A provocative new theory of history which has won influential support from Bill Gates poses the latest challenge to the coalition government plans to return to a traditional school curriculum.Big History, a movement spearheaded by the Oxford-educated maverick historian David Christian, is based on the idea that the academic study of the past can no longer be carried out from a nationalist perspective. Christian and his acolytes argue that the discipline will progress only once it charts human activity with a global scope, looking at chains of cause and effect that do not respect national borders. On a Big History course, the species Homo sapiens is not even mentioned until more than halfway through.

via Big History theories pose latest challenge to traditional curriculum | Education | The Observer.