Please note: this article pre-dates the current National Curriculum and some content and references are outdated.

Children arrive at school or nursery with their personal, unique mental ‘models’ of the world. the challenge for us is to expand these so that increasingly the pupils will be able rationally to make sense of the world in which they live and of their place in it. to do this they need to develop understanding of the human condition, both now and in the past – to know where they come from, where they fit in and about all the fascinating differences there are in the world.