NCE Grade 8 Social & Modern Studies — slavery and indenture, society from the 1920s to the 1960s, independence, democracy and a changing climate.
Grade 8 runs in order, and the order is the argument. Slavery and indentured labour are where the population of this country comes from, and what the syllabus covers afterwards — who owned land, who worked it, which communities settled where — follows from those two systems rather than sitting beside them as separate topics.
From there a pupil tracks the island into adulthood: the society of the 1920s to the 1960s with its labour unrest and its widening franchise, the negotiated route to 1968, and the institutions a new democracy then had to build and defend. The year closes in the present, on the climate pressure that now constrains every plan a small island can make.