I can’t quite believe the number of professional historians who have denounced Michael Gove’s new history curriculum. Richard Evans, for instance, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Scarcely a day passes without him launching an attack on the Education Secretary. He has denounced the new curriculum as ‘a mindless regression to the patriotic myths of the Edwardian era’.
What he objects to is not just the facts that children will be expected to learn, but the manner in which they’ll be taught. He believes that children should spend their time learning ‘analytical skills’ rather than mere facts. Asking them to memorise facts is ‘rote learning’ and only suitable for creating Mastermind contestants.
This is presumably why he thinks it of little importance that more children associate the name ‘Churchill’ with the animated dog in the car insurance adverts than Britain’s wartime prime minister. Or that according to a BBC poll, half of Britain’s 16- to 24-year-olds cannot identify Sir Francis Drake as the naval commander who helped defeat the Spanish Armada, instead naming Christopher Columbus, Horatio Hornblower and Gandalf. Facts such as these are dismissed by Evans as ‘patriotic stocking-fillers’.
So what sort of ‘analytical skills’ are children learning in history lessons instead? According to the present curriculum, the job of historians is not to teach children about the past, but to furnish them with the skills of a professional historian. Such an approach may strike anyone who studied the subject more than 25 years ago as bizarre, but ask any child studying GCSE history. It’s not history so much as historiography.
In a typical lesson the teacher presents pupils with a primary source — a letter written by Cecil Rhodes, for instance — and invites them to ‘detect bias’, i.e. circle those words and phrases that, from our present vantage point, are unacceptably racist or sexist. In this way, history ceases to be about teaching children some perspective so they can transcend the tyranny of the present. Instead, it becomes a tool for reinforcing the prevailing orthodoxies of our time. This is what prompted Robert Tombs, another professor of history at Cambridge, to describe the current history curriculum as ‘crassly present-centred’ and ‘vapidly self-congratulatory’.
Detecting bias is the main stock-in-trade of professional historians, apparently, but children are also taught other techniques for convincing themselves how noble and wise they are compared to their backward forebears. Thus, no history lesson is complete without at least 15 minutes of ‘role play’ in which ‘learners’ pretend to be the victim of some past social injustice, such as a slave or a chimney sweep. No doubt Richard Evans spends several hours a day on these stimulating exercises.
This way of teaching history is supposed to be ‘value-free’, yet a glance at the accompanying materials quickly puts paid to that myth. According to Christopher McGovern, who has taught history to five- to 18-year-olds for over 30 years, the ‘obsession with political correctness’ in this approach is clear. ‘If a battle is taught it is as likely to be through a “social” or “gender” perspective — conditions on board HMS Victory or the role of women in World War II munitions factories — than it is to be about military events at Trafalgar or El Alamein.’
This goes to the heart of why so many academic historians object to the new history curriculum — because they’re dyed-in-the-wool lefties. The manner in which history is currently taught isn’t supposed to acquaint children with any facts about the past. Rather, it’s supposed to make them embrace the dogma of political correctness. It’s not Our Island Story. It’s a crash course in identity politics. God forbid that they should end up voting Conservative.
Which isn’t to say that the new history curriculum is right-wing, as its critics claim. Rather, it is informed by the principle that every child deserves to be given a treasure house of essential knowledge — the kind possessed by all professional historians and, indeed, professionals of every stripe. Not just the kings and queens of England, but the ideas of Plato and Locke, the plays of Shakespeare and Chekhov, the scientific theories of Newton and Darwin — the best that’s been thought and said. These are treasures that all children deserve to share, not just those lucky enough to go to a good school. And knowing this stuff is not left-wing or right-wing. It’s a necessary condition of realising your potential as a human being.
Comments