My Vision for History
in Schools
In
these economically and politically tricky times we need history's long look
more than ever, says historian and government adviser Simon Schama,
as he sets out six of the key events no child should miss out on
Whatever
else gets cut in this time of nicks and scrapes, incisions and mutilations, the
cord of our national memory had better not be among the casualties. For even
during the toughest trials it's our history that binds us together as a
distinctive community in an otherwise generically globalised culture. Mother
Teresa and Lady Gaga are multinationals; Oliver Cromwell and Margaret Thatcher
are peculiarly ours. In a headphone world where we get to privatise our brains,
it's history that logs us on to Our Space.
This
is not to say history is a placebo for our many arguments and ills; a stroll
down memory lane to escape the headaches of the present. It's exactly because
history is, by definition, a bone of contention (the Greek word historia meant, and was used from the very beginning by Herodotus
as, "inquiry") that the arguments it generates resist national
self-congratulation. So that inquiry is not the uncritical genealogy of the
Wonderfulness of Us, but it is, indispensably, an understanding of the identity
of us. The endurance of British history's rich and rowdy discord is, in fact,
the antidote to civic complacency, the condition of the irreverent freedom
that's our special boast. (Try the American version and you will know what I
mean about our brand of salutary disrespect.) The founding masterpiece of
European history, Thucydides's Peloponnesian Wars,
was written by a veteran for whom the discipline was sceptical or not worth the
writing: an attack on Athenian hubris precisely to demonstrate what was, and
what was not, worth fighting for in defence of the democratic polis.
So
it is exactly at a time when we are being asked to make painful, even
invidious, distinctions between the inessential and the indispensable in our
public institutions: that we need history's long look at our national makeup.
This is not an insular proposal. The way
Who
is it that needs history the most? Our children, of course: the generations who
will either pass on the memory of our disputatious liberty or be not much bovvered about the doings of obscure ancestors, and go back
to Facebook for an hour or four. Unless they can be
won to history, their imagination will be held hostage in the cage of eternal Now: the flickering instant that's gone as soon as it has
arrived. They will thus remain, as
The
seeding of amnesia is the undoing of citizenship. To the vulgar utilitarian
demand, "Yes, all very nice, I'm sure, but what use is it?", this
much (and more) can be said: inter alia, the scrutiny of evidence and the
capacity to decide which version of an event seems most credible; analytical
knowledge of the nature of power; an understanding of the way in which some
societies acquire wealth while others lose it and others again never attain it;
a familiarity with the follies and pity of war; the distinctions between just
and unjust conflicts; a clear-eyed vision of the trappings and the aura of
charisma, the weird magic that turns sovereignty into majesty; the still more
peculiar surrender to authority grounded in revelation, be that a sacred book
or a constitution invoked as if it too were supernaturally ordained and hence
unavailable to contested interpretation.
Tell
a classroom of 12-year-olds the story of the British (for they took place
across our nations) civil wars of the 17th century and all those matters will
catch fire in their minds. Explain how it came to be that in the 18th century
Britain, a newly but bloodily united kingdom, came somehow to lose most of
America but acquire an Indian empire, to engross a fortune on the backs of
slaves but then lead the world in the abolition of the trade in humans; explain
all that, and a classroom of pupils whose grandparents may have been born in
Mumbai or Kingston will grasp what it means to be British today, just as easily
as a girl whose grandparents hail from Exeter or Aberdeen.
But
the history of how we came to execute our king, or dominate south
My
own anecdotal evidence suggests that right across the secondary school system
our children are being short-changed of the patrimony of their story, which is
to say the lineaments of the whole story, for there can be no true history that
refuses to span the arc, no coherence without chronology. A
pedagogy that denies that completeness to children fatally misunderstands the
psychology of their receptiveness, patronises their capacity for wanting the
epic of long time; the hunger for plenitude. Everything we know about
their reading habits – from Harry Potter to The Amber Spyglass and Lord of the
Rings suggests exactly the opposite. But they are fiction, you howl? Well, make
history – so often more astounding than fiction – just as gripping; reinvent
the art and science of storytelling in the classroom and you will hook your
students just as tightly. It is, after all, the glory of our historical
tradition – again, a legacy from antiquity – that storytelling is not the
alternative to debate but its necessary condition.
I
don't underestimate the difficulty, especially with a looming rise in classroom
numbers as the mini baby-boom of the 2000s comes to school, of reinstating a
more complete history; especially one that will not neglect Europe and the
non-western world. And it can't be a good idea to treat school age as if it ran
on parallel tracks to chronology, so that the eight-year-olds automatically get
Boudicca. Better, perhaps, to start the reconnections between then and now in
primary school with the history closest to the children: families, the local
town and country, while not stinting their natural fascination with those who
live their lives on the world stage. All of which makes added time for history
in the curriculum the precondition of its rescue from disconnection.
Academies
– where history is discouraged, or even ruled out, in favour of more
exam-friendly utilitarian options – must be persuaded to teach it, and for more
than a trivial hour a week. Drive-by history is no history at all. Ideally, no
pupils should be able to abandon the subject at 14.
To
the retort that teachers have enough on their hands in the state system getting
their students to be literate and numerate, I would respond that in a pluralist
None
of this is to underestimate the heroic job being done by history teachers in
primary and secondary schools throughout the country, with brutally constrained
resources of time and materials. Nor is it to turn a deaf ear to their own concerns. As two successive Historical Association
surveys in 2009 and this year make dramatically clear (they are available online
at history.org.uk along with an excellent podcast debate about history in schools
chaired by Sir David Cannadine), my concerns are but
an echo of theirs. "My subject is disappearing," writes one anguished
teacher in the 2009 report, in a spirit of lament rather than recrimination.
What emerges most startlingly from testimonies of hundreds of teachers is that
at a moment fraught with the possibility of social and cultural division, we
are, in effect, creating two nations of young Britons: those, on the one hand,
who grow up with a sense of our shared memory as a living, urgently present
body of knowledge, something that informs their own lives and shapes their
sense of community; and those on the other hand who have been encouraged to
treat it as little more than ornamental polishing for the elite.
Independent
and grammar schools by and large teach the subject for 90 minutes or more a
week (albeit often in those chopped-up modules); and their teachers have
usually had specialist historical training. But one in three comprehensives and
academies teach the subject, if at all, with teachers who have no history
themselves beyond GCSE; and with harshly truncated hours. There is absolutely
no more guaranteed recipe for boredom than discontinuous subject matter taught
as an exercise in "learning" by someone who is passionless about the
past. How would you rather spend an hour: "learning about learning",
trapped in some sort of indeterminate swamp of histo-geographic-social
studies, or listening to and talking about, the murder of Thomas Becket?
If
we care about this as a country; if we believe, as I do, that one of its
cultural glories is that our future absorbs our past not as dead weight but
inspiration, then there is much to consider, debate and do. And nothing worthwhile
can be done without listening to and learning from those charged with the
mission, working on its frontlines up and down the country in all kinds of
schools. But in the end, the history community is – or ought to be – bigger
than just its school lessons: it should involve and engage academics who might
want to think as deeply about how the subject is taught to 13-year-olds as to
undergraduates and PhD students; writers outside the academy who might want to
produce new books – not just textbooks – but for the digital age, integrating
the kinds of sources that can be put without straining too many resources, on
every student's laptop, or even smartphone; the many
devoted curators and custodians of historic sites and museums. And, not least,
the reform and rejuvenation of history as a living breathing subject ought to
involve parents, who, after all, are themselves, one hopes,
the first storytellers their children listened to.
Of
course, the first obligation parents will feel towards their children, beyond
their safety, is that they be equipped with the skills and knowledge needed to
earn their living in a world in which that task gets harder by the day. But
caring parents, whatever their means, and wherever they live, surely have
another concern too, beyond the exigencies of pounds and pence: that their
children come to understand that the value of the house they live in is not
measured by square footage, the size of the car or the number of electronic
machines whirring and flashing in room after room, but the wealth of its
memories, the abundance of its shared stories; for it is from that history that
we recognise our membership of a common family. Like all other families, it
will row and rage and seldom sing from the same page. But somehow that common
memory will make it pause before it tears itself apart and shreds the future to
ribbons.
What every child should learn:
1.
Murder in the
cathedral: The whole showdown between religious and royal/secular ideas of law
and sovereignty embodied in the persons of Thomas Becket and Henry II. This
could hardly be more relevant in our contemporary world, where secular law and
authority are asked to submit to religious law. And a thrilling story, given
that Becket goes from being the king's right-hand man to his indefatigable
opponent. What kind of conversion was that? The story of Henry's penitence and
the establishment of a martyr legend is just as
riveting.
2.
The black Death, and the peasants revolt in the reign of Richard
II: how did society deal with the arrival of a terrifying pandemic? (Are we any
more prepared?) How did the plague change society among rich and poor. Was there any connection between the trauma and a
rebellion that took over the capital?
3.
The execution of
King Charles I: how did
4.
The Indian moment:
how was it that a country throwing its weight around the world's oceans got
kicked out of most of
5.
The Irish wars: William
Gladstone, Charles Parnell and the Irish wars – the subject that never goes
away! Two heroic and, in their own ways, tragic figures.
Could it ever have worked out peacefully?
6.
The opium wars
and
Simon
Schama
The
Guardian, Tuesday 9 November 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/nov/09/future-history-schools