IN my secondary school education Modern Studies was the poor relation of History and Geography in the school curriculum. It was perched uncomfortably amidst the technical subjects as an examination offering and had the same status as Anatomy, Physiology and Health or Home Economics when compared to the big science subjects like Physics, Chemistry and Biology.

I never quite understood the reduced station of ‘Moddies’ the name by which my nieces and nephews now refer to it. I’d have loved to have taken this subject alongside History, but was informed that I couldn’t study both at the same time.

I loved history, especially because we were taught it by a teacher - one Mr McGuire - who had a way of illustrating the causes and effects of great deeds in the 18th century with acerbic and ethereal asides. These invited you to fish out books from the local library which contained the full adult picture of what he had been slyly implying. The most vivid of these were the customs and habits of Catherine the Great of Russia and Rasputin the mad monk. As well as assorted reflections on the corruption of the medieval Church which would not have otherwise made it into a Catholic school syllabus.

But Modern Studies would have been pure dynamite. The Cold War; the rise of Eastern Bloc Communism; the causes and effects of the Suez Crisis; the Vietnam war and South African apartheid were all then beginning to form my adolescent political consciousness. It would have been such a delight to have had the opportunity to study these in further detail, aided by nightly news bulletins and television documentaries.

Modern Studies seems to have staged something of a comeback since then and, according to the younger members of my wider family, now punches in a higher weight category on the school exam syllabus. In the course of the next few years this subject ought to be experiencing something of a boom in the numbers of school pupils seeking to study it as one of their principal subjects.

Presuming that Scotland’s proposed draconian Hate Crime legislation doesn’t undermine the teaching of Modern Studies (as well as English, History, Biology, Modern Languages and Physics) we really ought to be seeing an increased take-up in Scotland’s secondary schools.

In next year’s Higher Modern Studies paper I fully expect to see some variations on the following questions.

Boris Johnson’s sudden and unexpected visit to Kiev in the midst of the Ukrainian war was not unconnected with his receipt of a fine for attending illegal lockdown parties. Discuss. Idle speculation that the Prime Minister was heard singing “Oh what a Lovely War” will be discouraged.

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