When I read Michael Gove’s 1500 word ‘essay’,
Why I’m backing Brexit (published in a Spectator
blog and elsewhere on 20 February), I was reminded of a dispute which had
started in the very early days of the previous government (i.e. the Coalition)
in May 2010, but which really began to fizz from 7 February 2013 – a public
debate about identity and attachment which touched on some similar territory,
including the nature of the relationship between British citizenship and
history education. There was an intense period of discussion which lasted from that
February (when the details of the consultation (or draft) document of the new
national curriculum had been announced in Parliament) through to July, and of
course the most controversial aspect of this consultation would be the history
curriculum. What was being proposed was subject to a huge amount of critical
scrutiny involving the media, professional associations, historians, teachers
and the general public. Perhaps the most far-reaching and articulate critique
came from Simon Schama, who although once designated as Michael Gove’s ‘History
Tsar’ (a title he disliked), was clearly unhappy with the direction which the
draft curriculum seemed to suggest. Maybe he had told the Minister that he
would be unavailable from late 2012 through to 2013 because he was busy
planning, travelling and recording his ‘Story of the Jews’ which would be
televised from September 2013. Indeed in December 2013 he is reported (in the
rubric for Start the Week with Andrew Marr) as writing Volume 2 of this. The
round-table groups tasked with re-writing the draft history curriculum in their
meetings in March and June (2013) and their parallel or subsequent telephone-call
or email ‘sub-meetings’ did not include any of the historians who had been
prominent in this debate, namely Schama himself, Niall Ferguson, Sir Richard
Evans and Sir David Cannadine. Less well known perhaps but undoubtedly equally
committed in their work and beliefs were historians Lord (Paul) Bew, Jeremy
Black, Jackie Eales, Arthur Burns and Robert Tombs. In fact these five
historians were among a total of twenty-three involved directly with the
re-drafting (see list of all here). Clearly it was not just a pure history problem and the role of teachers, ‘heritage’ providers, archivists and history teacher educators was significant. It is to be hoped that the debate about whether or not we leave the EU will be subject to a similar level of critical scrutiny by experts and by
the general public.
Since I retired in August 2011 I have
followed this history curriculum debate very closely, and offer here a total of
sixteen appendices which are, or refer to, ‘texts’ that made a contribution.
I have removed the page numbers and left only the Appendix number headings. The most challenging (but in many ways the
most enjoyable) of the texts has been the Simon Schama Hay Festival address of
30 May 2013. I have listened to the podcast and watched the Sky Arts film
recording. I apologise if I have mis-heard or mis-transcribed any of what he
said, and I am most grateful to Historyworks for the use of their transcript
(which however I have departed from in places).
My most recent piece of writing on this topic is this:
I have also written:
Guyver, R. (2014) ‘Michael Gove’s History Wars 2010–2014: The Rise, Fall
and Transformation of a Neoconservative Dream’, Agora
[Sungraphô] (Journal of HTAV – History Teachers’ Association of Victoria
[Australia], Volume 49, Issue 4, pp. 4-11.
List of Appendices
Appendix 1 Simon
Schama and Teachers: Our Children, Our History (transcript of podcast with
notes added by Robert Guyver) Hay
Festival 30 May 2013 4.30 p.m.-5.30 p.m.
Appendix 2 Michael
Gove’s speech at the Conservative Party Conference 5 October 2010
Appendix 3 Simon
Schama’s statement (5 October 2010) in reaction to his ‘appointment’ by Michael
Gove
Appendix 4 House
of Lords debate 20 October 2011 (Hansard transcript and film)
Appendix 5 Politeia publications related to the history
curriculum debate
Appendix 6 House of Commons, The All Party Parliamentary
Group on Archives and History (2013), History
for All? Report, together with
oral evidence, January.
Appendix 7 Michael
Gove’s statement in the House of Commons 7 February 2013
Appendix 8 The draft of national curriculum
history (Feb 7 2013)
Appendix 9 Joint Statement on the Draft
National Curriculum for History 12 Feb 2013
Appendix 10 The full text of the historians’ letter to The Times,
Wednesday 27 Feb 2013
Appendix 11 Other significant
articles (from Seumas Milne, Niall Ferguson, (Sir) David Cannadine and (Sir) Richard J. Evans)
Appendix 12 The ‘Mr Men’ and Primary
History controversy May 2013
Appendix 13 Reform of the National Curriculum
in England Consultation Report of the Consultation (July 2013)(History section)
Appendix 14 This is the new National Curriculum for
History (11 September 2013) Key Stages 1, 2 and 3
Appendix 15 Details of Start the Week with Andrew Marr 30 December 2013
Appendix 16 – Pre-2013 National Curriculum History
Appendix 1
Simon Schama and Teachers: Our Children, Our
History (transcript of podcast with notes added by Robert Guyver) Hay Festival 30 May 2013 4.30pm-5.30pm
This is a transcript from this podcast:
Sub-titles have been added to this
podcast transcript by Robert Guyver1
Hay
Festival Preface to this
Event 286 • Thursday
30 May 2013, 4pm • Venue: Barclays Pavilion
What kind of past is it that Michael
Gove’s proposed history curriculum offers to schoolchildren and their teachers?
Can it be taught? Should it be taught? And what are the consequences for our
national culture and identity? The historian leads the conversation and
welcomes contributions from primary and secondary school teachers.
Welcome and introduction – why history matters
My heroes, history teachers! Welcome!
I’m just your warm-up act and your enabler today!
There are lots and lots of you. Stand
up wherever you are. Actually I’ve always wanted teachers to stand up.
[APPLAUSE] Yes, yes everybody else carry on, the rest of you have to do the
exam before we let you out of here. The teachers don’t have to do it …
[LAUGHTER]
Teachers, I’m one of you actually (in
my minor function at Columbia University in New York), and you know that
history is a serious matter, never more so than perhaps now. It’s not just a
stroll down Memory Lane and it’s not Downton Abbey. It’s [not] Westminster
Abbey or Tintern Abbey. It’s not just a kind of romance of bustles and butlers.
It counts, it matters, and it affects how we feel about each other as a
connected family of memory. It’s very appropriate we’re having this conversation on the border of
England and Wales. I hope some of you will actually talk in a bit, or vent as
this is an opportunity for venting – ‘venting’ suddenly sounds like a Welsh word
– it probably isn’t – but maybe we’ll turn it into one!
But on the borderland between two
different and often conflicting traditions, history matters perhaps now more
than ever because we’re at that moment in our country’s history where we’re not
quite sure where the borders of our country are and what connects us and what
might disconnect us. We’re at the moment where there’s a kind of fierce
political movement inside England, which is all about turning its back on
Europe (UKIP).2 We’re at the moment when it’s possible that Scotland
might become an independent country once more. Interesting to me that in the
checklist3 of Michael Gove’s4 desiderata for things that
must be known, the Act of Union5 whereby Scotland (in a kind of
shamefully corrupted way) became part of the Union is not actually one of the
necessary topics.
We’re also at a time when issues of
allegiance are very distressing. We’re faced constantly with the issue of
whether or not fanatical religious ideology should overcome and overturn any
other bonds of the allegiance of memory and the stories that we share together.
So history is not just a stroll down
Memory Lane, as all of you fantastic teachers know. It’s an important thing and
it’s something that’s not just simply the antique furniture polish that covers
our culture. It will determine for our children whether we do feel connected as
a country. It’s got to, bless her, it’s important that the Royal family does
what it really does, it’s important that we felt as good as we seemed to have
felt last year about the Olympic Games and the Jubilee. There has to be more
than that and it has to be a living thing. Our kids have to know and probably
all you kids out there do know already why the Magna Carta6 (coming
up for its 800th anniversary) made a difference, not just to England but to the
world. A difference which turned out to be in some places, but not in others,
happily irreversible.
So it is an important issue and so, with
this in mind, about two and a half years ago I was weirdly volunteered by
Michael Gove, (who in many ways I admire and respect), to be not what was
preposterously called History Tsar – I’m not a Tsar – Jews feel very funny
about being the Tsar (any of you) if you’re on the receiving end of Tsarishness.7
The national curriculum – problems with past
versions
But [I was asked] to say a word or
two about how the national curriculum might be looked at once again. I was,
along with other people, concerned a bit about what seemed to be the
disconnectedness of history teaching in schools, not because the national
curriculum, as relatively recently revised and reconstructed8, did
not provide for a coherent continuous chronology. The importance of the
aim is announced yet again in the rubric to the most recent suggestions set out
in Michael Gove’s document (in February of this year). Because those of
you who are history teachers know that in theory you look at the [present]
national curriculum and it does take you through – the Middle Ages, it takes
you through the Early Modern European period – and it talks about the
relationship of royal power, Parliament and the [indistinct] early Industrial
Revolution – but in practice it works out rather differently.
And it wasn’t long before I
discovered what really counted and what made it very difficult to actually fulfil
or realise the aim of coherent and continuous chronology, (and of
infrastructural things that have absolutely nothing to do with the ostensible
content or subject guidelines of the national curriculum) – namely, not enough
hours of teaching – not enough
specialist educated history teachers – and for my part the unsatisfactory
situation by which it is possible to finish an education in history – at the
age of fourteen, actually!
There are some huge differences
between what independent schools are able to offer by way of number of hours,
(amount of classroom time), and what state schools and what, a forteriori, academies could or are
prepared to offer – now that’s barely scratched the surface. I hope I have some
primary school teachers here that can talk about the particular difficulties
they face. With this in mind, there were these hard-core knotty infrastructural
problems that got in the way of the old national curriculum delivering on what
it had promised.
School visits
I went to sit in classrooms and I went
to listen to what teachers had to say. I needed to be educated myself in this –
and very quickly I found how brilliantly and heroically many of you actually
manage to enrich the lives of the students – while having to deal with these
really fierce constraints of time. The issue of the constraints of time [are
real] – I know we’re in a difficult period in terms of the job market, economic
skills, and in terms of the practical skills that we want our kids to actually
acquire. The non-functional subjects are inevitably going to be squeezed a bit.
I know also, because look at all of you here, that many of you are passionate
about giving our kids a sense of the kind of country or countries to which they
belong. As I say, I was really incredibly impressed (pretty much) when I went
to sit down with kids.
I went to a docklands primary school
for example, where a very limited number of the children had parents for whom
English was a first language and yet these very little kids were doing a unit
about Queen Victoria and Queen Victoria’s childhood and the process by which
she became Queen. It was entrancing and they were completely into it and that
was rather wonderful.
I went to the Grey Coat Hospital
School in Westminster9, a school of mixed cultures again, and there,
even though there wasn’t a particularly deliberately specified module set out,
the history teacher there taught a wonderful unit (early Key Stage 3) on what
the experience of London was like where we were sitting. It wasn’t just an
academic [lesson] with a big A or a small a, it was really about the fate of
London in the years between 1665 and 1667, that incredible trifecta of
catastrophe that occurred in the country from the Great Plague, through the Fire,
and to the Dutch invasion of 1667, and they were engaged not just by the
accounts of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn but with maps of London, trying to
imagine what would happen when you began with a pandemic. So the very clever
teacher was thinking about the difficulties of SARS or influenza epidemics and
what that would be like in a culture and a time long ago with very limited
public health facilities and no aspirins and no proper pharmaceuticals.
They were both effortlessly wiring
together the experience of a long time ago with how the kids might actually
internalise it in their own contemporary lives. This was not a dumbing down, it
was not a vulgarisation of a knotty historical question. Buried in there the
teacher was doing exactly what great history teachers do, namely telling a
story that generates questions. That is what history is, it’s
storytelling that generates an analytical sensibility – and serious, deep,
profound, questions!
I went to Cottenham Village School
[actually named College] in Cambridge10 and there was the Hitler
bit, and it was a good hour on the Reichstag Fire11 – and I was one
of the people who thought ‘enough of the Third Reich already’ – I always
remember that Alan Coren, the Punch humorist,
had to collect (we all do this) a volume of his essays and he was told that Punch humour might or might not sell.
[He was also told that] the three categories of books that always sold were
animal books, books about golf, and the third one were any books about the
Third Reich. So he called his book Golfing for Cats and on the front cover there was nothing but an
enormous swastika.
So I went into the swastika classroom
and these kids were absolutely brilliant. There was a good whiteboard
presentation but they knew what the architecture of the Reichstag looked like
before it was burnt, they knew about the kind of shifty relationship between
the ultra-nationalists of the right and completely way-out Nazis. There was
nothing really that I would [not] have asked of my own undergraduates at
university that they were not engaging with! I thought this was extraordinary
and that it still might be possible, given changing the infrastructural constraints,
to actually make something of the curriculum we have.
A critical evaluation of Michael
Gove’s February 7th (2013) draft national curriculum
However, I was sympathetic and still
am sympathetic to an attempt to give a kind of over-arching chronological story,
as Michael Gove wants, from the beginning to the end, but then this document
appeared before us all in February of this year! Now I’m sure Michael Gove did
not actually want to give us 1066 and All That 12 without
the jokes, but that is pretty much what we’ve got, I think!
What is extraordinary, and history
teachers I’m sure you’ve looked at this since you might live in trembling fear
and trepidation of having to teach a nine year old the Heptarchy13, you
know you want to say to Michael Gove, I want to say to him now, ‘Michael, let’s
you and I go into a class of nine year olds and do the Kingdom of Mercia with
them shall we? How are you proposing to do that?’ I would love also to bring
Michael into a classroom and to do the entirety of causes, [of] not just the
English but causes of the English, Scottish and Irish Civil Wars in something
like forty-five minutes. If you actually take the number of statutory,
non-negotiable, indispensable items on the document that we now have, the sine qua non [as set out Gove’s
draft national history curriculum] and that all my friends out there are going
to have to teach, that’s what it comes down to! Whoosh, there was
Disraeli! Whoosh, there was Gladstone! All whipping past one. All you can do …
if it was the Crimean War or the French Revolution, if it’s lucky, may get a
drive-by ten minutes! It’s a sort of Gradgrindian14 philosophy of
historical pedagogy!
All you can do, is put salient facts
up on the board, have the kids remember them – and see if they remember them –
or have forgotten them next week – or the week after. There is no possibility
of telling the story to generate questions even though question asking is
actually specified in a rather eloquent and sympathetic way in part of the
rubric to the new syllabus. It may have been a little bit much
for the New Statesman to say this is not a curriculum and that
it is more like a pub quiz, but they were on to something!15
And also, and if you look, how much
faith can you put in a document which seemed to believe that Adam Smith was
English? Truly astonishing that he’s in a list of figures who are said to be
part of the English Enlightenment – you know, don’t tell that to Alex Salmond!16
The list of subjects seems to be essentially memories of A Level work circa
1965, [indistinct] or something pre-1950, embalmed in an aspic, and then
sprinkled over the aspic is a garnishing of tokenism. Mary Seacole is there for
example but not Mary Wollstonecraft.17 You wouldn’t know that
British history is also about people other than white males, mostly except that
there was some little tokenism of the wrong kind here and there. It’s
absolutely the wrong kind in my view … But mostly, as I say, it makes it
completely impossible – the engagement of the kids, particularly in Key Stage
3, with the issue of asking hard questions, of having questions generated out
of the narrative which you’re providing.
Clive of India
If you take one example that I
thought to me screamed of a kind of (I don’t want to say insulting – yes, I do …)
insulting, a sort of offensive, imperviousness to what it takes to wire
together the past to the gloriously but challengingly changed character of
Britain. It was three words in one item on this new national curriculum and
these three words were ‘Clive of India’.18
Now, think of what Britain is like
now. This is not tokenism, it’s very important – and not just for those who are
from an Asian origin, but for all of us to know what the relationship between
our eighteenth century England (Scotland was very much part of this and Ireland
too) and [what] the fate of the Indian subcontinent was. Couldn’t Michael Gove
(or whoever was talking to him) put himself in the position of a small boy in
Bradford or Southall – or somewhere like that – saying ‘Dad, what are we doing
here?’ [This could apply] for different cultures too, for a Jewish,
Afro-Caribbean culture. How did this happen to be? How did we come to be
British?
And believe you me, the answer is not
‘Clive’ ‘of’ ‘India’! ([Aside] Why it could be Derek and
Clive19 and Clive of India! [More laughter]). The reason it isn’t
Clive of India is because Clive of India, along with Wolfe and Quebec, was also
embalmed in those foxed pages of ancient imperial histories in our island and
empire stories of the 1950s and 1960s.20 Robert Clive was a
sociopathic, corrupt thug, whose business in India was essentially to enrich
himself, his co-soldiers and traders as quickly and as outrageously as
possible. He makes the chief executives of our more dodgy banks, [for example] Fred
Goodwin, look like a combination of Mary Poppins and Jesus Christ by
comparison.
It’s not the squalor of Robert Clive
… maybe that was Michael’s idea: that you actually have an example of someone
for whom criminal squalor was the point of the exercise! The issue I take with
Robert Clive is his ultimate insignificance. There is a huge story behind Clive
of India, namely how did the British come to be in India in the first place –
and how did a trading company, the East India Company, come to be a government
of pretty much an entire subcontinent of a hundred million people? That is an
extraordinary story and that is one of the great stories of how we came to be
the Britain we are, and how we were the Britain that we were in the period of
the Durbars in the high nineteenth century.
And to answer that question – you
certainly need more than the kind of forty minute drive-by you’ll get if you
abide by the national curriculum guidelines. You need to ask one much bigger
question than knowing all you can know about Clive of India: what was
eighteenth century India like? What was wrong with the Mughal Empire, what was
the Maratha Confederacy21 and why was it incapable of resisting the
intrusion of the British? But more particularly, and this is not to make a kind
of cheaply anti-imperial point, is neither to congratulate nor to deplore the
experience under the British Empire, it is to understand its causal reality.
The crucial thing is what was that
shift by which a failed trading company, the East India Company, discovered it
could make more money by putting itself in charge of the government of Bengal, and
then of Madras, and then of Bombay and then of an enormous expanse of the
subcontinent? How was it that the business of government came to supplant the
business of business? That is the story! Now, to do that, you need to know real
Indian history (not in impossible detail) with the help of myriad online
sources, with the help of maps, diaries and all the things you’re using. But it
does presuppose that you are interested, as the rubric of the national
curriculum says we all ought to be (and bravo to it), in the history of other
people than ourselves.
Which brings me at length to a sort
of sense of a conversation we might have in a minute, about why history is
important for children and what we want to give our kids.
The glory of history in the western
tradition – Herodotus and Thucydides
The glory of history in the western
tradition, about which we need not be apologetic for a minute, goes back to its
founding fathers, to Herodotus22 and Thucydides.23 It
really does in my view [go back to the founding fathers] because history in the
end, for those of us who have been lucky enough to practise it, write it and
read it, it does certain things. In the first place the word itself in Greek, ‘historia’, is simultaneously a narrative
and it is a matter of enquiry. I’m told by classical scholars more learned than
I, that it meant the two things indistinguishably, and it occurs in the first
line of Herodotus’ great history. So it is storytelling from which question
asking is necessarily inseparable.
Secondly, it is about the history of
other people – people disconnected from us in time and space and sometimes in
culture too. One of the most remarkable things about Herodotus’ history is that
he is so fascinated with the Persians, with the enemy, as well as the remains
of the Syrian and Babylonian culture and the Egyptians. It’s the first real
attempt at an Egyptian ethnography and it’s not coincidental because Herodotus was
not from Athens, he was an Ionian – he was a kind of inveterate traveller.
I always think of him as one of those
people you come across in a carriage in a train (going, say to Newcastle) and
he will not shut up! Then you realise – after having been irritated – how
grateful you are the Herodotus figure will not shut up – telling you where he’s
been in his life and times. That is the glory of chatty, pluralistic,
open-mindedness about the enemy and about people who are not like us.
Thucydides is, of course, the
flintier figure altogether. To Thucydides we owe the more aggressively
analytical, philosophically-embedded sense – that history will tell us what the
human condition is – and it will tell us about the uses and the abuses of
power. It too will tell stories – but they sometimes need to be chastening
stories. Thucydides was a general, he was a sacked general who had fought on
the northern theatre of the Peloponnesian War – and looked upon the history of
what became the Athenian Empire when it committed the act of hubris, which was
the campaign to Sicily – with horror.
Summary – how these two Greeks might
feed into a national curriculum model
The narrative arc is meant to
culminate in those great debates about whether or not to go to Syracuse. The
great confrontation between the young, feckless, glamorous adventurer
Alcibiades and the wise old Lysias, who nonetheless is prepared to follow
orders, even though he knows it’s going to lead to catastrophe. And for
Thucydides history is not about self-congratulation and it’s not really about
tracing the pedigree of the wonderfulness of us,24 nor is it about
tracing the pedigree of the reprehensibly awful nature of us either. It is a
chastening, disenchanted, honest, tough-minded, gadfly-stinging version of
looking critically at ourselves and seeing what we have become and where we
came from. Historians, for Thucydides, are meant to keep the powerful awake at
night, meant to keep them honest.
I come from a culture where I teach
in America25 where there is a lot of tremendous history being
written and being taught! But, if anything, it suffers slightly from a
sense of insular self-congratulation. And, if we take our two Greek founding
fathers together, our Greek patriarchs together, and you take Herodotus’ aversion
to the insularity of history and his attempt to say, to embrace that we cannot
understand what makes us Greeks and what makes us come together as a particular
cultural force in the world unless we understand Persia and Egypt and Asia
Minor, and so on. And then you take Thucydides’ aversion to history as a
chronology of national self-congratulation, you have the glory and honour of
western history. That’s really what we need to instil. Those are the things in
my view that ought to animate a construction of a national curriculum, which
means that … it’s not impossible to aim … Some of you teachers may not feel the
same way – and feel we have enough time to teach history, that it’s just the
way that the national curriculum is set out now that it is so misguided that we
can’t do it.
Although – it seems to me – that it
is not impossible to do this coherent chronology. It needs to be somewhere
between the national curriculum as was, (in other words these only slightly
arbitrarily connected modules), and this [Gove’s] both pedantic and utopian
scheme of knowing the names of the main Chartists or something! It
does need to have nodes (I don’t want to call them modules), it wants to have
concentrations of questions. It needs to be somewhere in-between.
Continuing the curriculum critique:
Religion, Puritanism and (later) the social and moral conscience of the
tribunes of Victorian England
Here’s one, for example. It was
absolutely astonishing to me, astonishing to me, in this national curriculum is
something that was incredibly important to British culture – and I mean
Scottish, Irish and Welsh as well as English culture, namely everyone –
religion … is missing! Religion and its relation to secular power. What you
look at – I mean it says Henry II and Becket, but of course the absolutely
crucial issue lying behind that very dense knotty and all important issue of
medieval history, which we’re supposed to teach to our ten year olds or earlier,
is the relationship between the Papacy and the Angevin, later Plantagenet,
sense of their own independent sovereignty. Why would our children not
understand the importance of a debate between allegiances to God or to the
King? Should they clash? To God in the figure of the Pope or to the King? I
think that is something pretty much all our kids, I would have thought, would
be able to get to grips with.
The word ‘Puritanism’, staggeringly,
does not appear in the national curriculum list of must know-abouts. Whereas
it’s inconceivable that you’d be able to understand how we came to chop Charles
I’s head off, how Cromwell came to be Cromwell, if you don’t actually know what
Puritanism is, the substance and content of Puritanism! There’s not a word on something
called the Union of Crowns26 or how the King James Bible came to be
conceived of as an act that would bind the different Christian communities of
the country together.
So, you know, I think there are
concentrated areas where these big questions might be asked. The relationship,
for example, between industrial energy in the nineteenth century and an
extraordinary presence of what we might call the social and moral conscience of
the tribunes of Victorian England.27 It is rather amazing that the
great and immense read figures of Victorian Britain are those who are most hostile
to the ethos of material accumulation, namely Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens
and John Ruskin – and in a sense they’re the tip-top three. I can think of all
sorts of other people too, such as Pugin, and so on, not to mention that
our Manchester manufacturer, Friedrich Engels, and the importance of the 1844
report The Condition of the Working Class in England, don’t feature on the list.28
You can’t not only understand the nature of the Victorian conscience but you
can’t understand where the Labour party and trade unionism will eventually come
from unless you understand how electrifying, dramatic and powerful the social
conscience was in Victorian England. It’s something to be proud of, to
celebrate – and something for the kids to engage with when they think about,
you know, our own condition now – and the relationship of the public conscience
to private cupidity – and the rip-roaring nature of the economic system.
The issue I want to hear from you
about is – should you as teachers just really fling this back in the teeth of
the Department for Education as full of impossibilities and absurdities, or
should we work with it? Are there things in the national curriculum with
which you’re working now – that are just fine – or should that be abandoned
altogether? What is it you want and how do you feel?
Parents too,
you’re necessarily part of this debate! Tell me, what’s on your mind? I
want to now go to as many questions as possible…
Q&A WITH SIMON SCHAMA AT HAY FESTIVAL (#Hay13)
Simon Schama If
you are teachers I’d love to know where you are teaching and at what school.
Questioner 1 I’m
a history teacher in a secondary school in Surrey but I’m not actually allowed
to give the name of it because I’ve been campaigning against [Gove’s proposed]
curriculum for the last three months [APPLAUSE] My school doesn’t want to be
associated with the campaign.
Simon Schama Can
you tell me your first name?
Questioner 1
Catherine.
Simon Schama
Hey Catherine! Is your school frightened or nervous? Is it embarrassed by you?
Questioner 1 My
school has a policy of political neutrality, which I find kind of ironic
because I think political neutrality in a curriculum in history should be
aspiring to. I think this curriculum raises some extremely important concerns
for our democracy. There must be something very worrying about a government
that wants to replace critical thought, critical engagement with source
material (which is taught by the current approach) with rote learning.
Democracies need citizens that can hold them to account and I think the current
way we teach history in schools, though not perfect, trains citizens very well
for this.
Simon Schama Can
you give me an example of a particular lesson you teach where you said – ‘wow,
I’m doing my job here’?
Questioner 1 I
actually teach Key Stage 4 and A Level. I think that what really invigorates
them and makes them love history is debate. I think that being force-fed
political propaganda and a nationalist narrative is going to switch them off.
They’ll feel bored and manipulated.
Simon Schama Can
I interrupt you for a second and say that if you look at this rather ridiculous
shopping list: Cromwell, the Chartists, the Suffragettes are there (although
Mary Wollstonecraft is not there) – it’s impossible to do the rote learning and
get through it all and have exactly the exhilarating debates that you’re
talking about. But it provides for politics and social options of all kinds.
Is that your worry? A sense of misguided … and you sense that there is a
sealing wax of Britishness …
Questioner 1 Behind
it is, in the Education Secretary’s words, ‘the desire to celebrate the
distinguished role of these islands in the history of the world’. I think if
you approach history from a partisan position like that, it is very hard to ask
difficult questions and have a proper debate. It also marginalises women and
non-white ethnic groups and many other ordinary people. It completely sidelines
social and economic history and all the rich diversity as it has developed in
the universities over the past few decades. It reverts back to a very archaic
political style of history teaching and even archaic use of language, such as
the Glorious Revolution. [APPLAUSE]
Simon Schama
Yes, I’m essentially on your side and I don’t want to over-egg this, but it
doesn’t actually say ‘celebrate’, what it says is ‘to ensure that all pupils
know and understand the story of these islands, how the British people shaped
this nation and how Britain influenced the world’. It doesn’t say ‘celebrate’,
but what is incredibly wrong with that sentence is ‘how the British people
shaped this nation and how Britain influenced the world’ and not vice versa,
how the world influenced and shaped Britain. That’s a bigger giveaway than
thinking Adam Smith is English actually. Look at it carefully.
Questioner 1 I
wasn’t quoting the curriculum document itself, I was quoting the Education
Secretary who said those words and the Prime Minister has described it as ‘our
island story in all its glory’. I’m using this as an indication of where they’re
coming from rather than quoting the document itself.
Simon Schama
But it doesn’t prevent you Catherine and others – I mean the Slave Trade is
always there and it’s right that it should be thought of as a structurally
appalling element in the way Britain modernised. So in this long kind of
shopping list there are all sorts of opportunities to think as you say – critically
– about how Britain became powerful.
Questioner 1 To
think critically about history, you need time!
Simon Schama Ah
bravo! AND HOW! This is a document written by people who have never sat and
taught twelve year olds in a classroom. And none of you should sign onto it
until we trap Michael Gove in that very classroom and say, ‘Right, get on with
it. Give me the Civil War in the next forty five minutes!’ [APPLAUSE] Yes, this
gentleman there.
Questioner 2 I
teach at Newcastle funnily enough (but I don’t think I’ve ever talked to you on
a train) and I do agree with you and I do think history teachers are the
anarchists in the classroom. Whatever they set up we will put it back as it
should be. That’s what I would say, so I think it will always be that we will have
to do the tests, run through the chronological gallop for a bit, then we’ll get
into the debates in the areas that are meaty. Each teacher will do that
separately and I will probably want to celebrate some of the glories of our
past…
Simon Schama
Sure, Magna Carta is worth celebrating. What’s your name?
Questioner 2 John.
Simon Schama I’ll
be after you. Promise me, you’re going to continue to be an anarchist in that
case? The issue is, – whether this enormous whale bone structure that is
set out in this sort of unthought-through list of topics makes it incredibly
difficult to do that? There’s no sense of how this would be tested. You know,
you know, two words I hate that actually really make me feel physically sick
are ‘key developments’, you know really … but particularly when ‘key
developments’, which don’t belong in the great tradition of historical
storytelling … actually the words ‘key developments’ are attached to King
Athelstan – actually I’ll give a magnum of fabulous burgundy to anyone who can
stand up here now and tell me the ‘key developments’ in the reign of Athelstan,
it’s stupid really, and King Canute and I don’t want to hear the word ‘waves’
in this either! There are no ‘key developments’! So the issue is about whether
or not this sense of testable competence in history will enable you and
Catherine to actually give kids a sense that these very important events
happened but they were understood and written about in different ways. And if
you ask a Puritan Member of Parliament about royalist absolutism … So that they
can actually feel that disputes about the historical truth – are NOT the
same thing as saying these things don’t happen – it’s NOT the same thing as
chaos and confusion, let alone relativism! You feel you could live with any
version of the document that appeared?
Questioner 2 Having
taught since 1980 and having subverted right back to Thatcher I think I could
pretty much teach proper history to…
Simon Schama
But doesn’t the national curriculum – as it is – give you bigger space to do
that?
Questioner 2 It
does – but I think what will happen is you can tick boxes – we do that for
head teachers, we do it for all kinds of people and they don’t really know what
we’re doing either! [APPLAUSE]
Simon Schama
I must ask you if my adorable and horrible [indistinct – horribly?] reactionary
friend Professor Niall Ferguson29 was here with me, he’d say ‘they
don’t know who John Hampden is’, and David Starkey would say, ‘they have no
idea, they mix up Oliver Cromwell with Thomas Cromwell’. Does this have a sense
of a leaping over, because of the module- friendly nature of the curriculum and
the vast areas of British history – and indeed world history – that are not
taught at all? Does this give any of you teachers pause? Don’t you want a
way in which you can join the dots up without having to join them as
relentlessly as the curriculum document now suggests? Or are none of you bothered
by that? It does seem extraordinary to me that it’s quite difficult to, you
know, at the moment. One thing that I did not hear very much from schools, is
the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century is the furnace really, in which
modern Britain is formed. Whether it’s an imperial power or whether it’s an
industrial power, it is the moment where Britain became Britain. Is this not a
concern for you?
Questioner 3 Nikki.
I’m a teacher in inner city Coventry and there’s 56 different languages in my school.
Simon Schama
Wow, 56! What’s the least likely one that’s going to surprise me?
Questioner 3 As
a first language? The least likely would be English. [What I want to say is] I
think that you’re perhaps underestimating the professionalism of history teachers.
We do not jump great swathes of time, as Mr Gove maybe does more than ever. We
have to cut bits obviously at one hour a week at Key Stage 3. We have to teach
to the exam board for GCSE and A Level , but we are professionals and we are
passionate about our subject! And we do not suddenly give modules and
make no links between them! My last lesson that I taught before half term last
week was the triangular [Atlantic] trade – the slave trade, and there I was
with my wonderful PowerPoint all prepared, to have two Ghanaian girls in year 8
tell me how to pronounce their names which I cannot do properly, the history of
the slave trade in Ghana, which they will continue with after half term because
they are preparing a lesson. Where will I have time for that in the new
curriculum? Where will I be able to engage with them? That is the worry!
Simon Schama
I’m thrilled to hear that. That was my experience at Grey Coats [Grey Coat
Hospital C of E Comprehensive School for Girls in Westminster] when they did a
wonderful thing on the 1666 Fire of London, and the consequences. I’m
thrilled to hear that, and bravo to you for doing that! But it sort of
reinforces my point again that when you have this relentless emphasis on moving
onto the next thing (so as you get the names and dates right), it’s going to
undercut the possibility of making the connection between who they are and
where they have come from.
Questioner 3 As
my colleague over there said, we do that. That’s what we do and all we have to
do is circumvent Gove and his national curriculum to do it. That’s fine, we’ll
continue doing it.
Simon Schama So
you’re not worried about anything?
Questioner 3 Only
that when OFSTED come in we have to tick the boxes, but until they come in we
can go ahead and teach history properly. Then when OFSTED come in we’ll do it
the other way. [APPLAUSE]
Simon Schama
Yes, lady there?
Questioner 4 Hello,
I’m Ellie and I’m a parent. From a parent’s point of view, my children love
history! But where the time constraints of classroom are made up for – when
they are watching Horrible Histories, which they adore! To help
them understand history I think that helps – whereas teachers just don’t
have the time to cover everything in the curriculum – so it is left to parents
to help their children to take it that little bit further.
Simon Schama
Well bless you, how old are your kids?
Questioner 4 My
son has just started Key Stage 3 so he’s twelve and my daughter is nine.
Simon Schama Parents,
you are teachers too! I do say that history is a serious matter! For I
was born in 1945, and my dad was passionate about history, starting with
Shakespeare and the Bible, but then my dad would sort of walk me round the kind
of ruins of London that were damaged in the Blitz, and not just the bits that
survived, because London was full of soot-covered ruins that stuck out like
stumps of blackened teeth, and he would know really where the mediaeval city
was, and where the post-Fire of London city was. It was completely magical to
me, and it was important in those grim and tough and bleak years, really to
understand there is a glory to British history – but the glory to British history
is argument, dissent, the freedom of dispute. It’s not an endless, as I say, a
massage of self-congratulation (pro-empire against empire). That’s what’s the
glory, it’s the division, and the celebration of division, that is at the heart
of the story, beginning with Magna Carta! But you parents should use
anything, museums, exhibitions, the web, absolutely anything you can get. The
web is an incredible resource now, but there’s nothing that is better than the
passion of parents themselves for [communicating the importance of the past].
It is like taking them to an attic and opening up a suitcase of your
great-grandmother’s belongings from wherever they came from. The attic of the
memory is the gift we give our children and we hope our children will give to
their children in due course as well. How many more minutes have I got?
Questioner 5 Hello
my name is Wendy. I only do supply teaching now.
Simon Schama
Were you a full-time teacher?
Questioner 5
I was a full-time teacher in Birmingham and I taught English as a second
language there. So anyway, I was teaching in this comprehensive in Staffordshire
in a mining village, and we had a head of history who was a Sikh and there on
his blackboard was ‘Clive the Invader’. Would you approve of this aspect of
teaching English history?
Simon Schama
No I wouldn’t. No, I wouldn’t have him there as invader either – I wouldn’t
have Clive there at all to be honest. The sort of dumbly partisan hostile is as
bad as the unthinkingly self-congratulation. As I said, the real question of
how the British came to rule India is what happened to the Mughal Empire, what actually
happened, what was India like before the British, and how could the suddenness
of this thing happen? And as a matter of fact, there are all sorts of
extraordinarily interesting highways and byways. For example, the figure who is
not actually in Michael Gove’s precious list is Warren Hastings30
who is much more important and interesting. That is because Hastings is really
interested in the East India Company supporting the religious education of
Hindus and Muslims, and for example the generation which follows, Sir William
Jones,31 and those slightly unfairly demonised (by my old friend
Edward Said), as orientalists.32 You know the British are
responsible. There is a great debate which comes over both primary and
secondary Indian education in which the young Macaulay33 takes part
in the 1820s and 1830s, when the charter of the East India Company comes round
for renewal, it actually sounds very, very boring, but it’s actually very
profound because the issue was, are we, the British, here in India to restore,
revive and reinvigorate Indian institutions? Or is that condescending and
patronising? Should we be here really, essentially, either to make
money? Or, if we can’t make money, should we leave? Or, the third
option was, should we be Anglicising India? That’s a profound debate that takes
place both in India and in Britain too. If you think about it, a debate like
that cuts to the quick of our own questions about what our culture is like now.
Those are the great questions which I’m convinced are more important than Clive
the Invader.
Questioner 5
I’m a school governor and I’ve engaged in quite a battle royal with our head
over the teaching of history in our school which I don’t find satisfactory.
Simon Schama Tell
him to call me, I’ll sort him out! Again, he doesn’t see the importance of it
at all?
Questioner 5 Not
at all.
Simon Schama
Really, I’m sorry to hear it!
Questioner 6 My
name is Jonathan. I’m not a history teacher, I run a design agency in London,
but I’m an employer, and I have serious fears with Mr Gove’s plans. He’s
dropped art and design from the core skills and [I see] the dilution of history
as another way of denying our country and our future of thinkers, detectives
and deductors. In design you look at all the factors and it leads you to the
brief and then you come to a resolution. When I enjoyed studying history at O
Level and A Level we were encouraged to come to our own conclusions, looking at
the facts and the primary evidence. I think this country has been built on a history
of innovation and of being creators and inventors. If we lose that ability in
whatever profession, because very few people go on to be historians but they
use those skills in an engineering or a scientific capacity. Without the
ability to ask, ‘what if’, and then test that, we lose that. [APPLAUSE]
Simon Schama Wow
Jonathan. That’s not really a question, it’s a speech, but that’s the first
time I’ve heard the ability to think critically, to sort of internalise and
embrace past experience and to stand back from it and see it afresh, and you’re
absolutely right, it’s at the heart of new ideas in theatre or whether you look
at them in fashion or wherever. I couldn’t agree more with you! It’s a
wonderful connection you’ve made! Fashion is about …
Questioner 6 There’s
a fetishisation of science at the moment but if you have a scientist without
imagination you will never have discovery. A scientist will ask, ‘what if’, and
then he has the skills to test that theory, but if he doesn’t have the
inquisitiveness to come up with the theory in the first place, then he’s just a
drone.
Simon Schama
Yes OK, thank you for that.
Questioner 6 I
just wanted to give you a slightly different perspective.
Questioner 7 I’m a
teacher in Sheffield at the moment, I’ve taught in lots of different places,
but I teach English language and literature. I was looking at the history
curriculum because the teaching of history isn’t just a matter for history
teachers, which I’m sure we all agree on here. We all own history, whether it’s
English history or Jamaican history – it’s where I’m from. I see myself as an
international citizen so the histories of all people is of interest to me and
all history is connected. Now the issue I want to raise is, it’s not so much …
the saving grace of this whole debate is that the truth is not necessarily
going to be determined by what history teachers teach in classrooms, because I
was taught history with an extreme dissonance between what I was taught in
classrooms and my owned lived experience, the stories I got from my parents, the
things I read in novels. There is so much history in novels. Michael Gove
doesn’t have control over those stories and no government will ever have
control over those people and over their stories and the ways they can be told
independently of how they’re taught in classrooms. For me that is at the heart
of the question, because what the problem with history was for me when I was
being taught it, was the sense that I was being lied to. So, the issue for us
is, do we want a history curriculum that leaves our young people (with whatever
heritage they have), feeling like they’re being lied to? If you come from a
working class white background or from a Jamaican heritage background, or
wherever, if history isn’t truly about questions, about social history as well
as the history of kings and queens, some section of the population that is
being taught will feel excluded.
Simon Schama
I take your point but I think that is an issue for any kind of curriculum,
whether it is this one or the other one. The long list may seem a bit too white
and male and imperial but actually there’s all sorts of things in this list
that enable the ‘right’ version to get out. The issue is really whether or not
there’s enough time, passion and engagement. We had that wonderful intervention
over there which says that history teachers are true professionals and they
will get around whatever the robotic machinery the curriculum gives them in
order to do that. The main thing is to actually have the space to be able to
have a rapt audience amongst our children and students for the stories that beg
and demand the questions. That’s what we want!
Historyworks did not include this last piece of the
Schama talk (which was included in the Sky Arts HD television broadcast on
Wednesday 5th June at 7 pm and in the Hay Festival podcast):
I’ve got
to stop in a second, but forgive me at the front here [person waiting to ask a
question].
You’ve
been a good class. I want to, and I may be going over … I’m going to give you a
reward. Here’s a story by somebody we
think of as an absolutely back-number, Macaulay – you know – a bigger
back-number there couldn’t be … and yet Macaulay does a wonderful thing – in
Volume 4 I think of the History of England,34 because actually he’s
going to signify an enormous sea-change in British life that will happen with
the revolution against the kind of Catholic absolutism of James II. And it has
to begin with a human moment. Now all of you great history teachers begin with
human moments of story. And here’s one I love – and I love it because of one
verb.
The death of King Charles the Second took the nation by surprise. His
frame was naturally strong, and did not appear to have suffered from excess.
This
wonderful, kind of feckless old playboy is collapsing suddenly.
He had always been mindful of his health even in his pleasures; and his
habits were such as promise a long life and a robust old age. Indolent as he
was on all occasions which required tension of the mind, he was active and
persevering in bodily exercise. He had, when young, been renowned as a tennis
player, and was, even in the decline of life, an indefatigable walker. His
ordinary pace was such that those who were admitted to the honour of his
society …
[heavy
irony on Macaulay’s part]
… found it difficult to keep up with him. He rose early, and generally
passed three or four hours a day in the open air. He might be seen, before the
dew was off the grass in St. James’s Park, striding among the trees, playing
with his spaniels, and flinging corn to his ducks; and these exhibitions endeared
him to the common people, who always like to see the great unbend.
And the
genius verb there is ‘flinging’. The image of the feckless king who is about to
kind of go down to a kind of black-faced stroke, enveloping the country and the
destiny of the country in revolution and disaster, of the chucking of the corn
to the king’s own ducks.
And,
before I decline and disintegrate in front of you … my kind, dear audience … my
hero history teachers, I thank you for coming. (Much
applause)
*This text is in the Historyworks website: Historyworks is a Limited
Company, and the Co-Directors are Helen Weinstein and Jon Calver. Our team is
based in York and Cambridge and Oxford and Richmond and Bloomsbury.
Historyworks has liability insurance to cover our production work on your
property. Helen Weinstein may be contacted
on historyworks@gmail.com regarding the commissioning and of costing
projects; and Jon Calver may be contacted on enquiries@historyworks.tv for
submitting funding application letters of support and is the Director who deals
with invoices for training and also invoices for media products.
1. Historyworks added this below the
title to their transcribed version of this piece: ‘Please note that Simon Schama was speaking in a
huge rush of energy and dynamism, so when you read the text below you’ll have
to imagine Simon pacing about and interacting with the audience, without a lot
of punctuation, and sometimes small segues that are not well conveyed in a
transcript, when they make total sense when spoken as parenthesis! Please
do use this transcription for discussions and quotations, especially
#historyteacher, and #histed, and all that is asked is that you acknowledge
that this website content is creative commons rather than copyright, so you credit
@historyworkstv’. The sub-titles, Appendix and notes (above and below) have
been added by Robert Guyver guyverrobert@gmail.com. The opinions expressed in these notes are Robert
Guyver’s and not those of Historyworks.
2. UK Independence Party. Nigel
Farrage’s UKIP won 150 seats in the May 3 Council Elections (2013). However in
the 2015 General Election UKIP only won 1 seat despite getting 12.6% of the UK
vote.
3. See Appendix 7 after this
transcript
4. Rt. Hon. Michael Gove, Secretary
of State for Education from May 2010 (to July 2014).
5. Act of Union: two Acts
of Parliament: the Union with Scotland Act 1706 passed by the Parliament of England,
and the Union with England Act passed
in 1707 by the Parliament of Scotland
6. Magna Carta, 1215. See http://www.bl.uk/treasures/magnacarta/ for translation and comment. Simon Schama in his A History of Britain – At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC – AD 1603
(pp. 162-164) explains the significance of Magna Carta. ‘So, if Magna Carta was
not the birth certificate of freedom it was the death of despotism. It spelled
out for the first time, and unequivocally, something which the Angevins
themselves, as the highest justices of the realm, could not conceivably
quarrel: that the law was not simply the will or the whim of the king but was
an independent power in its own right, and that kings could be brought to book
for violating it – and they should, for example, show due cause why a person’s
body might be confined (habeas corpus)
and not just declared to be detained at
the inscrutable pleasure of the prince. All this, in turn, presupposed
something hitherto unimaginable: that there was some sort of English ‘state’ of
which the king was a part (albeit the supreme part) but not the whole. And it
was, in the name of that state, that the barons added something startling to
the charter: a proposal that a body of twenty-five of them would be instituted
to monitor compliance with the charter and, if necessary, to act as collective
ombudsmen, hearing cases in which Crown officials were themselves accused of
infringing the charter.’
10. http://cvcweb.net/the-college/ See also Ofsted ‘Good practice resource – Ensuring rigorous
historical thinking: Cottenham Village College’ (30 May 2012, ref: 120139) http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/good-practice-resource-ensuring-rigorous-historical-thinking-cottenham-village-college: ‘Incisive teaching and comprehensive planning,
combined with a highly engaging history curriculum, ensure that students
develop perceptive and sophisticated thinking. Among other things, students
explore the views of historians and this aids not only their knowledge and
understanding but also the way in which they think about the issues they study.’
The school has worked closely with the University of Cambridge Faculty of
Education (and particularly with Christine Counsell). This is a quote from the
Ofsted report: ‘A key component of the success of
teaching is the commitment to regular and sustained subject-specific continuing
professional development of all history teachers. There is a recognition and
belief in the centrality of ongoing professional development to sharpen
practice. As a result, all teachers are engaged with the subject community through,
among other things, mentoring trainees on the University of Cambridge PGCE
history course, acting as an AST [Advanced Skills Teacher] in history across a
range of secondary schools in the local authority, editing Teaching History [Michael Fordham], the Historical Association’s
journal for history teachers in secondary schools, and presenting workshops at
the Schools’ History Project annual conference. This work not only engages
teachers with the subject community but also contributes to the collective
expertise of that community. However, as Matt Stanford, a member of the history
team, points out: “We need to know the latest research so that what we have to
say is right up to date”’. Indeed Cottenham Village College was well represented
at the Historical Association annual conference (York, May
2013) where both Michael Fordham – Head of History, and Geraint Brown –
Advanced Skills Teacher, led a secondary session on, ‘Rigorous history and OFSTED success: happy
bedfellows’.
12. 1066 and All That: A Memorable History of
England, comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103 Good Things,
5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates,
written by W.C.Sellar and R.J.Yeatman, was first serialised by Punch magazine,
but was then published as a book by Methuen & Co. Ltd. in 1930.
13. According to Wikipedia: ‘The Heptarchy (Greek: ἑπτά + ἀρχή seven + realm)
is a collective name applied to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of south, east, and central Great Britain during late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, conventionally
identified as seven: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms
eventually unified into the Kingdom
of England’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heptarchy. But see http://abuseofhistory.wordpress.com/tag/british-museum/ (What has the Heptarchy ever done for us?) for a
discussion of what historians now believe about this period. See also John
Blair, The Anglo-Saxon Age: A Very Short
Introduction (Oxford, 2000).
14. Thomas Gradgrind was a fictional
character, a retired wholesale hardware merchant, in Charles Dickens’ novel, Hard Times (1854). The opening scene,
set in a school in Gradgrind’s Coketown, follows a conversation between him and
the class of Mr M’Choakumchild, in which Gradgrind praises Bitzer, a boy who
can define a horse with a list of related facts. But the utilitarian Gradgrind
pours scorn on another pupil, Sissy Jupe – whose father’s profession is
‘horse-riding’ linked to the circus – who understands the real essence of
horses and loves them, indeed has ironically an equally utilitarian attachment
to them, given their role in the life of her family. She uses the word ‘fancy’,
to his distaste, when responding to his question about papering a wall with
images of horses or carpeting a floor with flowers. Dickens skilfully
juxtaposes ‘fancy’ with ‘fact’. Gradgrind’s harsh philosophy is contrasted with
a more empathetic, indeed merciful, attitude to life in various places through
this novel, which satirises a relentless Victorian business model in which
people were treated and controlled almost like machines. The circus folk,
including Mr Sleary, provide a contrasting natural spontaneousness. Although it might be tempting to see, in this
talk, Simon Schama playing Sissy Jupe to Michael Gove’s Bitzer (or even his
Gradgrind!), the truth is more subtle: that it is not just facts that are needed, but some emotion too; facts need to be
put into much wider contexts as Simon Schama demonstrates, and these contexts
require scholarship (as the leadership in the good practice school in
Cambridgeshire [Cottenham Village College] discovered);
indeed, in order to allow and facilitate the kind of contextualised
storytelling that generates questioning, scholarship is certainly needed, but
also the kind of empathy that can place a teacher in the shoes not only of the
characters in the story, but also in the shoes of the students being taught.
16. Alex Salmond MSP, First Minister
of Scotland 16 May 2007 to 19 November 2014. Leader of the Scottish National
Party from 3 September 2004 to to 14 November 2014. MP for Gordon (constituency)
from 8 May 2015..
17. Mary Seacole (1805 – 1881),
Jamaican-born Crimean War nurse and author of Wonderful
Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857). Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97), author
of A Vindication of the Rights of Women
(1797). Simon Schama writes about each of these women in his A History of Britain Volume 3 – The Fate of
Empire 1776-2000 (2002, BBC Worldwide) in the chapter ‘Wives, Daughters,
Widows’ – Seacole: pp. 220-221, 223; but Wollstonecraft more extensively: pp.
54, 56-7, 74-83, 87-9, 105, 136.
18.This does represent something of a qualitative
change from Simon Schama’s recommendations [in The Guardian] of 9/10 November
2010 (see his article ‘Simon Schama: My Vision
for History in Schools’, www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/nov/09/future-history-schools). However in this his Hay talk of 30 May 2013 he is
making a serious search for what it was that had been really significant about
this period, both for India and for Britain. In his list of 6 events which
every child should know, in 2010 he had included this description of ‘the
Indian moment’ : ‘How was it that a
country throwing its weight around the world’s oceans got kicked out of most of
America but in two generations came to rule an immense part of the
subcontinent? Any class would want to know about the cunning-crazed Robert
Clive; to look again at Siraj ud Daula and the tragic ruin that Warren Hastings
became, not to mention stories of Brits who defied the race and culture barrier
by wearing Indian dress, speaking Indian languages; illicitly marrying Indian
princesses’.‘Robert Clive’ is however not described as
‘Clive of India’ with all that seems to imply.
19. Derek and Clive is a double act of comedy characters
created by Dudley Moore (Derek) and Peter Cook (Clive) in the 1970s.
20. H.E. (Henrietta) Marshall
(1867-1941) wrote both Our Island Story –
A History of Britain for Boys and Girls (1905, Nelson) and Our Empire Story (1908, Nelson). These books retained a popular
readership into the 1950s and 1960s and beyond. On October 5th 2010
Michael Gove had said: ‘The current approach we have to history denies children
the opportunity to hear our island story’. Civitas, a think-tank, supported by
subscriptions from The Daily Telegraph,
republished Our Island Story in 2005.
Chapter XCIII of Our Island Story
(‘George II – The Story of the Black Hole of Calcutta’, pp. 434-436) includes
the story of Robert Clive and the Battle of Plassey (1757): ‘When Clive heard of this horrible deed [the
Black Hole incident], he marched against the native Prince, and utterly
defeated him in a place called Plassey. He drove him from his throne, and
placed another Prince, who was friendly to the British, upon it; he drove the
French from their fortress there, and ever since then the power of Britain has
grown and grown in India, until today our King, the King of Great Britain and
Ireland, is also the Emperor of India’ (Marshall, 1905, p. 436). The king
referred to was Edward VII (1901-1910). Simon Schama writes about Clive and
related matters in A History of Britain
(Vol. 2) 1603-1776 – The British Wars, pp. 402-408. This comparison between the Marshall version
and scholarly work is an example of why it is important to have an historian
evaluating a curriculum. The influence of Marshall can be seen not only in her
‘canon’ of events and their romanticised interpretation of British history, but
also in the structure of Our Island Story
with its set of chronologically sequential landmark events linked to the
actions of heroes, heroines or – in some cases – villains. In her book The Warrior Queens (Anchor Books, 1990)
Antonia Fraser includes one of A.S.Forrest’s original and evocative
illustrations (the one facing page 20 – ‘Will you follow me, men?’) to the
chapter (‘The story of a Warrior Queen’) in Marshall’s book, and she states on
the Civitas website, ‘I was
given H.E. Marshall's Our Island Story
at Christmas 1936 and I’ve still got that copy. It was a direct inspiration for
me in my career as a historian stating that the
book and its pictures formed part of her childhood history education’. Despite its old-fashioned approach and its
inaccuracies (e.g. the story of the Princes in the Tower is taken straight from
the Shakespeare play) it has provided strong images which have fed the
ideological battle over the history curriculum (see Andrew Hough, ‘Revealed: David Cameron's favourite childhood
book is Our Island Story’, The Daily Telegraph, 29 October, 2010,
21. An Indian imperial power. The
Maratha Confederacy period was 1761-1818.
22. Herodotus (c.484 – 425 BCE) born in Halicarnassus in Ionia –
modern day Bodrum in Turkey, author of The
Histories, written (in the Ionian dialect) from the 450s to the 420s BCE.
23. Thucydides (c.460 – c. 395 BCE), author of History of the Peloponnesian War (up to 411 BCE)
26. Actually there is, under ‘the
Stuart period’ at the end of Key Stage 2 (although there was a change to this
in the final version of the curriculum).
27. A tribune (according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, 11th
Edition, 2004) is an official in ancient Rome chosen by the plebeians to
protect their interests.
28. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881); Charles Dickens (1812-1870);
John Ruskin (1819-1900); Augustus Pugin (1812-1842). All of these men, but especially
Carlyle and Ruskin, have a strong presence in Schama’s A History of Britain Volume 3 - The Fate of Empire 1776-2000
(Volume 3), judging by the number of pages references: Carlyle (pp. 1689, 170, 172-3, 184, 202, 213, 240, 242,347, 413, 419, 553); Dickens (pp.
172, 184, 231, 347); Ruskin (172, 173, 177, 207, 234, 236-7, 247, 413, 416);
and Pugin (173, 174-6, 177-8, 347, 413 [Pugin’s book, Contrasts (1836) 171,
173, 177]) Pugin is remarkable in Schama’s eyes for in his promoting of a
Gothic revival he was reconnecting Victorian England with its medieval past,
rooted in a subaltern movement – the medieval crafts. Schama is in a way doing what Butterfield did in his 1945
book, The Englishman and His History
(Cambridge University Press) discussing how each age appropriated periods of
the past for its own purposes. Also Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). Engels’ book,
The Condition of the Working Class in
England, finished in March 1845, was first published in Leipzig in 1846.
Engels also gets a passing mention in Vol. 3 of Schama’s history (p.165).
29. Niall Ferguson (Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at
Harvard University, where he is a resident faculty member of the Minda de Gunzburg
Center for European Studies; Senior
Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University; and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford
University) has been very much part of this debate since the Hay Festival
three years previously, 30 May 2010, when he gave this talk, ‘Down with junk history: a campaign for real history
in schools’, (http://www.hayfestival.com/p-2464-niall-ferguson.aspx [audio
podcast]), ironically a session attended by Michael Gove himself, who can be
heard asking Professor Ferguson whether he will be ready to help with reframing
the history curriculum. This Hay talk includes a reference to his six ‘killer
applications’, a theme developed in his subsequent book The West and the Rest (Allen Lane, 2011) which also became the
topic of Channel 4 television programme, also in 2011. Thus Ferguson was recommending for schools a
grand connecting narrative of the rise of the West, particularly from 1500 to
1913. This was to be a cautionary tale, perhaps with a parallel story of the
more recent economic rise of East, the West having lost its grip on some of its
essential ‘killer applications’ [competition; the Scientific Revolution; the
rule of law and representative government (feeding into its corresponding
section in the book, on property); modern medicine; the consumer society; and
the work ethic], perhaps the work ethic, although the West’s failure to
regulate some of its institutions, particularly its banks, would form part of a
separate work by Ferguson: The Great
Degeneration – How Institutions Decay and Economies Die (Allen Lane, 2012 –
the book of BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures).
Ferguson’s 2010 Hay talk was based on a chapter, ‘The Decline of History
and the Futures of Western Civilisation’ in Liberating
Learning – Widening Participation, edited by Patrick Derham and Michael
Worton (University of Buckingham Press, 2010, pp. 15-23), in which he had not
only introduced the six killer applications, but had also provided six key
questions to drive the narrative behind them (p.21): (1) What was the role of institutions (as against
resource endownments) in the ‘great divergence’ of the West from the East after
1500? (2) Why was there no Scientific Revolution outside the West? (3) Why did
Western politics make the transition to truly representative governments before
others? (4) How far was Western ascendancy due to imperial exploitation and
coercion? (5) Why did the Industrial Revolution and the Consumer Society
originate in the West? (6) Did religion (e.g. Weber’s ‘Protestant ethic’) play
any significant role in Western ascendancy? This 2010 chapter reveals that
Ferguson was part of a group meeting in 2005 at Dartington Hall in Devon under
the auspices of the Prince of Wales to discuss how history education might be
improved. Ferguson’s Hay presentation (together with Michael Gove’s reaction to
it) was immediately treated as provocative and controversial by Guardian journalist Seumas Milne, ‘This
attempt to rehabilitate empire is a recipe for conflict’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/10/british-empire-michael-gove-history-teaching. His
attack on Ferguson was met by a counter-attack by Ferguson himself: ‘Seumas Milne’s
article (10 June) is a shocking
piece of crass misrepresentation, not to mention shocking historical
relativism’ (‘Historical dispute over the facts and
figures of the European empires’, The
Guardian, June 12, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/12/facts-and-figures-of-empire). Later
on in the process Niall Ferguson was engaged in a filmed debate with Richard J.
Evans (University of Oxford Podcasts, The Jesus
College History Debate, ‘What history should British children be taught?’ held at the Law Society in London with Lord Bragg as chair and Professor Niall Ferguson
and Professor Richard Evans, on the evening of Wednesday 9 March, 2011, http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/what-history-should-british-children-be-taught-audio). Evans
remarks in the debate that by this time Michael Gove had already rejected Niall
Ferguson’s big picture interpretational thesis in favour of the Schama one
(whatever that would prove to be). Nevertheless, after the publication of the
draft curriculum of February 7 2013 – and despite the document’s emphasis on
national history rather than the West as a whole (‘our island story’ rather
than ‘our western story’ – Ferguson was to write, first an article in support
of Michael Gove (‘On the teaching of history, Michael Gove is right. Why
do critics feel obliged to defend a status quo that so many teachers, parents
and pupils agree is indefensible?’ The
Guardian, 15 February, 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/15/history-teaching-curriculum-gove-right);
and subsequently was also a joint
signatory of a letter of support (Abulafia, D., Beevor, A., Black, J.,
Burleigh, M., Charmley, J., Clark, J.C.D, Ferguson, N., Foreman, A., Jennings,
J., Sebag Montefiore, S., Roberts, A., Skidmore, C., Starkey, D. , Thorpe, D.,
& Tombs, R. (2013) Letter to The
Times, 27 February (text of this can be found on in Appendix 4 page 87 of
IJHLTR 11.2 [May, 2013], http://www.cumbria.ac.uk/Public/ResearchOffice/Documents/Journals/InternationalJournalOfHistoricalLearningTeachingAndResearchVol11No2.pdf). It is
of note that 3 years to the day after Niall Ferguson’s talk, and in the same
room at the Hay Festival, Simon Schama would be offering this – a strange mix
of ‘grandstanding’ and a polished performance as court jester – attacking but
also making kindly fun of the very curriculum for which Michael Gove had asked
for Schama’s help, having initially
wanted Niall Ferguson’s; and it would be
– indeed, almost as Seumas Milne predicted, a construction of the wording
associated with the interpretation of empire that would cause one of the
biggest problems (in Simon Schama’s view anyway). There is a sharp contrast
between Ferguson’s anecdotal assessments (in his Hay talk of 2010 and in the
debate with Richard J.Evans of 2011) of what was wrong with history teaching in
England and the two sets of evidence-based publications: (i) Ofsted’s History for All report of March 2011 http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/history-for-all, and
(ii) The Right Kind of History by
David Cannadine, Jenny Keating and Nicola Sheldon (Palgrave Macmillan 2011).
There also seemed to be an ignorance of actually was in the history curriculum
for the 7-11 and 11-14 age groups, as the Henry and Hitler caricature is quite
a long way from the truth. In another
contribution, but to a wider historiographical debate and seeking criteria for
convergence rather than divergence, David Cannadine deconstructed and
reconstructed his own set of six killer – if not applications – then at least
criteria for classifying identities, in The
Undivided Past – History Beyond our Differences (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013);
these areas being: religion, nation, class, gender, race and civilization. Both Ferguson (2011, pp. 312-313) and
Cannadine (2013, pp. 244-254) write about Samuel P. Huntington and his ‘clash
of civilizations’ thesis which has influenced neoconservative thinking, but
both show elements of scepticism when evaluating Huntington’s theory.
30. Warren Hastings (1732-1818) first Governor-General of
Bengal. Impeached but acquitted of all
charges in 1795. Simon Schama writes about him at length in his A History of Britain (vol. 2) 1603-1776 –
The British Wars, pp. 408-13. Schama suggests that Hastings was made a
scapegoat for the loss of the American colonies and in a bizarre move was
replaced in India by Cornwallis (1738-1805) who had surrendered at Yorktown
(Virginia) (1781).
31. Sir William Jones (1746-1794) was a philologist who worked
on the idea of Indo-European languages.
32. Edward Said (1935-2003), author of Orientalism (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).
33. Thomas Babington Macaulay (later
1st Baron Macaulay [Lord Macaulay) (1800-1859) Whig politician and
historian. Macaulay’s speech to the House of Commons on 10 July 1833 is
recorded in Simon Schama’s A History of
Britain Volume 3 – The Fate of Empire 1776-2000 (Volume 3), pp. 270-272:
In 1833 parliament had finally
liquidated the commercial side of the East India Company. What profits were to
be made from indigo, sugar, cotton and the only steadily lucrative business of
the time, narcotics (opium traded to China in return for tea), would henceforth
be harvested by private traders. The ‘Company’ was now candidly what for many
generations it had actually been, a tax-and-war machine, or, as it liked to
think of itself, a government. A member of the ‘Board of Control’ – the body
answerable to parliament and co-governing India with the Company’s Court of
Directors – it fell to Macaulay to justify the Whig government’s policy in the
Commons. The prospect, despite Macaulay’s reputation as the ‘Burke of the age’,
was not one that packed the benches. (‘Dinner bell’ Burke had himself often
emptied them, of course.) On 10 July
1833, speaking to a chamber only a third full, Macaulay delivered his vision of
British responsibility to India. It was a performance of stirring, Ciceronian
eloquence in which, however ignorance competed with arrogance. But it was, none
the less, the manifesto of the liberal empire of good intentions. Even as
Macaulay charted the beginning of the enterprise, he looked forward to its gloriously
disinterested end:
‘It may be that the public mind
of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown the system; that by
good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better
government; that, having been instructed in European knowledge, they may, in
some future age, demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever
come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or retard it. Whenever it
comes, it will be the proudest day in English history. To have found a great
people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition, to have so ruled
them as to have made them desirous and capable of all the privileges of
citizens, would indeed be a title to glory all our own. The sceptre may pass
away from us. Unforeseen accidents may derange our most profound schemes of
policy. Victory may be inconstant to our arms. But there are triumphs which are
followed by no reverse. There is an empire exempt from all natural causes of
decay. Those triumphs are the pacific triumphs of reason over barbarism, that
is the imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our
laws.’
34.
The reading is from Macaulay’s History of
England from the Accession of James II in Four Volumes, Volume One
(originally 1848; my edition is J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, Everyman’s Library,
1906/1957), at the beginning of Chapter IV, pp. 321-2).
General comment
Despite saying that history isn’t about celebrating ‘the
wonderfulness of us’ he does actually include quite a few events that attract
the verb ‘celebrate’, including Magna Carta and the reforming work of Victorian
‘tribunes’ like Carlyle, Dickens and Ruskin (not to mention Pugin, although he
is probably in a slightly different category to the other 3). He is also a bit
cagey about condemning all aspects of imperialism, remarking on how Warren
Hastings and later Macaulay showed signs of concern about (a) the education of
Moslems and Hindus (especially in the case of Hastings), and (b) about internal
institutions (Macaulay in his speech (given above) in Parliament on 10 July
1833, quoted in Schama’s A
History of Britain Volume 3 The Fate of Empire 1776-2000, p. 270).
My other observation is that the kind of storytelling
that can generate questions (set in a big picture context) requires from teachers
the kind of pedagogic content knowledge that is an amalgam of (very)
sophisticated knowledge bases, obviously teaching skills, but plus the
scholarly/substantive [content knowledge] as well as the scholarly/syntactic
[knowledge of history as a discipline and set of processes], indeed to use
Dickensian-Gradgrindian language (Collingwoodian too), where ‘fact’ and fancy
and an insight into the nature of historical evidence come into play. Simon
Schama himself of course has all of these attributes in bucketfuls. Maybe a
certain tactfulness is lacking in the way he seems so deftly to have shrugged
off his once quasi-official role in all this, but he is holding the powerful to
account, performing the function of an historian, and his criticisms are expressed
with moderation and humour. His summary of British exceptionalism as ‘dissent’,
drawing strength from the 17th century debates around Puritanism, is certainly
worth considering, and his tour of Herodotus and Thucydides is also quite
stimulating, especially as each of these two Greeks represents a missing
element in the February 7th draft history curriculum: the sense of
history being about the study of ‘other people’ (Herodotus) and the deeper kind
of history which searches for ‘causal realities’ (Thucydides). Although
Michael Gove’s draft structure does not strictly deny teachers or their
students the opportunity to do this, the infrastructural constraints within
schools – not least the demands of the rest of the rest of the curriculum as
well as the early finishing age for school history – make a deeper approach
much more difficult.
When I was a primary teacher in 1989-1990 I was a
member of the Department of Education and Science (DES) National Curriculum History
Working Group. Ironically enough two parallels with Niall Ferguson and Simon
Schama are (a) that the historian working on HWG for the first half of 1989
(until he resigned on 30 June) was Dr John Roberts, Warden of Merton College,
Oxford, who had been presenting on television his series The Triumph of the West, which was accompanied by or built on, a
book of the same name (1985); and (b) that Roberts’ successor, Professor Peter
Marshall (of King’s College, University of London), was an expert on the
history of the British Empire, and particularly India. He, like Schama, had
written about the East India Company, Clive and Hastings. All members of HWG were interviewed
personally by the Secretary of State for Education at that time, Kenneth Baker.
Unlike the 2010-2013 experience where specialised subject advice outside the
central national curriculum group was not bounded by any publicly shared ground-rules,
and accountability was apparently undefined and unrestricted, the working group
submitted two reports before a final version was written and even the last
report (Final Report of the History Working Group, April 1990) was put out for
an extra period of consultation of three further months.
Of course at the time when Simon Schama was giving
this talk and engaging with these teachers and members of the public, a round
table group was involved with the re-drafting of the curriculum, having formal
meetings on 26 March and 10 June 2013.
Their names can be found in this response by the DfE to a Freedom of Information
Request: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/history_curriculum_expert_group
In a parallel development Michael Gove became involved
in a controversy linked to the history curriculum debate in that it was about
methods and approaches to history teaching. He gave a speech to Brighton
College on x May 2013 in which he criticized (a) one individual and his website
and (b) the authors of four separate articles published in the Historical
Association’s journal Primary History.
The Brighton College speech prompted several articles in the media, a statement
from the Historical Association and a letter to xxx signed by 54 historians.
Details of the Gove speech, the website, the Primary History articles, the
media response and the letter signed by the group of historians, can be found
in Appendix
Robert Guyver (originally) 22 June 2013 (updated) 25
February and 10 March 2016
Appendix 2 – Michael Gove’s speech at
the Conservative Party Conference 5 October 2010
The relevant part of the speech is
this:
But then, how many of our
students are learning the lessons of history? One of the under-appreciated
tragedies of our time has been the sundering of our society from its past. Children
are growing up ignorant of one of the most inspiring stories I know – the
history of our United Kingdom. Our history has moments of pride, and shame, but unless we fully
understand the struggles of the past we will not properly value the liberties
of the present. The current approach we
have to history denies children the opportunity to hear our island story.
Children are given a mix of topics at primary, a cursory run through Henry the
Eighth and Hitler at secondary and many give up the subject at 14, without
knowing how the vivid episodes of our past become a connected narrative. Well,
this trashing of our past has to stop. I
am delighted to announce today that Professor Simon Schama has agreed to advise
us on how we can put British history at the heart of a revived national
curriculum.
Appendix 3 – Simon Schama’s statement (5 October 2010) in
reaction to his ‘appointment’ by Michael Gove
This was reported in the Guardian:
In a statement, Schama said he hoped to instil "excitement
and joy" into the history curriculum as pupils connected with their
ancestry. “A return to coherent gripping history is not a step backwards to dry
as dust instruction,” he said. “It represents a moment of cultural and
educational rediscovery. Without this renewed sense of our common story – one
full of contention, not self-congratulation – we will be a poorer and weaker
Britain.”
Appendix 4 – House of Lords (2011a), Schools: History Debate, 20 October, Hansard transcript and parliamentlive.tv video
House of Lords (2011a), Schools:
History Debate, 20 October, Hansard
transcript. Available
online:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201011/ldhansrd/text/111020-
0001.htm and http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201011/ldhansrd/
text/111020-0002.htm.
Also
available on: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/lords/?id=2011-10-20a.401.2
House of Lords (2011b), Schools:
History Debate, 20 October [video].
Available online:
This
is quite long: 11.05 a.m. – 4.22 p.m.
Appendix 5 – Politeia publications related to the
history curriculum debate
Abulafia, D., Clark, J. and Tombs, R. (2012), ‘History in the
New Curriculum: Three
Proposals’, online appendices in R. Tombs with A. Waldman and C.
Moule, ‘Lessons
from History: Freedom, Aspiration and the New Curriculum’, in S.
Lawlor (ed.),
Curriculum Series, London:
Politeia, 2012. Available online: http://www.politeia.co.uk/
sites/default/files/files/Final%20Appendix%20to%20Lessons%20from%20History.pdf.
Abulafia, D., Clark, J. and Tombs, R. (2013), ‘History in the
Making: The New Curriculum
Right or Wrong?’ in S. Lawlor (ed.), Curriculum Series, London: Politeia.
Tombs, R. with Waldman, A. and Moule, C. (2012a), ‘Lessons from
History: Freedom, Aspiration and the New Curriculum’, in S. Lawlor (ed.), Curriculum Series, London: Politeia.
Appendix 6 – House of Commons, The All
Party Parliamentary Group on Archives and History (January 2013), History
for All? Report
House of Commons, The All Party Parliamentary Group on Archives
and History (2013),
History for All? Report, together with oral evidence, January. Available online:
http://
www.archives.org.uk/images/documents/news/history%20for%20all%20final%20
report.pdf.
Page 4: Introduction and
Summary
Page 6: Oral Evidence, 22
May 2012 First Session
Page 30: Oral Evidence 22
May 2012 Second Session
Page 48: Oral Evidence 22
May 2012 Third Session
Page 58: Written statement
reflecting Oral Evidence 21 June 2012
Appendix 7 – Michael Gove’s statement
in the House of Commons 7 February 2013
A key principle of our
reforms is that the statutory national curriculum should form only part of the
whole school curriculum, not its entirety. Each individual school should have
the freedom to shape the whole curriculum to their particular pupils’ aspirations—a
freedom already enjoyed by the growing numbers of academies and free schools,
as well, of course, as schools in the independent sector. Programmes of study
in almost all subjects—subjects other than primary English, mathematics and
science—have been significantly slimmed down, and we have specifically stripped
out unnecessary prescription about how to teach, and concentrated only on the
essential knowledge and skills that every child should master.
In maths—learning from
east Asia—there is a stronger emphasis on arithmetic and more demanding content
in fractions, decimals and percentages, to build solid foundations for algebra.
In the sciences, there is rigorous detail on the key scientific processes from
evolution to energy. In English, there is more clarity on spelling, punctuation
and grammar, as well as a new emphasis on the great works of the literary
canon. In foreign languages, there will be a new stress on learning proper
grammatical structures and practising translation.
In geography, there is an
emphasis on locational knowledge, using maps and locating key geographical
features from capital cities to the world’s great rivers; and in history, there
is a clear narrative of British progress, with a proper emphasis on heroes and
heroines from our past. In art and design, there is a stronger emphasis on
painting and drawing skills. In music, there is a balance between performance
and appreciation. We have also replaced the old information and communications
technology curriculum with a new computing curriculum, with help from Google,
Facebook and some of Britain’s most brilliant computer scientists. We have also
included rigorous computer science GCSEs in the English baccalaureate.
With sharper accountability, a more ambitious curriculum and
world-class qualifications, I believe we can create an education system that
can compete with the best in the world—a system that gives every young person,
regardless of background, the high-quality education, high aspirations and high
achievement they need and deserve. I commend this statement to the House.
Appendix
8
The draft of national curriculum history (Feb 7 2013)
Purpose of study
A high-quality history education equips pupils to think
critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and
judgement. A knowledge of Britain’s past, and our place in the world, helps us
understand the challenges of our own time.
Aims
The National Curriculum for history aims to ensure that all
pupils:
·
know and understand the story of these islands: how the British
people shaped this nation and how Britain influenced the world
·
know and understand British history as a coherent, chronological
narrative, from the story of the first settlers in these islands to the
development of the institutions which govern our lives today
·
know and understand the broad outlines of European and world
history: the growth and decline of ancient civilisations; the expansion and
dissolution of empires; the achievements and follies of mankind
·
gain and deploy a historically-grounded understanding of abstract
terms such as ‘empire’, ‘civilisation’, ‘parliament’ and ‘peasantry’
·
understand historical concepts such as continuity and change,
cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance, and use them to
make connections, draw contrasts, analyse trends, frame historically-valid
questions and create their own structured accounts, including written
narratives and analyses
·
understand how evidence is used rigorously to make historical
claims, and discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of
the past have been constructed
·
gain historical perspective by placing their growing knowledge
into different contexts, understanding the connections between local, regional,
national and international history; between cultural, economic, military,
political, religious and social history; and between short- and long-term
timescales.
Attainment targets
By the end of each key stage, pupils are expected to know, apply
and understand the matters, skills and processes specified in the relevant
programme of study.
Subject content
Key Stage1
Pupils should begin to develop an awareness of the past and the
ways in which it is similar to and different from the present. They should
understand simple subject-specific vocabulary relating to the passing of time
and begin to develop an understanding of the key features of a range of
different events and historical periods.
Pupils should be taught about:
·
simple vocabulary relating to the passing of time such as
‘before’, ‘after’, ‘past’, ‘present’, ‘then’ and ‘now’
·
the concept of nation and of a nation’s history
·
concepts such as civilisation, monarchy, parliament, democracy,
and war and peace that are essential to understanding history
·
the lives of significant individuals in Britain's past who have
contributed to our nation's achievements– scientists such as Isaac Newton or
Michael Faraday, reformers such as Elizabeth Fry or William Wilberforce,
medical pioneers such as William Harvey or Florence Nightingale, or creative
geniuses such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel or Christina Rossetti
·
key events in the past that are significant nationally and
globally, particularly those that coincide with festivals or other events that
are commemorated throughout the year
·
significant historical events, people and places in their own
locality.
Key Stage 2
Pupils should be taught about the ancient civilizations of
Greece and Rome.
In addition, across Key Stages 2 and 3, pupils should be taught
the essential chronology of Britain’s history. This will serve as an essential
frame of reference for more in-depth study. Pupils should be made aware that
history takes many forms, including cultural, economic, military, political,
religious and social history. Pupils should be taught about key dates, events
and significant individuals. They should also be given the opportunity to study
local history.
Pupils should be taught the following chronology of British
history sequentially:
early Britons and settlers, including:
·
the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages
·
Celtic culture and patterns of settlement
Roman conquest and rule, including:
·
Caesar, Augustus, and Claudius
·
Britain as part of the Roman Empire
·
the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire
Anglo-Saxon and Viking settlement, including:
·
the Heptarchy
·
the spread of Christianity
·
key developments in the reigns of Alfred, Athelstan, Cnut and
Edward the Confessor
the Norman Conquest and Norman rule, including:
·
the Domesday Book
·
feudalism
·
Norman culture
·
the Crusades
Plantagenet rule in the 12th and 13th centuries, including:
·
key developments in the reign of Henry II, including the murder
of Thomas Becket
·
Magna Carta
·
de Montfort’s Parliament
relations between England, Wales, Scotland and France, including:
·
William Wallace
·
Robert the Bruce
·
Llywelyn and Dafydd ap Gruffydd
·
the Hundred Years War
life in 14th-century England, including:
·
chivalry
·
the Black Death
·
the Peasants’ Revolt
the later Middle Ages and the early modern period, including:
·
Chaucer and the revival of learning
·
Wycliffe’s Bible
·
Caxton and the introduction of the printing press
·
the Wars of the Roses
·
Warwick the Kingmaker
·
the Tudor period, including religious strife and Reformation in
the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary
Elizabeth I’s reign and English expansion, including:
·
colonisation of the New World
·
plantation of Ireland
·
conflict with Spain
·
the Renaissance in England, including the lives and works of
individuals such as Shakespeare and Marlowe
the Stuart period, including:
·
the Union of the Crowns
·
King versus Parliament
·
Cromwell’s commonwealth, the Levellers and the Diggers
·
the restoration of the monarchy
·
the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London
·
Samuel Pepys and the establishment of the Royal Navy
·
the Glorious Revolution, constitutional monarchy and the Union
of the Parliaments.
Key Stage 3
Building on the study of the chronology of the history of
Britain in Key Stage 2, teaching of the periods specified below should ensure
that pupils understand and use historical concepts in increasingly
sophisticated ways to make connections, draw contrasts, analyse trends, frame
historically-valid questions and create their own structured accounts. They
should develop an awareness and understanding of the role and use of different
types of sources, as well as their strengths, weaknesses and reliability. They
should also examine cultural, economic, military, political, religious and
social aspects and be given the opportunity to study local history. The
teaching of the content should be approached as a combination of overview and
in-depth studies.
Pupils should be taught about:
The development of the modern nation
Britain and her Empire, including:
·
Wolfe and the conquest of Canada
·
Clive of India
·
Competition with France and the Jacobite rebellion
·
the American Revolution
·
the Enlightenment in England, including Francis Bacon, John
Locke, Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, Adam Smith and the
impact of European thinkers
the struggle for power in Europe, including:
·
the French Revolution and the Rights of Man
·
the Napoleonic Wars, Nelson, Wellington and Pitt
·
the Congress of Vienna
the struggle for power in Britain, including:
·
the Six Acts and Peterloo through to Catholic Emancipation
·
the slave trade and the abolition of slavery, the role of
Olaudah Equiano and free slaves
·
the Great Reform Act and the Chartists
the High Victorian era, including:
·
Gladstone and Disraeli
·
the Second and Third Reform Acts
·
the battle for Home Rule
·
Chamberlain and Salisbury
the development of a modern economy, including:
·
iron, coal and steam
·
the growth of the railways
·
great innovators such as Watt, Stephenson and Brunel
·
the abolition of the Corn Laws
·
the growth and industrialization of cities
·
the Factory Acts
·
the Great Exhibition and global trade
·
social conditions
·
the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the birth of trade unionism
Britain’s global impact in the 19th century, including:
·
war in the Crimea and the Eastern Question
·
gunboat diplomacy and the growth of Empire
·
the Indian Mutiny and the Great Game
·
the scramble for Africa
·
the Boer Wars
Britain’s social and cultural development during the Victorian
era, including:
·
the changing role of women, including figures such as Florence
Nightingale, Mary Seacole, George Eliot and Annie Besant
·
the impact of mass literacy and the Elementary Education Act.
·
The twentieth century
Britain transformed, including:
·
the Rowntree Report and the birth of the modern welfare state
·
‘Peers versus the People’
·
Home Rule for Ireland
·
the suffragette movement and women's emancipation
the First World War, including:
·
causes such as colonial rivalry, naval expansion and European
alliances
·
key events
·
conscription
·
trench warfare
·
Lloyd George’s coalition
·
the Russian Revolution
·
The Armistice
·
the peace of Versailles
the 1920s and 1930s, including:
·
the first Labour Government
·
universal suffrage
·
the Great Depression
·
the abdication of Edward VIII and constitutional crisis
the Second World War, including:
·
causes such as appeasement, the failure of the League of Nations
and the rise of the Dictators
·
the global reach of the war – from Arctic Convoys to the Pacific
Campaign
·
the roles of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin
·
Nazi atrocities in occupied Europe and the unique evil of the
Holocaust
Britain’s retreat from Empire, including:
·
independence for India and the Wind of Change in Africa
·
the independence generation – Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Kenyatta,
Nkrumah
·
the Cold War and the impact of Communism on Europe
·
the Attlee Government and the growth of the welfare state
·
the Windrush generation, wider new Commonwealth immigration, and
the arrival of East African Asians
·
society and social reform, including the abolition of capital
punishment, the legalization of abortion and homosexuality, and the Race
Relations Act
Economic change and crisis, the end of the post-war consensus,
and governments up to and including:
·
the election of Margaret Thatcher
·
Britain’s relations with Europe, the Commonwealth, and the wider
world
·
the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
· Appendix 9
Joint Statement on the Draft National Curriculum for History 12
February 2013
As representatives of the principal
organisations for historians in the UK, we would like to respond to the
publication of the draft Programmes of Study for History in the national
curriculum released by the Department for Education on 7 February 2013. We want
to voice significant reservations both about the content of the Programmes of
Study which have been proposed, and about the process by which the Programmes
have been devised.
First, we believe that the Programmes of
Study are far too narrowly and exclusively focused on British history to serve
the needs of children growing up in the world today. History is of course an
important and necessary tool for teaching future citizens about the making of
their localities and nations. But it is not only that – it is also the
treasure-house of human experience across millennia and around the world.
Students should learn about British history: but knowledge of the history of
other cultures (and not only as they have been encountered through their
interactions with the British Isles) is as vital as knowledge of foreign
languages to enable British citizens to understand the full variety and
diversity of human life. The narrowness of the Programmes deprives children,
many of whom will not continue with the study of History beyond the national
curriculum, of the vast bulk of the precious inheritance of the past.
Secondly, we welcome the inclusion within the
Programmes of Study of topics concerned with social, economic and cultural
history. Students should certainly be taught political history; but they should
also be taught the histories of economies, societies, ideas, beliefs and
cultures. As the writings of historians over the past hundred years have
eloquently demonstrated, it is in any case impossible properly to understand
political history without an appreciation of these other histories. It might
still be debated whether the specifications set out in the Programmes of Study
have yet found the ideal balance between political history and other aspects of
the past, not least in relation to conveying to students a proper appreciation
of what the discipline of History now encompasses. This is especially important
with reference to how the subject is studied and taught in the higher level
qualifications delivered in both schools and universities for which these
programmes of study must in part be seen as preparation (a point of equal
relevance in consideration of the concentration on British history).
Thirdly, we regret that the construction of
the Programme in a strictly chronological sequence from Key Stage 2 to Key
Stage 3 ensures that many students will not be properly exposed to the exciting
and intellectually demanding study of pre-modern history other than in the very
earliest stages of their studies. This risks promoting even if only inadvertently
the naive assumption that human society and culture become more sophisticated
and complex through time, and also potentially encourages students and teachers
to neglect pre-modern history as they move on to study history at GCSE, A-Level
and beyond.
We recognize that there are limits to the
capacity of a curriculum to encompass all desiderata, and that a balance must
be struck between ambition and practicality. It is partly for this reason that
we also regret the way in which the curriculum was drafted. Despite much
interesting debate in the media about the future of the curriculum, and
especially the History curriculum, in the early days of the current government,
the details of the curriculum have been drafted inside the Department for
Education without any systematic consultation or public discussion with
historians, teachers or the wider public. The contrast with the practice of the
Conservative government of the late 1980s when it drafted the first national
curriculum is striking. Then, a History Working Group including teachers,
educational experts and academics worked in tandem with the ministry of the day
to produce first an interim report and then a final report in the midst of much
public discussion. The curriculum that resulted was widely supported across
many professional and political divisions in the teaching and academic
professions and by the general public. The current government was certainly
right to feel that after many interim changes it was time for a fresh look.
Unfortunately, it has not attempted to assemble the same kind of consensus, and
as a result it has produced a draft curriculum which it can be argued could
still benefit from extensive discussion about how to ensure that it best serves
both good practice and the public interest. Rather than find ourselves cast
necessarily in the role of critics, we would welcome an opportunity to engage
constructively with the government in fashioning Programmes of Study which
could seek to deliver outcomes equally acceptable to politicians, working
historians, the public at large and above all students, their teachers and
parents.
Professor David D’Avray, Chair, Medieval Studies Section,
British Academy
Professor Jackie Eales, President, Historical Association
Professor Mary Fulbrook, Chair, Modern History Section, British
Academy
Dr Keith McLay, Co-Convenor, History UK
Professor Peter Mandler, President, Royal Historical Society
Professor Hamish Scott, Chair, Early Modern History Section,
British Academy
12 February 2013
Appendix 10
The full text of the historians’ letter to The Times, Wednesday 27 February 2013
Dear Sir,
We believe that every pupil should have the
opportunity to attain a broad and comprehensive knowledge of English and
British history. Alongside other core subjects of the curriculum, mathematics,
English, sciences and modern languages, history has a special role in
developing in each and every individual a sense of their own identity as part
of a historic community with world-wide links, interwoven with the ability to analyse
and research the past that remains essential for a full understanding of modern
society.
It should be made possible for every pupil to
take in the full narrative of our history throughout every century. No one
would expect a pupil to be denied the full range of the English language;
equally, no pupil should any longer be denied the chance to obtain a full
knowledge of the rich tapestry of the history of their own country, in both its
internal and international dimensions.
It is for this reason that we give our
support in principle to the changes to the new national curriculum for history
that the government is proposing. While these proposals will no doubt be
adapted as a result of full consultation, the essential idea that a curriculum
framework should ensure that pupils are given an overall understanding of
history through its most important changes, events and individuals is a welcome
one. Above all, we recognise that a coherent curriculum that reflects how
events and topics relate to one another over time, together with a renewed
focus in primary school for history, has long been needed. Such is the
consensus view in most countries of Europe. We also welcome the
indication that sufficient freedom will in future be given to history teachers
to plan and teach in ways which will revitalise history in schools.
We are in no doubt that the proposed changes
to the curriculum will provoke controversy among those attached to the status
quo and suspicious of change. Yet we must not shy away from this golden opportunity
to place history back at the centre of the national curriculum and make it part
of the common culture of every future citizen.
Yours sincerely,
Professor David
Abulafia FBA
Antony
Beevor FRSL
Professor
Jeremy Black
Professor
Michael Burleigh
Professor
John Charmley
Professor
J.C.D. Clark
Professor
Niall Ferguson
Dr
Amanda Foreman
Professor
Jeremy Jennings
Dr
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Dr
Andrew Roberts
Chris
Skidmore MP
Professor
David Starkey FSA
D.R.
Thorpe
Appendix
11
Other
significant articles
From
Seumas Milne
From
Niall Ferguson (with reference to him in first article)
On the
Milne article above
Ferguson,
N. (2010) ‘Historical dispute over the facts and figures
of the European empires’, The Guardian, 12 June, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jun/12/facts-and-figures-of-empire.
From (Sir)
David Cannadine
From
(Sir) Richard J. Evans
Evans,
R.J. (2011a) ‘The Wonderfulness of Us – The Tory Interpretation of History’, London
Review of Books, 17 March,
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n06/richard-j-evans/the-wonderfulness-of-us
Evans,
R.J. (2011b) ‘Make history compulsory for the right reasons– history teaching
is not about encouraging a narrowly patriotic sense of national identity’, The
Guardian, 26 August,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/26/history-compulsory-right-reasons
Evans,
R.J. (2012) ‘1066 and all that. Michael Gove argues that schools should teach
children about kings, queens and wars’, New Statesman, 23 January,
http://www.newstatesman.com/education/2012/01/british-history-schools
Evans,
R.J. (2013a) ‘Little England folly at the heart of history’, Financial Times,
Opinion, February 7,
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5b658930-7121-11e2-9b5c-00144feab49a.html#axzz2QXF5IBvY
(Log-in necessary for access)
Evans,
R.J. (2013b) ‘History teachers learn to face the facts’, The Guardian,
18 February,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2013/feb/18/history-teachers-learn-face-facts
Evans,
R.J. (2013c) ‘Richard J. Evans on Gove’s planned reforms to history in
schools’, Varsity, 27 February, http://www.varsity.co.uk/news/5720
Evans, R.J. (2013d) ‘Michael Gove‘s history
curriculum is a pub quiz not an education: the rote sets in’, New Statesman,
21 March
Appendix
12
The ‘Mr Men’ and Primary History controversy May
2013
Michael Gove, ‘What does it mean to be an educated person?,’ 9
May 2013 (Brighton College Speech),
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/what-does-it-mean-tobe-
an-educated-person.
The four Primary History pieces (three articles and one case
study) referred to (and criticized) in the speech above (Primary History 62
(Autumn 2012))
Articles (x3)
Jane Card (2012),
‘Pointing the view: helping pupils to view historical film critically; Case
study 2: Using a Public Information film’, Primary History, Issue 62,
Autumn, pp. 13-14 (London: The Historical Association).
Susan Edgar (2012), ‘Primary
pedagogy and interactive PowerPoint: Lessons from Early Years Primary ITT
Students’, Issue 62, Autumn, pp. 15-16 (London: The Historical Association).
Jon Nichol (2012),
‘History mysteries and pupils as history detectives’, Primary History,
Issue 62, Autumn, pp. 20-21 (London: The Historical Association).
Case Study (x1)
Ilona Aronovsky with Kate
Benson and Ann Plummeridge, ‘Case Study 5: Animation’, pp. 33-4.
Note: I had myself written a brief piece in this
same issue (‘Podcasts on the HA website’, p. 41) but yet so had Michael Maddison
HMI (‘Using ICT to develop pupils’ understanding and thinking – The view from
OFSTED’, p. 5.
Russel Tarr
Russel Tarr, ‘1: Hitler’s Rise to Power: Joint History Lesson,
(Year 6 / Year 11)’ Teacher Notes (undated worksheet), http://bit.ly/10SYm84.
Russel Tarr, ‘Active History replies to Gove’s accusation of
“infantilisation,”’ 12 May 2013, http://www.activehistory. co.uk/gove.php;
Media Responses
Hurst, G. (2013), ‘Gove‘s
historical accuracy is questioned‘, The Times Online,
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/education/article3764263.ece,14 May. [Log-in
required]
Andrew Levy (2013),
‘Imagine Hitler as one of the Mr Men: Michael Gove slams history teaching in
scathing attack on play-based‖
lessons’, 9 May, Daily Mail Online,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2321950/Imagine-Hitler-Mr-Men-Michael-Gove-slams-history-teaching.html.
Historical Association
Response
Historical Association, ‘Cartoons and Mr Men,’ 13 May 2013,
http://bit.ly/MsFQMi.
Letter defending the
Historical Association
In defence of the Historical Association: The letter signed by
54 historians can be accessed through Richard Toye’s blog, http://bit.ly/1ndIcQw.
What I wrote about it
Michael Gove’s Brighton
College speech – Mr Men and Primary History
Michael Gove’s speech to independent school Brighton College on
9 May 2013 was in many ways a misjudgment and, consequently, a public relations
disaster, in which he continued a ‘discourse of derision’ towards teachers by
appearing to interfere in the micro-managing of the teaching process. This was fed
by some ill-informed market research the serious shortcomings of an earlier
example of which were later revealed through a Freedom of Information request
by a retired teacher, Janet Downs. Astonishingly the Brighton address included
references to four separate articles in a single issue of the HA’s journal Primary History. These covered the use of animation, film,
interactive PowerPoint, and detective work in history lessons. The burden of
the criticism was that the journal was recommending imaginative and creative approaches
to history teaching that seemed to be moving the discipline away from a factual
base, an echo of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate’s (HMI) ‘flights of fancy’
criticisms of the 1970s and 80s.
Michael Gove had also been made aware of a worksheet prepared by
Russel Tarr on his ‘activehistory’ website which suggested teaching the Third
Reich period by transforming Nazi leaders or those associated with them into
‘Mr Men’ characters. Tarr, of course, had something to say about all this. It
must be said that mixing Nazi history with cartoon characters fits the British
sense of humour, but to some, like Gove himself, this is still seen as
controversial. The HA published a rebuff to Michael Gove online. In addition,
and not surprisingly, some fifty-four mainly university-based historians,
including a past HA President, Professor Chris Wrigley, and a former President
of the RHS, Professor Martin Daunton, went to the press (The Times) on 14 May to complain about what they saw not
only as an attack on a revered (and, incidentally, charitable) institution (the
HA) but also as political interference. Several of the signatories were
involved with the HA at local branch level, giving talks and belonging to
committees made up of both town and gown. The HA’s fundamental contribution to
grass-roots civil society has been to underwrite and support a dynamic (and
indeed democratic) interaction between the general public, history teachers and
academics. (Guyver 2014: 8-9)
Robert Guyver, ‘Michael Gove’s History Wars 2010–2014:
The Rise, Fall and Transformation of a Neoconservative Dream’, Agora [Sungraphô] (Journal of HTAV – History
Teachers’ Association of Victoria [Australia], Volume 49, Issue 4, pp.
4-11. https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=787010623172797;res=IELAPA
Appendix 13
Reform of the National Curriculum in England Consultation Report
of the Consultation (July 2013)
History
History received the largest number of
responses of all the national curriculum subjects. Respondents raised a range
of issues which included a concern that teaching history chronologically would
not allow teachers to revisit certain periods or consolidate learning
effectively. Some of these respondents argued that if chronology was the
preferred method of presentation then it should be reversed so that young
children could start with more recent history which would be more relevant and
accessible for them. It was noted, however, that the prescription of a very
rigid chronological structure could be problematic for small rural schools with
mixed age classes. Some respondents thought that there was too great a focus on
British history. Others felt that there was too much content which could lead
to superficial learning rather than promoting a deep understanding of history.
Some respondents commented that the content was too prescriptive and
fact-focused, which might limit teachers’ ability to shape the curriculum to
pupils’ needs and interests. A number of respondents also expressed concern
about the likely impact of changing curriculum content at key stages 2 and 3 on
the use of museums and heritage centres for school trips. (pp. 7-8)
Appendix 14
Appendix
15 Start the Week Andrew Marr with guests
Michael
Gove is the MP for Surrey Heath and [was then] Secretary of State for
Education. Michael
Gove
Margaret
MacMillan is the Warden of St Antony’s College and a Professor of
International History at the University of Oxford.
The War
That Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War is
published by Profile Books. Margaret MacMillan
Simon
Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia
University. He is presently working on Volume 2 of The Story of the Jews. Simon Schama
Tom
Holland is an author. Herodotus:
The Histories, a new translation by Tom Holland, is published by Penguin
Classics. Tom
Holland
These are from two pieces I have written, referring to this:
Epilogue and conclusions –
Simon Schama and Michael Gove chaired by Andrew
Marr, BBC Radio, December
2013
Historians Tom Holland and Margaret Macmillan also
took part in this fascinating discussion between Gove
and Schama. The broadcast is notable for three things. First, Michael Gove
admitted that he was an unashamed Whig but that he was, nevertheless,
happy with the idea of a school student having the
freedom to make up his own mind about whether he wanted to
be a Whig or a Marxist. Secondly, Tom Holland put forward the idea
that there were, in fact, two kinds of interacting Whig narrative tradition –
‘high politics’ being one and ‘history from below’ as exemplified by E.P. Thompson [see note 54 below]. Of
course, both of these traditions could be sewn into a national curriculum.
There is indeed, as Tom Holland suggested, an Our Island Story model
which is neo-Whig – encompassing both ‘high’ and ‘subaltern’ history, as well
as both intranational and transnational dimensions – but
with a distinctly quirky exceptionalism lacking in pomposity, and it had been
visible on television. Simon Schama himself (presenter of A History of Britain) reaffirmed at Hay-on-Wye in May 2013 that
Britain’s ‘glory’ was characterised by ‘division.’ Michael Wood’s Story of England (in
book form and on TV) concentrated on villagers in Leicestershire and attempted
an intranational narrative through their recorded local reactions to national
and international events – a recognisably HA approach [see note 55 below]. Robert
Bartlett’s presentations of The
Normans and The Plantagenets emphasised the European and transnational
dimensions of these phases of the ‘national’ narrative [see note 56 below]. Lucy
Worsley’s The First Georgians – The German Kings who made Britain was also transnational – the story ‘warts and
all’ of the
development of Britain’s political system, told wittily [see note 57 below]. (Guyver
2014: 9)
Notes
54 See Edward P. Thompson’s classic work, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963). Raphael
Samuel also comes to mind.
55 Michael Wood’s Story
of England, BBC 4 Television (2010), http://bbc.in/ZtFKKT;
The Story of England (London: Viking Penguin, 2010).
56 The Normans, BBC2 Television (2011), http://bbc.in/ZRK3R8;
The Plantagenets, BBC 2 Television (2014),
http://bbc.in/1jsPoUe.
57 The First Georgians – The German Kings who
madeBritain, BBC 4 Television (2014), http://bbc.in/PKL2fL.
Guyver, R. (2014) ‘Michael
Gove’s History Wars 2010–2014: The Rise, Fall and Transformation of a Neoconservative
Dream’, Agora [Sungraphô] (Journal of
HTAV – History Teachers’ Association of Victoria [Australia], Volume 49,
Issue 4, pp. 4-11.
Andrew Marr and Start
the Week, 30 December 2013
With the history curriculum now finalized and calm settling over
these fraught debates, this was an end-of-year discussion between the
presenter, Andrew Marr, and his guests Michael Gove, Simon Schama, Margaret
Macmillan (another historian) and Tom Holland. Holland was a classicist and
ancient historian, and he had just published a translation of Herodotus’s Histories (2013), beloved of Simon Schama. The programme was remarkable
for its mutually tolerant good humour and shared sense of searching for a
consensus. It explored some difficult dynamics in the construction of national
history curricula like matching the level of what is studied with the age of the children, and the relationship between
narrative and enquiry, and indeed between narrative and patriotism. It hit a
note already flagged up by Lord Bew in his House of Lords address in 2011, that
a pride in the past is not just a possession of the political right, that H. E.
Marshall’s Our Island Story (1905) had a radical subtext, and that one
strand in English history, according to Michael Gove himself, citing the
example of John Ball was the subverting of executive power by the people.
Gerard Winstanley (1609–76), the Leveller, was included in this category by Tom
Holland. (Guyver 2016: 170)
Note: John Ball, c.1338-1381, was a Lollard priest executed
after his involvement in the Peasants’ Revolt.
Guyver, R. (2016), ‘England and the UK: Conflict and Consensus over
Curriculum’, in R.Guyver (Ed.), Teaching
History and the Changing Nation State – Transnational and Intranational
Perspectives, pp. 159-174. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Appendix 16 – Pre-2013 National Curriculum
Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2: http://www.rgs.org/NR/rdonlyres/BAAA2085-2E7E-4B0F-B6B4-13F715630293/0/FW_HistoryNC.pdf [pp. 103-107]
Key Stage 3: http://www.rgs.org/NR/rdonlyres/BAAA2085-2E7E-4B0F-B6B4-13F715630293/0/FW_HistoryNC.pdf
