The Ends of History

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. – George Santayana 

Those who fail history are doomed to repeat it next semester. – Anonymous

Beyond a generalised sense that curricula should be toughened across the board, it’s hard to think of many subjects in which the average person – neither an educationalist nor a subject specialist – feels qualified to dictate specifics of what should be studied. When it comes to the history curriculum, however, it is gradually becoming clear that everyone’s a critic. A young man or woman leaving school who couldn’t tell you who’d won at the Battle of Hastings, or who’s unable to put surnames to the many Annes and Catherines of Henry VIII, seems to offend us on a level deeper than the same person’s inability to tell you what an oxbow lake is or explain that, in contravention of all schoolboy and schoolgirl logic, Twelfth Night really was written with the intention of making people laugh. 

Make no bones about it: this is a political battlefield as much as a pedagogical one, and those with opinions on the subject tend to divide into two camps. (Or, rather, I have divided them into two camps, for ease of caricature.) On the one side, you have the fact-oriented, narrative-minded traditionalisers, whose spiritual leader is, of course, Michael Gove, and whose representative on Earth – or in the Guardian, at least – is Niall Ferguson. In the red corner, you have the counter-argument: skills over facts, depth of analysis over breadth of coverage, and oriented towards critical examination of traditional narratives, as if the ultimate aim is to fill our primary schools with armies of six-year-old Jurgen Habermases. (Habermii?) It was Ferguson’s article that inspired me to write this post, mainly because although my every instinct screams to dismiss out of hand a man who has written a book entitled "Civilisation: the Six Killer Apps of Western Power" and does not appear to be ashamed of that fact, he has raised issues that can’t be so easily dismissed.

The division between ‘facts’ and ‘skills’ is, of course, a false dichotomy, and I won’t pretend that I haven’t oversimplified the argument in my sketch of the situation. Nevertheless, the division is indubitably there: Ferguson himself is happy to frame the argument in this way, contrasting himself with the distinguished Oxbridge duo of Richard Evans and David Priestland, who, in their commitment to "the existing breadth and ambition of coverage, critical method and historical debate" – quoth Niall – suggest “an almost wilful ignorance of – or indifference to – the parlous state of historical knowledge among young Britons.” To Ferguson, this is ivory-tower elitism at its most counter-productive, taking a syllabus fashioned for undergraduates or postgraduates who have already made a positive commitment to the study of history and assuming that it will fit the uncluttered minds of our primary- and secondary-schoolers just as well.

He isn’t wrong, although his policy prescriptions probably are. For those of us who adore history, representing as it does the greatest assemblage ever chronicled of the weird and wonderful, the unlikely and improbable, the fascinating and the revolting and the truly humanising, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to recall what sparked that first interest. After all, none of us were born knowing who won at Hastings, Bosworth or Waterloo, and misconceptions or ignorance can persist well into adulthood unless one encounters – or puts oneself in the way of – something that will challenge that ignorance. (I won’t tell you how old I was before I realised that a pony was not simply a young horse.)

The key is curiosity. When a child has made the decision to learn in his free time, ninety percent of the battle has already been won, and the holes in 'common knowledge’ left by a history curriculum that - by necessity – cannot cover everything will inevitably be filled. The most effective way to address historical illiteracy amongst the youth of this country is not to argue endlessly about ‘facts’ versus ‘skills’, as if either can be separated from the other. It doesn’t matter whether the syllabus says a twelve-year-old must learn about Nelson or Nongqawuse if the twelve-year-old in question is counting the minutes until the bell rings, barely paying attention. Similarly, it doesn’t matter that she’s being encouraged to question whether the British Empire was a force for good or a tide of evil if, to be blunt, she couldn’t give a damn either way. 

History teachers – nearly all of whom by now are specialists holding degrees in their subjects and, at least in theory, are already turned on to the love of learning they’re trying to impart to thirty sceptical kids – have at their fingertips heroes and villains, wars and rebellions, love and treachery, faith and fervour, and a thousand gruesome and fascinating historical facts of the did-that-really-happen-sir? type. No syllabus can account for all of these, but nevertheless, our teachers must be freed up to employ them. 

What this means in practice is a more difficult question, but a less prescriptive syllabus would be a start, and possibly less early-years testing. A child who’s had her historical curiosity piqued by something interesting put in her way in her formative years will score better on the tests that really count than one who’s been drilled with 1066 or the Tolpuddle Martyrs until her head hurts. (For me, it was an detailed explanation – gruesome, in the way that your average seven-year-old boy rather likes to see – of the fact that if I’d been born a hundred and fifty years earlier I’d probably be dying up a chimney rather than sat in the back of my parents’ car reading about a kid dying up a chimney. This particular example came from Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories, a series that I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone trying to get kids interested in the subject.)

Trust teachers? It seems like a controversial proposition at a time when ever-increasing measurement and incentivisation of teachers’ performance is the hot topic, but we can’t put an Ofsted inspector in every classroom, nor should we want to. If a man wrote his dissertation about the Reformation, then he should be allowed some leeway to teach his kids about the Reformation, if only because he probably knows some really good anecdotes about naughty monks and greedy lords that’ll catch the attention of the heads-down crew at the back of the classroom. If someone else is an expert on cultural images of women in ancient China, then – although there can’t, of course, be a standardised test for every aspect of history – why the hell shouldn’t she be allowed to sit her eleven-year-olds down and teach them about the practice of foot-binding?

The intention behind this isn’t to let teachers make up their own curriculum on the hoof. There have to be some centralised standards, both for an individual school and for schools as a whole across the country, and there needs to be testing to monitor progress (or decline, as may be the case). But in our classrooms right now we have a huge amount of specialised knowledge and an equally huge amount of apathy, and that is not a tolerable or a sustainable situation. Governments, of both the left and right, need to take one step back and – to quote a cliché – let teachers teach.

George W. Bush, in his inimitable style, once put the question to us: “Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?” He was right to ask. A child can be sat in the classroom, and pitched battles can be fought in the Commons and in the press about what he should be learning while he’s there, but is he learning while he’s there? Education is not something that happens to a child between nine AM and three PM, five days a week, for fourteen years of his life. Education is something a person does to themselves throughout their lifetime, and it begins with a single thought: “Hey, that’s interesting.” One of the functions of formal education has to be to light as many matches as possible and see what kinds of fires get started. (Not literally, obviously). A child who knows how interesting history can really be will learn facts and skills, narrative and analysis, in the natural course of things, and she will have fun doing it.

What we are doing, when we argue in party political terms about the teaching of history, is arguing about whether bricks or cement are more important in building a house while ignoring the great gaping hole where the foundation should be. We’re doing our teachers a disservice; we’re doing our children a disservice; and, if we’re interested in history as a discipline, we’re doing ourselves a disservice. We were not born wanting to learn: we learned that before we learned anything else. We have an obligation to ensure that the next generation are helped to discover it, too.