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We treat our pupils like Aldous Huxley’s Gammas

04 February 2009

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The historian Lisa Hilton is dismayed by the government’s latest proposals for the teaching of history in which the understanding of complex narrative will be marginalised

Suggesting that children are incapable of dealing with complex narrative is intensely patronising. They manage fine with Harry Potter. Like it or not, our island story is a rollicking good read, with as many battles and murders as Grand Theft Auto. Certainly, much British history is of necessity concerned with the activities of elites, but is it not worth understanding why this is so? One doesn’t need to be a Whig to see the value of a story which explains how we got to where we are. Why assume that children’s understanding of issues such as multiculturalism or Europe might not be enhanced by learning about Commonwealth initiatives post-1945 or the Angevin empire? The study of British history does not need to be unquestioningly patriotic — the Peasants’ Revolt or the Irish Famine are as righteous subjects as one could wish for, yet it is pointless to teach them without context. The rights and wrongs of imperialism are shown to be as complex when considered in terms of Suez as they are simplistic in view of the rapaciousness of the East India Company.

Rose’s suggestions also seem blind to the reality of how history will be increasingly absorbed. Is it not irresponsible to deny children the capacity to assess information for bias, distortion and inaccuracy in a world of unsupervised, unfiltered internet access? Good history teaching provides a confident perspective from which to dismiss, as much as absorb, the massive amounts of information with which children will be daily bombarded on the web. Huxley’s Bernard Marx claims that 62,400 repetitions equal one truth; not an implausible figure in the age of Google. The extent to which consensus is capable of creating reality is alarmingly suggested in a recent text poll of 50 million predominantly young Russians asked to name their greatest national figure. The 13th-century warrior Alexandr Nevsky came first, but Stalin was only pushed into third place by a last-minute television rally.

The oral epics of pre-literate cultures, from Homeric Greece to the Siberia of Maadai-Kara, saw poets revered as the guardians of national consciousness. In denying children the thrill of our own epic historical narrative we also deny them the option to compare, to judge, above all to refuse. Surely the point of all humanities teaching is not the regurgitation of whichever facts the government deems appropriate, but the ability, quite simply, to think? Orthodoxy is the absence of thought. At least, given the current curriculum’s obsession with fascism, that is a truth which every schoolchild knows.

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cuffleyburgers

February 5th, 2009 8:11am Report this comment

Trying a bit hard with the long words Lisa, but you're not wrong. The state of history teaching is tragic. The state of maths, physics and English teaching is little better but even the socialists, at least some of them, recognise that if infants are to be turned into little work units, then the basic skills help.

Unfortunately the Gramscian tendency have been left to hijack history undisturbed, and the result is a generation cut off from their roots, in ignorance of their culture.

You're right that our island story is a rattling good read, but one the teaching establishment won't allow.

John Lea

February 5th, 2009 9:42am Report this comment

Excellent article. I wonder if you have read 'The Illumination of Merton Browne' by JM Shaw, which touches on the same theme?

Rhoda Klapp

February 5th, 2009 10:35am Report this comment

Blimey. Perhaps Lisa would like to dispense with the social butterfly rubbish and write more of this sort of article?

David

February 5th, 2009 12:10pm Report this comment

I have to say, my memories of primary school from the 1970s do not include any history teaching at all, unless referred to in local or topical context.

Isn't timing the issue here? What's wrong with tackling narrative history in secondary school?

Bill Corr

February 5th, 2009 5:26pm Report this comment

So what's needed is for smarties to write good stuff as well as the Harry Potter books are written - 100% accurate and 100% in context. Like starting with Jack London's 'People of the Abyss' for a good gobful of gritty terrible true social history.
Or Evelyn Waugh on the St. Helena who might or might not have found what might or might not have been the true cross.
Actually, I STILL love Macauley even if he's been proven wrong scores of times - such language!
The Duchess of Portsmouth "intelligent and lascivious" with "a life of frivolity and vice" behind her!
Show the nippers the film 'The Battle of Britain' a few times. Bring back Jackdaws! Make history live again! Dig out the BBC series on the Great War.
And no preaching of anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist claptrap.

Dave

February 6th, 2009 1:25am Report this comment

A quick read of Hayek's Road to Serfdom explains all.

You are expecting the same government who can not manage something as simple as grit salt on roads, to educate children in the finer points of history. A tall order.

Abolish state schools and get back to what made this country great -- private education coupled with low taxes so that working class people could afford to use it.

simon baker

February 6th, 2009 5:24pm Report this comment

I would not go as far as Dave in abolishing state education, but would certainly allow vouchers and grammars where parents want them. It should also be possible to create more schools with a history specialism, alongside those with maths, science, technology, languages, english, arts and sports specialisms. Centralised education alone does not work!

RobHK

February 8th, 2009 1:06pm Report this comment

"...depriving children of any coherent understanding of the forces which made the world they inhabit."

Ah, yes. Isn't that "coherent understanding" the real goal of history teaching? How we got from a few tens of thousands in the African trees, via a million or so living "nasty, brutish and short" lives in the caves to six billion in the complex industrial society of today, with unheard-of affluence alongside still-grinding poverty. And how this can inform our judgments for today and tomorrow. Raise issues of just what a short period of time our modern society occupies and how best to sustain it. But how to achieve it? Understanding any period in or aspect of history involves a knowledge of other inter-related bits.

I did history to A-level and continued to be exposed to aspects of it in a languages degree with heavy emphasis on the writings of dead white males. Yet I must have been at least thirty before I had any real conception of the unique significance of the Industrial Revolution, and older still before I could fit it into the wider pattern of human development. I'm still learning today at the age of 67. (Niall Ferguson on "The Ascent of Money"... fascinating.)

@Bill Corr
"And no preaching of anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist claptrap."

Agreed, provided we don't return to the earlier pro-colonialist and pro-imperialist claptrap, that was, if anything, even worse.

Kevin Barry

February 10th, 2009 8:27pm Report this comment

Describing historical forces as amenable to "coherent understanding" is about as simplistic as the government strategy you criticise. Far better and more useful to teach children about incoherence.

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