We treat our pupils like Aldous Huxley’s Gammas

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

Like any self-respecting adolescent, I spent most of my teenage years referring to my parents as fascists. What exactly that meant I had little idea, thanks to a state education in which world history consisted of Romans, mediaeval monasteries, the Industrial Revolution and the first world war, in a repetitious carousel of unrelated events.

Presumably today’s stroppy brats can malign their parents with impunity, as practically all they learn about is Hitler, yet what of those other much used critical terms — ‘imperialist’, ‘colonialist’, or the ever more reified ‘democracy’? This matters. It’s not just pedantic peevishness. These are the terms around which political judgments are based, and they are hurled right and left with little concern for the historical implication of their use. They form the basis of a political discourse which is increasingly divorced from meaningful knowledge. How is it possible to make decisions if we don’t really know what we are talking about? Before he had to worry about saving the world, Gordon Brown spent much of last year drivelling on about Britishness and the values of citizenship, yet current government thinking on history teaching seems to deny students the opportunity to consider what those values consist of.

In a curriculum which currently devotes less than 4 per cent of its time to history, the suggestions of the recent Rose report seem intent on further severing the essential bond between knowledge and meaningful political participation. We don’t need Orwell to remind us that control of the future is predicated on possession of the past. In the absence of historical certainty, that past becomes a palimpsest upon which convenient ‘truths’ can be re-inscribed with impunity.