Yesterday, the Wuhan Municipal Education Bureau announced that starting from next semester, the first-year junior middle school students in Wuhan will take the history and society exam instead. As a transition, students in the second and third grades continue to complete their courses until they graduate from junior high school. This means that this "new" course, which has only been offered for four years, will completely disappear in the junior high school classroom in Wuhan after two years.
Since the autumn of 2004, Wuhan has opened a comprehensive science course in the first year of senior high school. In order to cooperate with the experiment of this course, a comprehensive course "History and Society" was set up in the autumn of 2006.
According to Wuhan Education Bureau, the course has achieved certain results in the past four years. Its open and comprehensive content broadens the professional vision of subject teachers and changes the way of teaching and learning to some extent.
However, there are some inherent defects in this course. For example, some of the contents overlap with some of the contents in Geography and Ideology and Morality. Normal universities don't offer the subject of "History and Society" separately, so the source of professional teachers can't be solved in a short time. It is difficult to connect the comprehensive teaching in junior high school with the teaching in senior high school.
Some educators believe that the cancellation of History and Society is a helpless return under the pressure of exam-oriented education.