Making History
nick cowen, 7 October 2008
At last week’s Tory party conference, shadow education secretary Michael Gove committed his party upon their return to power to restoring the teaching of narrative British history in schools. He reportedly said:
‘Instead of being taught about the Magna Carta the Glorious Revolution and the heroic role of the Royal navy in putting down slavery, our children are [now] either taught to put Britain in the dock or they remain in ignorance of our island story, That is morally wrong, culturally self-defeating – and we would put it right.’
He promised the history curriculum would be overhauled so as once again to highlight ‘the great things that we as Britons have achieved’.
This is a curriculum change for which Civitas has long campaigned, republishing Henrietta Marshall’s Our Island Story after half a century of being out of print to point out how history could and should once be again be taught.
It is heartening to see former opponents of the revision for which we called now acknowledging its merits. One belated convert is Tristram Hunt, quoted in last Saturday’s Independent as saying:
‘I used to be wary of the sort of stuff Michael Gove is saying … but I now think there is something in it, because no one knows any history any more. If the island’s story is told properly and cleverly, it’s a progressive, interesting story.’
That represents quite a departure from what Hunt was saying only three years ago when he remarked in the Guardian: ‘Grand narratives of our struggle for freedom will neither engage more students in the studying of history nor serve our public sphere well.’
Perhaps, Hunt has finally seen the force of the point we at Civitas had long been arguing, a point Andrew Roberts puts very well in the same Independent report in which Hunt announced his change of mind. Andrew Roberts said:
‘The great thing is that you don’t need to teach patriotism. All you need to do is teach a completely objective accurate account and the outcome is naturally patriotic because it is such a great story.’
Another historian yet to appreciate why we at Civitas regarded Marshall’s book as highly as we did is Edward Vallance. Writing on his website last month, he accused Civitas (and Andrew Roberts) in championing Marshall’s book of having ‘unwittingly been recommending British schoolchildren read a surreptitiously pacifist, feminist and republican version of ‘Our Island Story’.
We were full aware and endorsed the proto-feminist sentiment Marshall had expressed, as we did her sympathetic treatment of the Peasant’s revolt and favourable estimate of Cromwell’s achievement.
I look forward to the day Henrietta Marshall replaces the truly subversive mush currently taught our schoolchildren in place of proper history in the new ‘Identity and Diversity’ strand of the citizenship curriculum. Maybe that day is not too far off.
Roland, It was the original article that proposed teaching history in a morally-loaded way by listing all the ‘glorious’ things that the nation had done over the centuries. That was why I pointed out that not all the British interventions could be interpreted as positive in the way that was being suggested. Of course history should be contextualized, that is why children need to learn the skills to do so. In fact, the analytical skills that this article appears to dismiss as ‘subversive mush’ are what will help them to learn to investigate history for themselves rather than accepting interpretations that are presented to them – whether from the right or left wing.
I’m not sure what relevance the anti-academia rant that you ended with has to this debate. Are you proposing that all academic research should be ended and that we go back to the curricula of the 1950’s and stay with them in a bid to regain the ‘confidence’ that was destroyed by those nasty hippies?
Oh dear!
same old tired, lefty drivel about making sure we continue to teach how awful we were and how it is all our fault.
Let us not forget that history is of its time and in its context – Britain was as bad, or as good, as many other nations – and in many cases much more liberal and ‘progressive’ (whatever that is supposed to mean).
The problem with this ‘nation’ is that it has lost its confidence and has been taken over by the 60s and 70s generation of lazy, can’t be bothered’s who think that the state should pay for their lifestyles (academia being the classic example). Alan Whicker once said in one of his TV reports on the Hippies in the US in the late sixties, that they could indulge themselves because other peoples taxes and hard work were paying for their safety and welfare – that, in my view sums up the modern, social-welfare state.
Will children also learn about the ‘glorious’ role of the British in perpetuating slavery for centuries? Or how the navy ‘gloriously’ sent most of those slaves it ‘liberated’ to work as indentured labourers in British territories? A sense of ‘patriotism’ based on a selective reading of certain events is the very last thing history needs to instill in children in an increasingly divided world. We should be teaching them about the real global interconnections between societies throughout history and about the negative and positive deeds and thoughts of humanity as a whole rather than trying to ram some outmoded concept of the nation state down their throats.