History Curriculum Newsprint & Radio5Live Debate

Today we were involved in an interesting debate on air and on twitter via Radio5 Live led by Richard Bacon, responding to the fifteen historians who wrote a Letter published in today's "The Times" in support of Michael Gove's proposals to change the history curriculum.  This is now in the teeth of huge opposition by history teachers, both in schools and universities, led by The Historical Association, and The Royal Historical Society.  Many involved in the debate today had not had access to the text of "The Times" letter, so here it is, with the fifteen historians identified,  incase you want to be in dialgoue with these participants and develop the debate further:

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

Professor Robert Tombs

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Letters to the Editor: THE TIMES Thursday 28 2013

(4 short rejoinders to yesterday's Letter from "the historians"  - in this order

DR SEAN LANG

BERNARD KINGSTON

ANDY CONNELL

DAVID JACKSON

PROF NIGEL SAUL

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Letter to the SPECTATOR by Jackie Eales, President, Historical Association

Printed in edition dated 3 March 2013

Gove’s idea of history

Sir: Toby Young (Status anxiety, 23 February) can’t quite believe how many professional historians have denounced the new history curriculum, but if so many of us are against it, perhaps we have a point. I am glad that he agrees with our recent statement that history is a ‘treasure house’. There is a crucial difference here, however: he sees it as a repository of knowledge, whereas we described it as ‘a treasure house of human experience’. Yes, this does mean that we advocate learning about bias and the complexities of social and gender history, as well as the facts of political and military history.

The new proposals require children to gallop through the centuries to 1700 by the time they leave primary school. Everything else must be crammed in before they can drop history at age 13 or 14. There is thus little chance that they will remember, or even understand, much about the medieval, Tudor and Stuart periods.

There is surely a major inconsistency here in the thinking of Michael Gove. On the one hand, free schools are allowed to devise their own course content; on the other, the minister wants to micromanage which gobbets of history should be studied in maintained schools. The idea that there is a canonical body of knowledge that must be mastered, but not questioned, is inconsistent with high standards of education in any age. Even the new English curriculum does not impose a list of great authors, apart from Shakespeare, on teachers. Yet under the new proposals, history teachers are advised to teach the poet Christina Rossetti, as an example of ‘creative’ genius, and the novelist George Eliot as an example of Victorian social and cultural development. Professional historians are indeed wary of such ministerial tinkerings, not because we are a bunch of dyed-in-the-wool lefties as Toby Young fondly imagines, but because they will do nothing to raise standards or to create a freer educational system.

Professor Jackie Eales
President of the Historical Association, History and American Studies,
Canterbury Christ Church University, Kent


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"OPINION" PIECE ON PAGE 25 - THE TIMES - Thursday February 28 2013

Mr Gove and his horrible heptarchical history

David Aaronovitch
David Aaronovitch
Published at 12:01AM, February 28 2013

Mr Gove and his horrible heptarchical history

Trying to cram in everything from Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to Thatcher is not only impossible but utterly wrong

I think that if I were a history teacher at an English school now it would be a good time to kill myself. Preferably using a method that the Education Secretary would approve of, such as opening my veins in the bath or indulging in a surfeit of lampreys.

Earlier this month Michael Gove published draft "Programmes of Study for History" in the national curriculum and invited responses to be in by April.  The draft follows one of our periodic convulsions about two of our national neuroses in times of change: what's happening to our kids?  And what's happening to our nation? Put them together and, given that we're not going to change anything at home, it usually means a shake-up in schools.

Just as everyone is an expert in marketing, everyone is an expert when it comes to education.  We take our own school experience (however vaguely remembered), or whatever we have managed to pick up - between the "fine, Dad" and "it was OK"s - of our kids' school lives, and we generalise.  Boy, do we generalise.

A few weeks ago the Guardian writer Martin Kettle came back from a play about Charles I that he'd seen with his grown-up son.  The son confessed that "he had reached adult life knowing almost nothing about the English Civil War".  Kettle felt this was a shocking statement. "The English need to learn their own history." Five days ago William Dalyrympe, the travel writer and historian, was worrying about another omission from the history lessons.  "My own children", he complained, "learnt Tudors, and the Nazis over and over again in history class, but never came across a whiff of Indian history."

Dalrymple's concern, in the light of David Cameron's visit to the site of the 1919 Amristar massacre, was not national consciousness but that pupils were being deprived of a historical moral education.  "Most people who go through the British education system", he claimed, "are wholly ill-equipped to judge either the good or the bad in what we did to the rest of the world."  His argument, distilled, was this:  children need to know, from studying the British Empire, that empires are always bloody businesses.

Yesterday on our own letters page was a roundrobinocracy of (mostly) right-of-centre historians, embracing the Govian proposals. Some of them are friends of mine and all of them are writers I enjoy reading.  The letter I enjoyed less.  "No pupil", they chorused, "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"

Children forget things.   Maybe Josh had viola practice that day

I have written before that anyone using the phrase "rich tapestry" should be executed and I cannot make an exception for popular historians.  Especially since what lies at the heart of their view was the assertion of a "special role" history has "developing in each and every individual a sense of their own identity".

So, there's the common assumption lying behind all this curricular upheaval - ie, that we don't teach much English history in English schools.  And the only problem with this is that it's a myth.  Look online at the curriculums for state schools and you'll see loads of English history, invariably including the English Revolution and usually something about the Empire.  It's obvious what's happened here: pre-GCSE parents don't take that much notice of what their kids are doing in lesson-by-lesson detail, and children forget things they've been taught.  Maybe Josh had viola practice that day, or Poppy was off with a cold.

Because blink and you've missed it.  The historian David Cannadine took the unusual step a couple of years back of actually examining what schools did.  He found that one big answer was "too much".  With history not being compulsory after 14, a curriculum originally designed for eight years is being squeezed into six.  They dash through it.

And now they'll dash through the centuries even more.  And even more prescriptively if the draft becomes the curriculum.  In Key Stage 2 (that's primary school, age 8-11) the draft begins: "pupils should be taught the following chronology of British History sequentially...[they] should be taught about key dates, events, and significant individuals.  They should also be given the opportunity to learn about local history".  And also "ancient civilisations".

There then follow 40 specified headings dealing with British history, to be taught in the 99 hours that the children will, on recommendation, have available to learn history in that three years.  They include, at age 8, the "heptarchy" - an anachronistic term for seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms - and "key developments in the reigns of Alfred, Athelstan, Cnut (good luck with that one on the whiteboard) and Edward the Confessor." Athelstan? The heptarchy? Oh, and by the way, since you are the Department of Education, it's just "Domesday book" not "the Domesday book".

At 11, Key Stage 2, pupils will encompass "the Enlightenment in England, including Francis Bacon, John Locke, Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, Adam Smith", oh sorry "and the impact of European thinkers".  They'll do this, with another 60 specified headings in the 135 hours they have available.  No illnesses. No staff absences.  No snow days.  Any of those and you'll wreck the tapestry.

From 8 to 14 English children will learn about history - with not one mention of China.  Not one.  The heptarchy, yes.  The oldest civilisation on Earth and not its second largest economy? No.

I am amazed to have to write this but what lies behind this stupidity is a profoundly mistaken and ahistorical idea of what the discipline is.  It's history as bastard civics.  History with social and political objectives: to cement the nation, weave the tapestry, to "bring us together", to educate us morally.  It's like demanding that physics concentrate on the achievements of British physicists or geography miss out the rainforests because you don't get many of those down our way.

This isn't the history I've loved all my life.  History, the endless curiosity about how people lived; the discipline of discovering the past by using and evaluating sources, balancing claims, coming to senses of likeliehood and causality.

This is instead rote indoctrination, fuelled by anxiety and done at absurd speed. The citizens of tomorrow won't love it, won't recall it, and they won't thank us for it.  So pass the lampreys.

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Alex Ford on the Hodder Blog
Whose History?: Alex Ford's critique

Although I believe it is the ideological underpinnings of the curriculum that we must challenge, it is worth pointing out that, beyond other concerns, the proposals are just fundamentally unworkable. In a year, History departments across England will be asked to throw away their schemes of work for Years 7, 8 and 9, along with thousands of pounds worth of resources that go with them. Where will all of these go? Who will be coming up with replacement resources? More importantly, who will be controlling the content of these? Will the government be producing an approved core text for historical study, with all the overtones thereby implied: The story of Britain from primitive times to world power or even Britain from Ethelred to Thatcher – A Story of Improvement? What worries me more, is that someone, somewhere probably is writing one of these, or something very similar. Again, we cannot let this be the factor which determines the historical diet of our children.
 
When my department were engaged with re-writing our Key Stage 3 schemes of work at the end of 2010, we spent a long time considering, and arguing heatedly over, the aims of History.  Ultimately we concluded that History was about helping children to not just blindly accept the world for what it says it is but to always be questioning it. Gove’s new curriculum undermines this with its prescriptive diet of events which build a false sense of national pride. We decided that History should help to make children into better citizens by engaging them with a wide range of historical narratives, and encouraging them to appreciate their place in the broad sweep of humanity; recognising a common experience which goes beyond national and temporal boundaries. Gove’s curriculum dismantles this through its narrow focus on Britishness, a white, male Britishness, a divisive, insidious and reactionary Britishness with little focus on ordinary humanity. Finally we agreed that History provides freedom. Teachers and students, we said, have opportunities to pursue their own interests and ideas because it involves the whole of human experience. Again, Gove’s curriculum rips professional choice and student interest from the heart of the subject. It reduces it to a dry, dusty trudge through the lives and actions of a privileged class of people and the decisions they made. It is a curriculum devoid of freedom, with a suffocating range of content which stifles teachers and blinkers children to the real historical world around them. As Braudel famously said 'The history of events [is merely the history of] surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs...'. Yet here is a curriculum which is all foam and no substance, surely we deserve better.
 
There seems to be a growing body of people criticising Gove’s educational reforms. Michael Riley for instance has provided an excellent response to the proposals on behalf of the Schools History Project, and Twitter is awash with people denouncing this narrowed, ideologically driven revision. The real challenge now will be to combine all of these battles and wage a real war against Gove’s neo-liberal education agenda. But where will the impetus come for this? For twenty years schooling has been turned into a game (Gunter, 2011) where leadership is about the promotion, and the implementation of national initiatives rather than the true leadership of education. Our 'school leaders' have for too long been chosen on their ability to follow instructions and delegate rather than through engagement with the profession. So in the absence of resistance from the top, the profession itself must take up the vanguard. History teachers are some of those who have the most to lose under these reforms, not least in terms of our professional freedom. Because of this, we must be the front line in stopping Gove's agenda moving any further. It is all too easy to decry the problems of the curriculum but do nothing. Now is the time to stand up and be counted. If nothing else, being a History teacher shows us the power of mass, unified action.
 
First and foremost we must respond in the strongest terms to the consultation which is now on-going. Time is of the essence and Gove’s department will be monitoring reactions very closely now. Beyond this there needs to be a clear campaign of resistance against this attempt to control of our history. Write to your MP, write to the government, take part in the consultation (now that it is working again), contact your local universities, most importantly, don’t let this issue fall out of the news. Gove has backed down before, so this is not an unwinnable campaign. Already there is a groundswell against what Gove is trying to do, bringing together people from very different backgrounds. This is not a case of the 'usual suspects' railing against the Tories, what Gove wants to do with History will damage our profession and remove the right of children in England to receive a broad and balanced History education. The 'Save School History' campaign is already trying to gather unified support. You can join their Facebook group here http://www.facebook.com/SaveSchoolHistory or follow them on Twitter @SaveOur_History. United as a profession, we do have the power to challenge these reforms before it is too late.
 
History is part of all our identities, it must not be a tool of political control, or a dog whistle to those on the right who want to see Britishness and nationalism as the only products of our schooling system. History teachers need to make a stand, we need to refuse to teach this perverse national narrative and resist attempts to de-professionalise us. History will always be part of the curriculum in England, the real question is, whose history do we want it to be?
 
 
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History Curriculum Radio5Live Debate

 

 

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