to social studies in the school, but also to think about having more history."

MUN's history department issued a letter in response to the postponing of the proposed changes, voicing concern over what further cuts to history subjects could have on students.

Rossignol said it's important for Newfoundland and Labrador's future citizens to have a grasp on the past and have insight on the way humans talk about current events, especially in times of tension between Canada and the United States.

"People are talking about concepts like fascism, imperialism, nationalism. All of these very big, important topics that are being talked about on the news, all of them having some very important historical background and significance," he said.

"We need more [than] to just read a Wikipedia article to understand that, and it should start in the school."