Gove’s paradox

By any standards, the Education Secretary is good news for history. He knows the subject, he likes the subject, and his ‘English Baccalaureate’ is already producing a marked upturn in pupils studying the past.

Sadly, Michael Gove is also a Conservative — and a deeply ideological one at that. He has a certain vision of history and, with it, a ‘drum and trumpet’ view of what should be taught in our schools. I would be happy for pupils to learn this aspect of our past. But the problem the Education Secretary faces is how to marry that passion for Whiggish British history with an equally strong determination to liberalise the education system.

In Gove’s ‘school reforms’ is a microcosm of that historic Tory tension between British parochialism and free-market fundamentalism. It is a fissure only exacerbated by the fact that the Department for Education has now confirmed that more than half of England’s secondary schools are, or are about to become, academies. Michael Gove’s ‘schools revolution’ is going to make the teaching of a cohesive history all the more difficult.

In the Education Secretary’s favour is a passionate commitment to open up the wonders of the past to as many pupils as possible. ‘One of the under-appreciated tragedies of our time has been the sundering of our society from its past,’ he told the 2010 Conservative party conference. ‘Children are growing up ignorant of one of the most inspiring stories I know — the history of our United Kingdom.’ He went on to announce a review of the National Curriculum — advised by the Atlanticist Simon Schama — placing British history at its heart. ‘Our children,’ Schama suggested, ‘are being short-changed of the patrimony of their story … for there can be no true history that refuses to span the arc, no coherence without chronology.’