The history curriculum debate has been given air time and prime news space several times this week in response to Michael Gove's plans to make changes to the current curriculum. This is indicative of the concern of history teachers in schools and universities, and their successful campaign to raise the profile of the issues at stake.
Today 3rd March there has been a package made for BBC1's Sunday Politics Show Presented by Reporter Susana Mendonca, Studio Discussion by Andrew Neil, featuring Nick Gibb MP (former Schools Minister 2010-2012) and Greg Jenner, (Consultant for Horrible Histories,) some vox pops of primary school kids, (filmed at The Ragged School Museum); and most air time given to a tricky spat between Dr David Starkey vs Prof Sir Richard Evans.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ See below other useful materials transcribed over this week on the history curriculum debate including letters to The Times by Richard Evans, The Times 15, Op Ed by David Aaronovitch &c, intended to be useful to history teachers navigating the press, and especially for MA students of Public History....
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HISTORY CURRICULUM DEBATE ON BBC1 SUNDAY POLITICS SHOW
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01qy5n5/Sunday_Politics_London_03_03_2013/
TRANSCRIPTION, SUNDAY 3RDMARCH: 27.55 to 37.51 on iplayer = BITLY: http://t.co/6a07x8LhTq
IN 27.55
ANDREW NEIL
Now, How’s your History? When you hear the words ‘William of Orange’ do you think of an invading Dutch Monarch, or the Foreign Secretary after a trip to the tanning salon? Are you a bit sketchy about the Reformation but think it may be something to do with Robbie Williams going back to Take That!
Well, it’s a good job Michael Gove is on the case. He has plans to change the way we teach history in schools in England. But what are they and will they work?
Susana Mendonca has been back in time to find out:
[Victorian School Reenactment Sequence filmed at Ragged School, London – see http://www.raggedschoolmuseum.org.uk/nextgen/]
SUSANA MENDONCA, REPORTER
This is School Victorian-style. These nine and ten year olds are on a day trip to London’s Ragged School Museum. But in the future, kids this young won’t have to be taught about the Victorians because the way we teach history is changing.
[Ragged School Sequence: Spelling; and melody …”throw away your books… because I’m going to tell you what cooks”]
So, what cooks for these kids?
VOX POPS WITH YOUNG PRIMARY KIDS [c aged 9]
- I like Romans, I really like the Romans
- I did like the Great Fire of London
- The Egyptians
SUSANA MENDONCA
Yes, pay attention, the Egyptians are not on the new curriculum, but the Romans are, and there will be more focus on chronology and knowledge.
But why?
NICK GIBB MP, SCHOOLS MINISTER 2010-12
There is a perception that I think is real, that children are leaving school without a deep knowledge of the chronology of British history and the history of countries that are important to this country. They tend to repeat the same periods of history over again, the Tudors, and then the Second World War, and I think that children need to understand the whole of our history if they are really going to understand Britain.
[Horrible Histories 2ndWW Reenactment Sequence]
SUSANA MENDONCA
One successful attempt to get young children interested in history has been “The Horrible History” series, the programmes’ Historical Consultant thinks the Government’s new curriculum might struggle to engage young minds though:
GREG JENNER, HISTORIAN
What Michael Gove is trying to do here feels a bit like a 19thcentury, rote-learning -type of scholarship, where it’s all about the kids absorbing the facts that are flung at them, rather than talking to children, communicating with them….
[Ragged School Reenactor Sequence:
You will learn these facts by repetition: repeat, repeat, repeat, remember, remember, remember!]
SUSANA MENDONCA
Yes Miss. Back In Victorian times it was all about rote learning, the idea that repeating facts again and again until they stuck in your head. Well, critics of Michael Gove’s plans say that he is heading back in that direction, while supporters think that the balance tipped too far the other way.
The ‘70s saw a move away from text-book-based teaching in Primary Schools (and according to former Schools Minister Nick Gibbs) Secondary Schools began to focus on skills rather than knowledge in 2007. But how much do these kids know?
VOX POPS WITH YOUNG PRIMARY KIDS (c aged 9)
- The Spanish Armada? What Year did they attack England? (umm… I don’t know.. giggle… I seriously don’t know….) Who was the Queen at the time? (…um.. Queen…. Victoria?....) Tell me, who was Brunel? (..um.. I’m just guessing… I think… maybe a Queen?) Do you know what Magna Carta is? (No.. giggle… no, I don’t know)
SUSANA MENDONCA
To be fair, they’ll be a few adults out there, who don’t know the answers to those either….
ANDREW NEIL
So - is Mr Gove right or wrong? Two leading historians, Dr David Starkey, and Professor Richard Evans, join me to go “Head to Head”…
31.47
ANDRE NEIL
Richard Evans, what’s wrong with what Michael Gove is proposing?
PROF SIR RICHARD EVANS, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
There’s a lot of things wrong with what Michael Gove is proposing. First of all, it is a very personal curriculum that he has drawn up. There was a large consultation exercise, consulting teachers, and all kinds of organizations. He pushed that all to one side. And many of these organizations, like the Historical Association, some Conservative Teachers (who are used to teaching in schools), are absolutely horrified. It is a very amateurish set of proposals.
What’s wrong with it is, in particular, that it’s just teaching a Chronicle.
It doesn’t teach the kinds of historical skills which you need to analyze the past, to make up your mind. It is shoving facts down school childrens’ throats without giving them a chance to debate and make up their own minds.
ANDREW NEIL
What say you - David Starkey?
DR DAVID STARKEY, HISTORIAN AND BROADCASTER
I think there are two problems with what Richard has just said now. We’ve seen from those clips there, that there is a staggering level of ignorance (& University Challenge demonstrated incontrovertibly because a question on 1688 got an answer from one good student at Bangor that the monarch involved was Elizabeth the First – from another even brighter student, a medical student, la crème de la crème at UCL, that it was William the First, and you know, – we saw ‘out by 600 years’ from Paxo -) Now, that is a problem. Richard doesn’t seem to think that it is. There’s evidence of an extraordinary evacuation of basic historical knowledge. He talks about debate, criticism, but you can’t debate unless you know! This whole skills approach has got it the wrong way round… but I think there’s something much more fundamental…
ANDREW NEIL
Before you do go on, please can I just get you to react to that, that you need to know the facts before you can analyze?
RICHARD EVANS
No, This is Michael Gove preparing kids to do well in a pub quiz or come top in Mastermind. His curriculum is not about teaching them to understand history and analyze history. The facts don’t come first, they come together with the interpretation, they both belong together, absolutely I agree factual knowledge is really important….
ANDREW NEIL
So when should it be taught?
RICHARD EVANS
It should be taught, well it should be taught in an age appropriate way. Michael Gove is proposing to get seven year olds to understand early Medieval history, (the Heptarchy, King Athelstan); he wants ten year olds to be able to understand Magna Carta; he wants eleven year olds to understand John Locke for goodness sake, - having a whole chronology of British History from the age of five to fourteen, starting at the beginning and going up to the present is not going to work, it is too much, there’s too much there….
ANDREW NEIL
I interrupted you…
DAVID STARKEY
(I will interrupt him, that wonderful flow) the problem is, the current curriculum (which Richard is defending) is wholly dishonest. He talks about the need for debate, the need to question everything. Richard – should schools be questioning and debating the Holocaust? Or should they be presenting it as moral fact?
RICHARD EVANS
That is a really good point, [Starkey: thank you] because the new curriculum says that children have to learn the unique evil of the Holocaust. Now, there are several problems with that. First of all, it is a moral approach not a historical approach. Secondly, the uniqueness, now that is extraordinarily controversial…
DAVID STARKEY
Now Richard forgive me – that is exactly what is going on now - I’ve never heard a single debate in a school on the issue of the molocaust, [giggle], the Holocaust, because it is taught as a moral absolute…
RICHARD EVANS
It should be taught as an historical issue ! How can you understand the Holocaust without knowing something [Starkey: we are agreeing] ;how can you understand it without knowing something about the history of anti-Semitism for one thing? [Starkey: of course]; And how can you understand it without knowing something about Germany - Germany does not appear in this entire new curriculum…
DAVID STARKEY
Let us take another point – you said you dislike myths and you dislike hero worship. Why have we got Mary Seacole there? Have you looked at the text? [Evans: Yes, I have] which describes Mary Seacole? They describe her in a fashion which is clearly designed to make her the antecedent?
[Starkey gestures to Andrew Neale] Do you remember your dear friend Diane Abbott going on about – [how] we don’t want blonde blue-eyed Scandinavian nurses of the national health - we want good British West Indies? Mary Seacole is being invented on the basis of no evidence whatever as the heroine, the patron, of those nurses. This is a completely… this… the current curriculum is affected completely by current political concerns…
RICHARD EVANS
Mary Seacole is in the new curriculum, and there I’m absolutely agreeing with you, what children need to be taught to do, is to look at someone like Mary Seacole and answer some difficult, [Starkey: absolutely] awkward questions [Starkey: absolutely] about her.
But the new curriculum does not combine historical thinking, or skills, on the one hand, with the facts, it just has the facts !
DAVID STARKEY
Good, so we are now agreeing Richard, are we, that the current curriculum has fundamental problems?
RICHARD EVANS
No, you are generalizing from one tiny example…
DAVID STARKEY
No, forgive me, no no no no… because I’ve never seen any evidence in any teaching materials that there is any debate about Mary Seacole. At all.
ANDREW NEALE
You get the final word because he has .. a lot…
RICHARD EVANS
Well, the current curriculum does a narrative of British history from the age of eleven up to the age of fourteen (let us remember that this is up to the age of fourteen) there’s a whole another bunch of problems about 14 to 16, 16 to 18. But the current curriculum actually is centred on a narrative of British history [Andrew Neil: And you are happy with that] and it combines that with skills and it has some world history and some European history and that is what the new one is absolutely missing, you will have a whole generation of kids leaving school without knowing anything of the history of any other country apart from Britain…
DAVID STARKEY
Sorry, just a final second, it really is wrong that the campaign to retain Seacole within the current curriculum was headed by a list of signatories, with Jesse Jackson at the top, in other words, the current curriculum is politically and left-wing skewed, and quite deliberately so, it is a product of the last government, and it needs demolishing now!
ANDREW NEIL
And we shall see how many of our viewers have ever heard of Mary Seacole… and you both get a hundred lines for over running….
OUT 37.51
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------On 27th February 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
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?
Articles Referenced
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LETTER TO THE TIMES
Richard Evans, Regius Professor, Cambridge University
Beware Meddling with the History Curriculum
Published at 12:01AM, March 1 2013
Mr Gove’s proposals ‘will produce a generation who know nothing about the history of the world beyond these shores’
Sir, History is an academic discipline like physics or medicine; one must not confuse it with popular memory, as your leader writer (Feb 27) seems to do. Teaching history in our schools is not a matter of passing “historical memory” on to the next generation; among other things, it’s about learning how to apply skills of critical analysis to the remains the past has left behind; it’s about interrogating and questioning myths, not uncritically repeating them.
The national curriculum, which Mr Gove seeks to replace, does not replace whole chunks of the British past with “Hitler and Henrys”. Your leader writer is confusing the lamentable situation with GCSE, AS and A level – where it is possible to repeat these topics again and again at different stages – with the excellent national curriculum, which takes pupils only up to 14, before GCSE begins. The curriculum already requires the teaching of British history from 1066 to the present, so at 14, if the curriculum is properly taught (a big if), pupils will indeed leave school with a sense of “the great arc of British history”.
Vague notions of “empathy” have not been taught in school history lessons for ages, but the schools of analysis and criticism have, along with a good dose of European and World history to enable pupils to gain some grasp of societies and cultures other than their own. Mr Gove now proposes to do away with these things. His amateurish proposals will produce a generation who know nothing about the history of the world beyond these stories and lack the ability to question the past, look at “heroes” with a critical eye, or approach politically loaded terms such as the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 with the scepticism they merit.
Richard Evans, Regius Professor, Cambridge University
OTHER LETTERS – TRANSCRIPTIONS COMING SOON
- GILES MARSHALL, HEAD OF SIXTH FORM, SUTTON GRAMMAR SCHOOL, SURREY
- - RICHARD MOSELEY, ALDERMASTON, BERKS
- RACHEL HUNTLEY, HEAD OF HISTORY, MALVERN ST JAMES, WORCS
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Letters: Gove risks a historic catastrophe
INDEPENDENT - 18th February 2013
Elizabeth Truss defends the history National Curriculum proposals on the grounds that they include diverse groups and encourage critical reflection (Voices, 14 February). We applaud each of these. What neither the minister nor her boss understands, however, is the impact of the new proposals in the classroom.
We’re not sure that parents have yet realised that their six-year-olds may soon be learning about the concept of Parliament and the meaning of “nation”. Meanwhile, their eight-year-old siblings will be tackling the sensitive complexities of the Crusades, all in the hands of teachers without history degrees, teachers without knowledge of history or its scholarship.
Nine-year-olds will wrestle with the differences between Catholics and Protestants and the causes of the English Civil War, never to return to these at secondary school, never to be taught them by specialist history teachers. To label the proposals “age inappropriate” is just the start of it.
Mr Gove wants pupils to have knowledge. We agree: knowledge is central and plenty of it should be British, too. But these proposals will not achieve what Mr Gove wants. At best, children will emerge with superficial, vague and ill-formed notions of a narrative that has taken a tortuous seven years or more to wade through, with scant specialist teaching. Their understanding will be practically nil and their love of history destroyed. What is more, do we really want to be the only leading educational jurisdiction in the world not to have a proper, mandatory world history course?
We represent the history departments of three large comprehensive schools in south London, all rated “outstanding” by Ofsted and all with an excellent track record of engaging and challenging many thousands of young people in history. We would like to know on what experience the Secretary of State and his ministers are basing their decisions, given that this is the first national curriculum written in this country with no transparent authorship. We know it will fail and what is more, we know it will fail to deliver what Mr Gove and Ms Truss want. It is a catastrophe.
Tom Greenwood
Haberdashers’ Aske’s Hatcham College
Sean O’Neill
Langley Park School for Boys
David Stevenson
Norbury Manor Business and Enterprise College
London SE14
