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History Curriculum: Gove, Newsprint, & BBC Debates

The history curriculum debate has been given air time and prime news space numerous times over the past weeks in response to Michael Gove's plans to make changes to the current curriculum, announced on 7th February 2013.

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. Museum professionals have also joined the discussion about how the proposed changes may impact their role & use of collections for supporting the history curriculum.

If you want to refer back to the Gove document on the proposed changes to subjects in the curriculum, where you will find the section on the history curriculum on the pdf from page 165 onwards: https://media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/n/national%20curriculum%20consultation%20-%20framework%20document.pdf

Below, you will find txts from Cannadine, Evans, History Assoc; plus debates on BBC TV, and Radio: Full txts not always available and sometimes behind paywalls, but DRAFT TRANSCRIPTIONS BELOW wherever possible, and also you can find links to Guardian, other Blogs, transcription of Times articles by Aaronovitch, Radio and TV discussions, including the spat between Starkey & Evans from Sunday 3rd March on BBC1 with Andrew Neil. Also a full trancription of the Moral Maze R4 debate (which is very long) so please scroll beneath this to find previous materials, because they are uploaded in chronological order! please browse:

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28th March, THE HISTORY RESOURCE CUPBOARD, by Katherine Edwards, History Teacher, via @sharethis

Distorted coverage of the debate over the proposed history curriculum on ‘The Moral Maze’

Last night, radio 4′s The Moral Maze discussed the proposals for the new national curriculum. Katherine Edwards, a history teacher campaigning against the awful proposals wrote the following response – see below.

Katherine is behind the website historynotpropaganda and instigated the e-petition Keep the History Curriculum Politically Neutral. Please sign this petition if you haven’t done so already.

Here is Katherine’s thoughtful response to last night’s programme:

The debate on the reform of the history curriculum was significantly distorted by yesterday’s ‘Moral Maze’ on BBC Radio 4. Although some heated exchanges took place, one point on which all participants agreed was that it was not acceptable for the history curriculum to become a vehicle for encouraging patriotism. This included Chris McGovern, Chairman of The Campaign for Real Education, who was calling for an end to history lessons which ‘denigrate this country’ and Antony Beevor who was defending the government’s approach.

Beevor was in fact very explicit about this, stating that he believed it was ‘absolutely wrong for history to be used as patriotism’. Yet he claimed ‘I don’t see any patriotism’ in the new curriculum. Which curriculum has he been reading? Clearly not the curriculum devised by a department headed by someone who calls for history to ‘celebrate the distinguished role of these islands in the history of the world’ and who spoke in parliament of history lessons which focused on ‘British heroes and heroines’. Clearly not the curriculum endorsed by the Prime Minister at the Tory Party Conference as ‘our island story in all its glory’.

If he, along with majority of contributors to the programme who failed to bring the issue to light, cannot see the patriotism here, how does he explain why 2045 people have so far signed an e-petition calling to ‘Keep the History Curriculum Politically Neutral’?

You don’t actually have to look hard in the draft document to see it. The concept of the nation state is given such prominence that it is mentioned second only to the simple time-related vocabulary such as ‘before’ and ‘after’ to be taught to five year olds. The Dutch invasion to depose James II is referred to as the ‘Glorious Revolution’. Slavery is not mentioned in ‘the development of a modern economy’ section, despite a growing academic consensus that it was of vital importance to this process. Instead ‘the slave trade and the abolition of slavery’ are mentioned in one breath implying their equal significance. The draft uses archaic, loaded terminology such as ‘Britain and herEmpire’ and the ‘Great Game’ which serious historians have not used for decades.

The political agenda behind the curriculum is also painfully evident in its omissions. The ‘British heroes’ Mr Gove has in mind are predominantly white Protestant male ‘winners’, preferably those carrying a gun. Ordinary people hardly get a mention; people of African and Asian origin make no appearance in the whole primary curriculum and then only appear either as slaves, or the immigrants of the Windrush generation, or refugees from East Africa. This conveys the dangerous and erroneous impression that multiculturalism is something new on ‘these islands’. There are only two women mentioned in the four years of Key Stage 2 history, both Queens. If what we study in history is a reflection of what matters to us as a society, this sends some very disturbing messages.

Instead of highlighting this, the debate focused on the ‘facts versus skills’ argument, with many voices contending that it was impossible for children to engage in critical analysis before they knew ‘the facts’. Richard Evans’ position, which has always been that the two should be learnt in tandem, was misrepresented as being a privileging of skills over factual knowledge. To present the two as mutually exclusive alternatives would be as absurdly reductionist to any history teacher as the suggestion that when learning a language all the vocabulary has to be mastered before any grammar can be taught.

Children are quite capable of understanding that people take different perspectives, and that evidence can be brought to bear in judging between them as anyone who has ever arbitrated in their playground arguments can testify. As soon as they can read fluently they are quite capable of reading two contrasting sources, suggesting reasons why they differ and trying to adjudicate between them, albeit on a simple level.

In doing so they are engaging with history in an honest and authentic way – in fact the only honest and authentic way – and one which reflects the way the subject works at a much higher level, rather than being duped into thinking that the subject consists of a body of supposedly objective ‘facts’, which no serious historian would contend. There is nothing that engages young people in the subject more than a good debate, or the empowering sense that they can formulate their own views, as long as they are based on the evidence. ‘Facts’ and ‘skills’ are actually mutually reinforcing. They remember the factual material much better as well if they have deployed it in a debate with their peers or their teacher. It not only inspires their interest in history but gives them the instinctively critical approach to evidence which is so valuable as a life skill and so important in maintaining the health of our democracy.

If teachers – those that will deliver the new curriculum – were given a genuine voice in the debate, then it would be put in perspective. The Historical Association’s survey of teachers show clearly that the teachers are anything but evenly divided between supporters and opponents of the new curriculum. From over 700 respondents 96% thought the new curriculum over prescriptive; 93% strongly disagree that ‘everything’ from the Stone Age to 1700 should be taught at primary school; 85% disagree that there is an appropriate amount of European and World history; 91% disagree that the new curriculum will ‘effectively prepare young people for life and work in an increasing globalised society’; 90% disagree that the aims of the curriculum can be delivered by its content and only 5% agree that their school will follow the new curriculum in its current form!

Before we take the dramatic step of replacing our current curriculum with a high prescriptive, undeliverable, dangerously politicised narrative, we should at least give the debate proper representation in the national media.

The political agenda behind the new curriculum may be invisible to Antony Beevor, but these current secondary school pupils attending last Monday’s BASA meeting to discuss the threat it poses to multiculturalism are well aware of it.

Katherine Edwards, history teacher

Please sign Katherine’s e-petition Keep the History Curriculum Politically Neutral.

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27th March, BBC Radio 4, "The Moral Maze" - transcription will be available here after transmission!

Duration: 43 minutes First broadcast: 20.00 Wednesday 27 March 2013

History Curriculum debate on Radio 4's THE MORAL MAZE with witnesses: Chris McGovern, Antony Beevor, Sir Richard Evans, Matthew Wilkinson

George Orwell (who is soon to have his statue erected outside New Broadcasting House) said 'Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.'

Education Secretary Michael Gove is bringing in a new school history syllabus. The story of Britain will be taught in chronological order from the first year of primary school to the age of 14, finishing with the election of Margaret Thatcher. The emphasis will be on facts and dates. There will be no more of those essay assignments that begin 'Imagine you're a slave bound for the West Indies ...'

Is it right to put Britain at the centre of the story and to mention foreigners only insofar as they have impinged upon our nation (and vice very much versa)? Or is it more moral to teach children the history of the planet because we are all citizens of the world?

Should history teachers be aiming to turn out good citizens with shared moral values? If so - whose values? Is it more important to teach national pride or national humility? Is an emphasis on 'cultural sensitivity' just left-wing propaganda in disguise?

And is it right that a politician should be able to dictate the history syllabus in the first place? Some of the precedents for it - in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and Mao's China - are not encouraging.

TRANSCRIPTION

Moral Maze: Should history lessons teach patriotism, national humility, citizenship or scepticism?

First Broadcast: BBC, 27 Mar 2013

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rgj1v

PANELISTS

Michael Buerk (Chair)

Claire Fox

Giles Fraser

Matthew Taylor

Anne McElvoy

WITNESSES

Chris McGovern - Chairman, The Campaign for Real Education

Antony Beevor - Historia

Sir Richard Evans - Regius Professor of History and President of Woolfson College, University of Cambridge

Matthew Wilkinson - Director and Principal Researcher Curriculum for Cohesion

BBC RADIO 4 Credits

Producer: Peter Everett

Series Researcher: Kathryn Blennerhassett

Michael Buerk

Good evening, Michael Gove has a face seemingly made to stare out of posters, and his new glasses are slightly sinister in a retro kind of way, but it is still difficult to see the former panellist on this programme in the world of Big Brother. Certainly the education secretary is trying to rewrite history, or at least the history syllabus in schools, and it’s quite true that a slice of the history establishment regarded as an Orwellian attempt to control the past. What’s fascinating is how this ill-tempered tussle over what is to be taught raises big moral questions about what, not just history but education as a whole is for.

Mr Gove wants school history to be the story of Britain told in sequence with facts and dates. His critics see it as Anglocentric rope learning, insufficiently attentive to other cultures. One of our most distinguished historians has dismissed it as “history for football hooligans, preparation for a pub quiz.” Mr Gove’s supporters ridicule the present syllabus as long on bogus empathy and short on facts, producing children who think that they know what it was like to be a slave but are convinced that Churchill was a talking dog.

Behind this dust-up are unresolved arguments about the purpose of teaching history. Is it about identity or shared values? If so, what identity, which values? To instil national pride or national humility? Is it about us or the world in which we live? A framework of knowledge or a tool for sceptical analysis? Above all, who should control the past? As Orwell said “Who controls the past controls the future.”

It’s our Moral Maze tonight, the panel; Claire Fox from the Institute of Ideas; Anne McElvoy, Public Policy Editor of The Economist; Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA; and Giles Fraser, Priest at St Mary’s, Newington, and radical opinionator at large.

Giles, what is education for - not education, history education in particular?

Giles Fraser

It is there to expand the imagination. I think that is the great thing that history does, I mean it can show us that the world is a bigger place than the sort of narrow, temporal slice of it that we exist in at the moment, and that there is just extraordinarily other ways of being.

Michael Buerk

Claire?

Claire Fox

I suppose it’s to introduce people to the concept of historical thinking, even though that sounds obvious. But you have to have a sense of chronology, periodization, timeline, and I think that that’s been missing recently. I do actually think that you need a framework on which you can handle all the analysis and the values and all the rest of it. So for me, you’ve got to be able to realise that the past was a foreign country.

Michael Buerk

Matthew?

Matthew Taylor

I think history can contribute to children’s moral development but particularly if it engages children, if it connects with them, and if enables them to understand the world they live in today. And I’m not sure that facts, chronology for the sake of it or nationalism really helps.

Michael Buerk

Anne?

Anne McElvoy

It’s about thinking about out of your own time, which is actually incredibly hard to do, and to do it with any useful result you do have to know some facts, be able to assemble some evidence, and then you can have interpretation but you can only really do it in that order.

Michael Buerk

Panel, thanks very much indeed there. Our first witness is Richard Evans, who is Regius Professor of History and President of Woolfson College at Cambridge. You’ve been pretty scathing about these proposed changes, why should they amount to education for the “football hooligan on the terraces”, I think was one of your jibes.

Richard Evans

First of all, these proposed changes I think are necessary if you look at the existing national history curriculum which, remember, only goes up to the age of 14, does not include GCSEs and A Levels (which are the province of examination boards) but the existing curriculum does have British history as its centre and it does have a chronological/

Michael Buerk

Sorry, the question was why you described this as education for the “football hooligans on the terraces”?

Richard Evans

Because the existing curriculum has not only British history as its centre (in key stages 2 and 3, 12 up to 14) but also has some history of other countries and of the world, Europe and the world as well. So it does, I think, teach children that there are civilisations, other countries, other histories, and the new one, Mr Gove’s proposal, doesn’t do that at all. It just looks at British histories, educating, it’s going to bring a generation of kids who know nothing about the history of other countries outside the UK.

Michael Buerk

Claire?

Claire Fox

I might come back to that Professor Evans but if I could just ask you the question we were asked: what’s the, very quickly dare I say, purpose of history education for you? What is the key thing it has to do?

Richard Evans

The key thing is to teach children to develop their own ideas, their own skills, reach their own judgements about the big issues in history, the big questions in history to make them, in a sense, capable of independent judgement as adults and to teach them something about the foreign country that is the past. To realise that there are other civilisations, other worlds, other ways of thinking and other ways of behaving. In that sense, to help them make them more tolerant but also reach judgements about what they think is good and what they think is bad. So I do think there is an element of morality in there.

Claire Fox

Yes, so when they grow up they can make those independent judgements but in order, in terms of we’ve only got until 14 as it were, is it not therefore until you’re 14 that we give them that framework of periodization - you know, the facts, the detail - the critical analysis happens later on. But you need something on which you can critically analyse, isn’t the core therefore what Gove suggested?

Richard Evans

Well no, because facts don’t have any meaning by themselves, they are always tied into interpretations and narratives. How are you going to test kids on their knowledge of the facts with which Mr Gove wants to pack the history curriculum? Do you have multiple choice tests? You know; the Battle of Hastings happened in 1066; b, 1845; c, 1688? There’s no other way of testing historical knowledge except in conjunction with interpretation and argument.

Claire Fox

But interpreting what, I suppose has to be my question because one of the things I’m concerned about is this sounds kind of like a social deconstruction class for 11 year olds. I mean how, seriously in terms of what we’re expecting kids under 14 to do, surely we equip them with (which I think Gove is saying really) a familiarity with the event, the periodization and the chronology.

Richard Evans

Of course that’s important but it comes together with interpretation and argument. You can’t have the two separated. You can’t teach kids facts then ask questions about them, they have to be taken together/

Claire Fox

[inaudible]

Richard Evans

No it’s not, it’s an absolute because facts are always tied to a narrative. It’s an absolute nonsense also that Mr Gove is proposing to try and teach 9 or 10 year olds extremely complicated things like the philosophy of John Locke or 5 and 6 year olds about Anglo Saxon history.

Claire Fox

But I think it’s an interesting thing that you think it’s difficult to teach them the philosophy of John Locke, which I’d agree, but you actually want them to have a sophisticated analysis of all sides of the argument and different interpretations.

Richard Evans

It’s tailored to the age. The current history curriculum is tailored to the age of the kids, the proposed new one is not. It’s too packed with facts, it divorces them from skills and interpretation/

Claire Fox

Skills, skills, skills.

Richard Evans

Yes, skills. The skills of historical analysis which is at the core of/

Claire Fox

Without the core of the - there is no point of the skills

Richard Evans

/recognising chronology and the influence of one event on another, or one thing on another. That is part of the skills that they learn, of course. The first thing they learn in the current curriculum is to distinguish between different periods.

Michael Buerk

Anne McElvoy?

Anne McElvoy

What’s wrong with the idea of history for a pub quiz?

Richard Evans

Because it’s not education.

Anne McElvoy

Why not?

Richard Evans

Because education is about understanding, it’s about learning. It’s not about wrote-learning of facts. Facts are important of course but not just by themselves. How are you going to test it? I come back to this, how are you going to test this?

Anne McElvoy

Yes but I think the problem with your position is really that you sound like there’s a sort of producer interest here. That you’re a professional historian who’s very high up level and you’re also surrounded by history students that are pretty high level, and therefore you want everybody else to approach history in this way. Now what is wrong with the Secretary of State in this case, or anyone saying that there’s just a basic story and there are quite a lot of bits in it that we think people should know about? After that you can then get into your argument about critical interpretation and many other things, but there is only so much time and there is only so much scope that you can put into this unless you are of course the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge.

Richard Evans

Absolutely, of course, but he’s packing far too much in. You know kids at primary school have one hour of history a week and he’s prescribing an enormous length of detail. Niall Ferguson has complained about this and said Michael Gove did not take his advice, there’s too much detail.

Anne McElvoy

I just want to get off practical curriculum issues. What is wrong, tell me again more clearly, (maybe I’m just being a bit dim here) what is wrong with people just knowing that certain things are connected, that there is a certain body of knowledge, facts and connections that you would expect them to know?

Richard Evans

You already conceded my point. You’re talking about connections and the connections are again between economies, society, culture, politics. They’re all kinds of connections that kids need to gradually, in an age appropriate way, learn about. Not just individual discreet facts that are listed in Mr Gove’s proposals

Anne McElvoy

Mr Gove isn’t planning to ban connections is he?

Richard Evans

He doesn’t say anything about them. If you look at the existing national curriculum/

Anne McElvoy

Well let’s give the idea the benefit of the doubt.

Richard Evans

No I don’t propose to give him the benefit of the doubt/

Anne McElvoy

You see, that’s the problem. Why, because politically you disagree with him?

Richard Evans

No it’s not because of that. He’s been attacked by many conservative historians. He’s been attacked by the entire historical profession; the Royal Historical Society, a well-known bunch of Marxists; the Historical Association; all the history teachers.

Anne McElvoy

What about you? There’s something that riles you particularly about this approach that doesn’t just seem to be about the facts.

Richard Evans

Yes. You may not know but I have two school age children who are studying history themselves at school and I’ve seen the way they’ve gone, the way they’ve been taught history which I think is absolutely excellent.

Anne McElvoy

Do you?

Richard Evans

It’s following the national curriculum. There are some problems later on, particularly in GCSE and A Level with the repetition of matter which I think is a real problem.

Anne McElvoy

So we’ve established that the system isn’t perfect as it stands/

Richard Evans

Don’t sound so surprised, you obviously haven’t read the OFSTED reportHistory For All/

Anne McElvoy

No but I have read what my children have been taught at school/

Richard Evans

…it concludes that history is in a state of rude - good health in schools. The idea that there’s too little British history taught is a myth, quote unquote the OFSTED report, it quotes many students it’s questioned in 166 schools. What do they say - what do they say they most like/

Anne McElvoy

I must move onto something…I really don’t want any more of the OFSTED report. If we can just get one extra question in/

Richard Evans

…what do kids most like about history? It’s the ability to make up their own minds about things.

Anne McElvoy

Just very quickly, if politicians aren’t the right people to write the history syllabus, who should write it and is there a built-in assumption here that historians know best?

Richard Evans

Yes absolutely because it’s not a political point. Mr Gove wants to write a Tory version of history, no doubt Tony Benn, if you gave him the power would write a labour version of history. History is not political indoctrination/

Anne McElvoy

So it’s the trade union of historians here?

Richard Evans

It’s not the trade union of historians, it’s the entire profession. The existing curriculum has broad support right across the board. The new one has total opposition across the board. There is something wrong here.

Michael Buerk

Claire?

Claire Fox

Can I just clarify then, don’t let the politicians write it, let the historians write it. Therefore historians you would say bring to it no moral prejudice at all or no political prejudice at all. I mean are you therefore saying that there is a set of historical ideas and facts that you can introduce to them?

Richard Evans

No, of course historians disagree but that’s one of the key things to get across to kids, that historians do have a point of view. It’s not a bunch of facts that they have to accept.

Claire Fox

So therefore I don’t necessarily know that I’d have academic historians write the curriculum because that is going to be as prejudice as anyone else, that’s all I’m saying.

Richard Evans

Oh no it’s educational professionals writing the curriculum. Of course they’re in touch with the academic professionals.

Michael Buerk

Sir Richard Evans, thank you very much indeed. Our next witness is Antony Beevor, the historian and author of course, and one of fifteen eminent historians who have signed a letter to The Times broadly backing the Gove proposals. What is history for? Morality, citizenship and knowledge of your own identity?

Anthony Beevor

None of the above. It is about understanding, and to achieve that understanding you’ve obviously got to have a certain framework. One of the problems, I think, with the current system is we have these modules which are all over the place. I mean you can go backwards or forwards or whatever. And one sees sort of, say in literature, I mean many people don’t know who came first, whether it was Shakespeare or Dickens. And I think this is a serious worry, one certainly needs that framework to start with and obviously we need a certain number of facts but the point is that the framework, the curriculum proposals made clear is that is the basis before you develop into depth.

Michael Buerk

Matthew?

Matthew Taylor

I think one of the things history gives children is a capacity to better interpret their own times. Now of course there will be many young teenagers in the country who assume that recession is a natural state of affairs. Now I would have thought in order to better understand our own economic plight there are two things which should be really interesting for even quite young children to study. One would be the US depression because that is the most similar time in history. It’s not the most recent history, it’s not chronological really, history is bumpy in that way. And secondly to understand that the economy is a truly global system, it is not simply the system that we look at from Britain. Doesn’t the Gove curriculum, wouldn’t it actually make it harder for children to have access to either of those things? Firstly it isn’t really about Britain and we’re supposed to study about Britain, and the second is that we’re persuaded to look at things from a British perspective rather than a global perspective?

Anthony Beevor

Well I think that most countries in Europe basically teach a core, if you like, of the national subject and then develop out from there and I think that the Gove proposals do that to a large degree.

Matthew Taylor

But they wouldn’t for example study the US depression particularly because it’s an event in America, it’s not an event in Britain, even though it’s a profoundly important event, isn’t it? The children really ought to, particularly at a time like this.

Anthony Beevor

I think that we’ll find when they get into the 1920s and one’s looking at the sort of wider perspectives, I mean talking about Soviet Russian and Germany and so forth, then that will become the natural place for it to come into. I mean I’m all for more international history even within this particular thing but I think it’s a question of time. I mean when you’ve only got an hour a week there have to be certain priorities.

Matthew Taylor

Well then let’s not then just talk about priorities, let’s talk about whole perspectives. Let’s fast forward thirty years and imagine the children in class learning about the Cypriot financial restructuring that’s taking place this week. Is there only going to be one interpretation of that, the British interpretation? Or did they - will they need to learn the Russian interpretation, the German interpretation, the Greek interpretation? People’s views of the events taking place are profoundly different.

Anthony Beevor

Sure but we’re talking here about current affairs.

Matthew Taylor

But I’m saying in thirty years, looking back on it. We need to understand that there’s not just a British perspective on something like this.

Anthony Beevor

Yes that’s certainly true but I think that when we’ve got, I mean here they’re ending history with the fall of the Soviet Union and I think that that is a fairly good cut-off point. But obviously the revolution that we were actually, we’ve experienced during that particular period, it wasn’t just the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Matthew Taylor

But that’s my point, my point is that historical events are subject to multiple interpretations. Now the point about the Gove approach is that you learn a lot in a shallow way rather than a smaller amount in a deeper way. I suppose what I’m arguing that when you look at an issue, like for example the global economic crisis of the 30s it’s only if you understand it in depth that you get to understand the history is contested. If you do it in a shallow way you only do it from one perspective and that seems to be the intention of this reform.

Anthony Beevor

This is surely coming along in later stages when they’re getting on to GCSE.

Matthew Taylor

So they can only really get their heads round the idea that there are different ways of thinking about things when they’re old?

Anthony Beevor

I think that they need to develop a certain basis of knowledge before they can go on then into depth.

Michael Buerk

Giles Fraser

This approach has been, erm, the pub quiz approach to history. If I just develop that pub image a moment, I have a problem with this, if you meet someone in the pub and they’re just banging on about how wonderful they are, how wonderful their past is, how wonderful all the things they’ve achieved is, you actually think they’re a bit insecure. But there’s something sort of - isn’t this the history of decadence about how we’re just trying to big ourselves up and actually it’s rather sad?

Antony Beevor

No, no, I don’t see any patriotism banging drum in this at all.

Giles Fraser

The story of our national story? And this is the sort of great patriotic/

Antony Beevor

But one sees, as they rightly say, it’s a question of the achievements and the follies. And my goodness there have been follies along the way we have committed and crimes as well, and those are all part of, if you like, that rich tapestry or whatever you want to call it.

Giles Fraser

But isn’t that because you agree with it? You fundamentally agree with the sort of ideology that’s impregnated in this/

Antony Beevor

It’s not an ideology

Giles Fraser

/about, you know, reading, writing and rule Britannia as being part of the narrative that’s going on here?

Antony Beevor

No, it’s absolutely wrong for teaching to be used for patriotism or anything like that. I’m totally against that. History should be there so that people understand how developments and particularly historical developments, whether it’s a question of what they call significant individuals and their decisions and whether it’s economic or social change.

Giles Fraser

And it can be value neutral? You can teach it value neutrally?

Antony Beevor

I don’t think that anybody can be totally value neutral but I think that one can certainly make the biggest effort possible to be value neutral.

Giles Fraser

But, so you’re going to - so if it’s not value neutral there will be a value impregnated into it within this narrative and people would see that about your history. You were an army officer in the Hussars, then that would - Queen and country would perhaps influence the in which you did history.

Antony Beevor

It may have influenced the way I did history in the past but I don’t think if you read most of the reviews, I don’t think that my books are judged in that particular way.

Michael Buerk

Antony Beevor, thanks very much indeed. Our next witness is Dr Matthew Wilkinson who is Research Fellow at Cambridge Muslim College and Principal Researcher on the Curriculum for Cohesion. Whatever is that?

Matthew Wilkinson

Curriculum for Cohesion is a collaboration of teachers, academics, employers looking to develop effective humanities education for young people in the 21stcentury.

Michael Buerk

And what does that mean actually?

Matthew Wilkinson

That means that humanities education that enables children to relate to themselves, their communities, their country and the wider world and be effective in the place of work where they find themselves.

Michael Buerk

So cohesion in terms of a multi-ethnic society, is that what you are saying?

Matthew Wilkinson

Yes, cohesion both internally in terms of who they are as people and in terms of relating to other people with whom they find themselves in society.

Anne McElvoy

So would it be fair to Dr Wilkinson to say that you think that citizenship and integration are two of the main purposes of history teaching and what it should promote?

Matthew Wilkinson

Yes that would be fair. I think, actually it’s not me saying that, when I’ve researched children what they are looking for from history is to have a strong civic understanding of the country and where we’ve got to.

Anne McElvoy

But I just wondered that you might’ve put the cart before the horse here in that citizenship and integration follow from an understanding of where you are now and how that relates to your past, your country’s past? That trying to put it the other way round is instrumentalising what should primarily be an academic study?

Matthew Wilkinson

Well, I think with any educational pursuit you need to have an idea of where you’re heading with any discipline. You need to have an idea of the human being or range of possibilities of the human being you’re trying to develop and history is no different from that. You need to know what you think an educated person gets through history and you need to head for that, so that’s why/

Anne McElvoy

Sorry, who needs to know and who needs to decide? It sounds awfully like you’ve got this purpose - application of history, and that would imply that you have a certain view, a certain kind of history you’d like taught.

Matthew Wilkinson

I don’t think that’s the case, I’m just saying that with any educational system or pursuit you have an idea of what an educated person is before you design an effective discipline for that person.

Anne McElvoy

And the idea that history is (a big argument has gone on tonight, really) how much is the body of knowledge, how much is the sort of critical tool, how important is it to you that it should provoke people to be critical, sceptical, even a bit cynical about the times they live in?

Matthew Wilkinson

Critical, yes, cynical, no. Sceptical, depends on what you’re looking at.

Anne McElvoy

So where would you like people to be more critical as a result of the history that they learn in school?

Matthew Wilkinson

Well, I think that we live in the digital information age, kids will leave school and at school, during their time at school, bombarded with different types of information of various degrees of reliability and credibility. They need to be able to decode what information is worth believing in.

Anne McElvoy

How on earth is history going to do that for them unless you’re assuming that you’re going to teach them a certain approach that says distrust the products of the capitalist system or whatever you might want to teach?

Matthew Wilkinson

I think that history, one of the great things that history can teach you is how people view events that really have happened, things that really have happened, change and also each event is viewable in a multiplicity of ways. That’s one of the great things that history can show children.

Anne McElvoy

Is that the only thing it shows children? Doesn’t it, apart from relativism, doesn’t it show something else? Might it not show that there are certain values that you find important that should be carried on?

Matthew Wilkinson

Well, yes absolutely. One would definitely want from examination of great events of the past (you know, Holocaust, Slavery, whatever it might be, British Empire) that kids interrogate their own values and they come to understand what they believe and why they believe it more deeply.

Anne McElvoy

But, sorry, there’s some tension there because on the one hand you want them to interrogate deeply, so I’m not quite clear how much you want it to be critical and how much you want it to knowledge based?

Matthew Wilkinson

I don’t see those two things as in any way opposition. You can’t be critical if you don’t have knowledge and you can’t have knowledge if you’re not prepared to be critical about it.

Anne McElvoy

So you quite like the knowledge based curriculum proposed by Mr Gove?

Matthew Wilkinson

No I don’t. I like the aims but the content I find unsatisfactory.

Michael Buerk

Claire Fox

When you started you talked about the curriculum for cohesion as allowing children to relate to themselves, their multi-ethnic society we live in today, those kind of issues. That, I just wondered, that sounds like a citizenship relevance agenda there, it doesn’t sound anything to do with history?

Matthew Wilkinson

Well, I think the moment the state puts its hand on the curriculum you’ve already got a citizenship relevance being brought to bear. So if you have a national curriculum for history, which is designed by agents of the state, you’ve already got something that/

Claire Fox

There has been for quite a while, I mean, were you happy when for example, when he was Education Minister, Alan Johnson said that the history curriculum was ideal for teaching multiculturalism and antiracism? Do you think that was ok?

Matthew Wilkinson

What I think about those things is if you think about racism you can see by the study of history that the values that nowadays coalesce around racism are things that are actually very modern/

Claire Fox

Is history then only for studying today? That’s what I can’t understand.

Matthew Wilkinson

As far as children are/

Claire Fox

English Civil War/

Matthew Wilkinson

I mean no, that’s a very good example. As far as children are concerned you cannot understand the political complexion of what has arisen without understanding the events of the English Civil War.

Claire Fox

Is the purpose only that they understand the complexion of the contemporary world? That’s what I’m trying to ask you. You cited only “children say this”/

Matthew Wilkinson

Not only. I think children must be given the tools to decode their present as best they can.

Claire Fox

Is it not possible that we just give them the tools to understand how to think historically, to understand what happened in the past? I mean you’re just emphasizing today, we’re trying to talk about history. What would be rather contemptuous is to/

Matthew Wilkinson

No, what I - I think that a division I need to, not a separation, a distinction needs to be made between academic history and school history up to the age of fourteen which is what we’re talking about at the moment. 98% of kids that leave school, what one would want to leave with them is a great curiosity for the past, for what happened, and some core knowledge of history by which they can look around them and understand things better. I think that’s very important, and an academic historian would more get into the past for its own sake.

Claire Fox

So I cannot understand at all, therefore, why you are objecting to this particular curriculum because it seems to me that it gives exactly what you’ve just said. Post-fourteen you basically can go off and explore as much as you want but you have to have knowledge of past events, chronology and so on.

Matthew Wilkinson

Can I just quickly? Curriculum for Cohesion and I myself agree very strongly with the aims of this curriculum, all kids should leave with critical habits of mind and a strong civic knowledge of the country, however the way this curriculum is going about it in terms of the content is undeliverable, it’s unteachable and/

Claire Fox

That’s a practical problem and I/

Matthew Wilkinson

Well this is the curriculum/

Claire Fox

That’s a practical problem we’re talking about the morality of it. Just finally, just in terms of priorities it’s been called too Anglocentric, it says it doesn’t look at the world enough. I mean if you’ve only got til 14 and you’ve got to decide what to teach, how can you prioritise it other than by making certain decisions like that?

Matthew Wilkinson

Well, I can say that. What should have been done is that - what is absolutely core about the British national story of course should have been there but you cannot in todays globalised worlds. I think, as we speak, David Cameron I think is leading business leaders around India and the Middle East/

Claire Fox

We’re back to David’s politics, it’s got nothing to do with history/

Matthew Wilkinson

We’re talking about the world children are going to have to be effective in, have an historical understanding of, and that’s where this curriculum is a retrospective curriculum looking back to the world as it was back in the 1950s, not/

Claire Fox

It’s called history.

Michael Buerk

Thank you Dr Wilkinson, thank you very much indeed. Our last witness is Chris McGovern who is a former state school history teacher, more recently the head of a London prep school. More to the point, he’s Chairman of The Campaign for Real Education which presupposes that history teaching is not real. In what way is it not real?

Chris McGovern

Shall I give you an example? The most widely used textbooks in secondary schools at the moment deals with the 18thand 19thcentury and in order to denigrate this country it proposes that children investigate evidence, which is very much the fashionable approach. The problem with the evidence is that they manufacture it. So they look at people that are now dead and they say this is what they would say if the y could come back from the dead. So for example, Princess Lakshmi of India would say “The British shot cannon balls through us at point blank range”. They also have Cecil Rhodes and they invent what he said, so it’s the undead speaking. That’s fake history, it’s not real history.

Michael Buerk

Giles Fraser?

Giles Fraser

Do you think history should be morally neutral?

Chris McGovern

Yes, history is not a vehicle, it should be morally neutral as far as it can be.

Giles Fraser

What does that mean? Who gets to decide what’s in the story?

Chris McGovern

Right, history shouldn’t be a vehicle, for example, for teaching a particular attitude, patriotism, or denigration of the country. It shouldn’t be a vehicle for teaching anything.

Giles Fraser

But all stories are going to have a moral valance to them aren’t they? So the story of who chooses the story, the history story, how we tell our story has a moral valance to it.

Chris McGovern

Well this is the great thing about Mr Gove’s syllabus in fact. Though he sets out some landmark events, for example he covers ancient Rome and he covers ancient Greece (there’s a lot of things happened in ancient Rome and ancient Greece) and he leaves it to the teachers to decide.

Giles Fraser

So the teacher gets to tell/

Chris McGovern

The great thing is that this curriculum actually only sets out headings and it gives out much, much more freedom to the teacher than is currently the case.

Giles Fraser

But, I mean, you’ve just said earlier in your answer to your first question you know, people using history to denigrate this country which makes me suspect that you would like to use history to big up this country, to feel slightly better about ourselves, certainly not to denigrate it. Well there’s a, there at least is a moral position about the way that history is being used as a way of supporting a certain national story, a certain self-identity.

Chris McGovern

It’s a false assumption, I do not believe history should be used to promote patriotism. Nor do I believe it should be used to denigrate the country. Currently it is often used to denigrate the country.

Giles Fraser

But I think it’s dangerous because it’s smuggled in. You have this fact-value distinction. You think that values can be, that history can be taught without any reference to sort of, erm, value neutral and that worries me because when you present yourself as being value neutral it’s the best way to usher in values as if they’re not there. And there’s, every way you tell a story you’re actually emphasizing a particular thing. You’re emphasizing a particular world view and a particular sort of morality, and if you do it form the top, the bottom, you are inevitably talking about values.

Chris McGovern

People always draw moral points from stories. I mean, when we talk about Romulus and Remus for example, I mean we’ve not talked about five year olds who are the most important age group in my opinion, there are moral issues about Romulus and Remus but I mean children have to have stories. They have the same stories when they’re five as the Romans had, they tell the story, we tell the stories of Romulus and Remus. Children want those stories and of course you can draw a moral judgement from them.

Giles Fraser

Yeah but the moral bit doesn’t come after it, it comes before. Deciding what stories you’re going to tell in the first place. Do you have this idea that the facts are out there and you pick them up and you go away and decide which ones are of value? The ones you pick up, it self-displays a sense of what you think is important, whether it’s right or wrong.

Chris McGovern

And the great thing about Mr Gove’s syllabus is that he allows teachers to make most of those judgements. But there is a law that says, it’s a 96 education act, you must not promote, for example, political bias so we have protection by the law, from the law.

Giles Fraser

And the people I’m most worried by are the people that pretend they don’t do political bias and this is a curriculum written by a politician.

Chris McGovern

Well we don’t actually know whether he wrote it or not.

Michael Buerk

Matthew?

Matthew Taylor

I know this isn’t rally fair but can I ask you to make a choice between two views of history? Is history fundamentally a body of facts, is your view that history is a body of facts and we’re going to pour them into children? Or is your view that history is inside children and we need to show them, help them find out how?

Chris McGovern

History is an account of the past.

Matthew Taylor

That’s all it is, is it?

Chris McGovern

The unique thing about history, and it is the only unique thing, is that it is knowledge of the past. Everything else you can get from Hilary Mantel, Sleeping Beauty or The Hobbit. All these concepts of continuity and change of chronology, go for fiction. I’ve done research which proves that fiction is more effective and in fact in schools today we have teachers using fiction to teach the historical skills.

Matthew Taylor

So why do you think, I’m just interested, why do you think there has been a huge growth in interest in people’s family trees. Now they want to understand their history but they want to understand it because it tells them something about themselves. It’s the reason why people find it so fascinating is because history shines a light on who they are. Now isn’t that a reasonable way of thinking about history, that it’s about shining a light on who we are now, today?

Chris McGovern

History does tell us who we are, it tells us where we’ve come from. It’s like a route map to tell us where we’ve come from, then signposts are the landmarks of history.

Matthew Taylor

So let’s take something like the British Empire. So if you’re teaching history to a multi-ethnic group of students, Empire has made them all who they are in various ways, isn’t it inevitable that you’ll have to get into a whole set of debates about values and competing issues of history rather than say here are a set of facts from the British perspective?

Chris McGovern

I think we have, as I said earlier, we have to be neutral. I think there are big issues when we start talking about the Empire for example. I’ve had discussions with the black community about the role of Mary Seacole, who is in many respects a heroine for the black community but she wasn’t black, she wasn’t British, she wasn’t a nurse. And her personal views, for example, about the Turks, she calls the Turks “worse than flees, degenerate Arabs”. Now Gove’s got that in the curriculum, and that’s what Turkish children in our schools are going to be hearing about themselves.

Giles Fraser

You make an interesting point and no one is in favour of teaching bad history, and they start getting the facts wrong. You gave an example earlier, I think, of kind of rather crude ways of instilling empathy into children, and I think part of the Govian critique is this idea that history is about getting children to empathise with past figures is problematic. I would argue that actually one of things we do need children to understand really deeply in the 21thcentury, inter-connected world as it is, is this capacity for empathy. And one of the great things history can bring to us is this task of trying to understand things through two different, three different, five different perspectives.

Chris McGovern

I think you’re probably thinking very much of older children there. I think you/

Giles Fraser

No I think young children are fascinated by – if you say to young children, you know, let’s look at the Wild West. Whose side would you be on, the Cowboys or the American Indians? I think young children are fascinated by that.

Chris McGovern

They are fascinated by stories and they will form judgements. There’s nothing wrong with that but I think at the age of five and six and seven, children need stories, landmark stories which they will enjoy. In my own, with the History Curriculum Association has sent out an alternative to every school in the country which is much richer than Michael Gove’s.

Giles Fraser

I just want to get to the bottom of this as it’s come up a couple of times. I’d suggest to you that what turns children onto history is precisely the fact that it is contested, that you can have an argument in the class about it however old you are.

Chris McGovern

And how do you teach five year olds? I would suggest that you, I would advise you to come see me teach five year olds/

Giles Fraser

I have five year olds and I’ve actually seen five year olds, for example, taught philosophy. And they love debating issues, it gives them a sense they’ve got a stake in the assignment rather than here’s a set of facts established by other people cleverer than you and you’ve got to learn them.

Chris McGovern

Well, it isn’t like that at all. We need inspirational teachers and we need to enchant children. We need the magic of history and you get that from stories and narrative.

Michael Buerk

Chris McGovern, thanks very much indeed. Ok let’s draw some of these threads together. Our first witness Sir Richard Evans, Claire Fox, his idea was that history teaching, even for these young children, is about their ideas, their skills to reach their own judgements. How far did you go along with him on that?

Claire Fox

Professor Evans is actually very interested in the skills agenda and it’s kind of history as a vehicle for teaching analytical skills. I actually think that that treats history with contempt and ends up side-lining historical, chronological understanding at the expense of skills and this actually is the orthodoxy in schools. And so it’s kind of all about using the evidence so that you can show that, and so that’s one side of it. I genuinely think it’s quite interesting that he’s very worried (which I share with him) about the age-specific – can you actually deal with ancient Greece with seven year olds as maybe the curriculum suggests. It seemed to me that he was asking people; to have the developed insights of analysis and argument about historic periods and I think Matthew, you agreed with him. I mean let’s have an argument/

Michael Buerk

Hang on a second. Matthew might have done but Giles/

Claire Fox

You have to know who they are before you have the row about whose side you’re on.

Giles Fraser

What he was saying - this is a misrepresentation. What he was saying was quite clear and it was actually quite straight forward, it wasn’t actually all this stuff about analysis. The past is another country and the job of history is sort of like travel and it expands the imagination just like travel does, and that’s absolutely right. And the idea that it has to be other, it has to be different, and that is really, really important. One of the things we’ve got too much of, it’s all about us, it’s all about our relevance to how we are and I like the idea that it’s completely other.

What worried me a bit about Professor Evans was, apart from the fact he seemed to have a fantastic overconfidence in what was being taught at the moment, but that’s a personal judgement, but I did worry a bit about this kind of protectionism of the historians because he really seemed, he got quite riled actually, he seemed to want to take ownership of that. Now, as it happens, I have doubts about how much politicians should control in all of this, or at least the idea that Mr Gove isn’t really trying to control it, I think is for the birds, he is. So I do have doubts about that but I also think I’m not totally sure that I just want this league of university historians. [Inaudible disruption] Hang on, but there is a balance here in what he seemed to be saying was this is what I find useful, this is the analytical approach that he wanted to promote. And one felt that anything else, including actually what the last witness said, Chris McGovern, which I rather identified with (I thought he put his finger on it), the route map, the landmarks, the stories, he didn’t have much time for any of that. And I think that was really the weakness in a particularly view of how to teach history. I felt he was a little deft and he might want to do it another way.

Michael Buerk

Matthew, Antony Beevor acknowledged that you can’t be totally value neutral but thought it was worth trying.

Matthew Taylor

It seemed to me that Antony wasn’t arguing really in essence, he didn’t seem to disagree with positions that I put to him. He just seemed/

Michael Buerk

No right thinking person could of course.

Matthew Taylor

He just seemed to say that until children are fourteen they can’t understand that things are complicated, and I just think that’s nonsense really. And I agree that facts report and I agree with Claire that if we’re going to understand Roundheads and Cavaliers we have to understand about the history. But the question is what is the access point for children? Is this access point learning the facts and then later on when they’re after fourteen you can say oh by the way this is argued about? Or is the access point to say here’s something that people have very different views about and we want to encourage you to get involved in the argument? Now Claire has used the phrase, on a number of occasions, the tools of thinking historically, now I think the tools of thinking historically should be given to children at the earliest possible age. We shouldn’t wait until they’re fourteen to say by the way all those facts we taught you, they’re all subject to quite a lot of disrepute.

Claire Fox

Well I think there’s this idea that what you do is you go in and you just announce the facts to children and you walk out of the room. I’ve been a teacher for years, I mean that’s not what happens. There are headings, you teach them. That’s the job of teaching but on Professor Beevor/

Matthew Taylor

Can you talk about how much you do Claire, because – The point is this Gove Curriculum it requires a lot/

Claire Fox

Time. I know there’s not enough time/

Matthew Taylor

Therefore it does speak to a shallow fact-based understanding/

Claire Fox

No. I think that there is a problem of time which is why I then think that you, at least in the time that you’ve got, you should give people a sense of chronology and history. That’s generally where I’m going. But just on Professor Beevor, I think the accusation against – levelled against Gove in this instance and in fact against Professor Beevor was this idea that if you support Gove that you’re a patriot, he wants to go out there and teach a nationalist agenda and this is all about bigging up Britain and all the rest of it. And he was simply saying, I thought, look I’m not trying to be silly about this, you will have interpretations all along the way but let’s at least aim for just simply giving people a body of knowledge on which you can then, for example, rebel. What I think is I got taught history as British Imperialist History which I was then able to go off and reread about and rebel against. At least I had something to rebel against.

Michael Buerk

Anne McElvoy, what did you make of the third witness Dr Wilkinson, and what, I think, one of the panellists accused him of having a rather instrumentalised view about an academic subject? He did actually say at one point that the purpose was to decide on what was the ideal person should be and then deliver that person, which sounded a little chilling but he was quite convincing in lots of ways.

Anne McElvoy

Well he was a polite instrumentalist, look he was teleological to – I think he had some very reasonable points along the way but ultimately I think he had this idea that it was a sort of designed system. That you decide the enlightened kind of citizen you hope would come out at the end and work backwards like some sort of raisonner in a Moliere play. And the problem that I had with him ultimately is if you said to him why are you teaching Romulus and Remus I would suspect that the answer would be something like you can better understand the Miliband resignation. He wanted everything to be about the present/

Giles Fraser

The problem is, you are absolutely right, it is about relevance. Everything had to be relevant.

Michael Buerk

He actually said Giles, didn’t he, that history was to help children decode the present?

Giles Fraser

Yes. No, I actually want it to be mystifying to them. I want you to do history of something that is so different they go: oh my word, you could live a completely different life in the middle ages. It’s not relevant/

Matthew Taylor

I want to defend the point which he made which I think is a very powerful point. Which is that any education system has to be based, whether it is implicit or preferably explicit, on some account of what kind of people we are trying to create through this process. Now there are children in schools/

Giles Fraser

That’s a bit chilling isn’t it?/

Matthew Taylor

No, no, no but it’s important. Giles, for goodness sake, it’s implicit in all education that we have some notion of what kind of development path we’re taking children on.

Giles Fraser

Why can’t it be that we want to create well educated young people?

Matthew Taylor

But the question is this: do we – there are young people in playgrounds all around Britain today having arguments about creationism because there are people from all different perspectives arguing about that. Now what is the most important tool/

Giles Fraser

At least it’d be a lively, intellectual playground discussion/

Matthew Taylor

That’s exactly the point. Are the citizens of tomorrow the ones we most want to be able to regurgitate a set of facts or are they the kinds of citizens that can meet people from very different kinds of cultures and perspectives, with different accounts of history and know how to have a civilised argument with them?

Claire Fox

The sneer, the regurgitation of facts, we would like young people today to be able to be factually accurate about things that have happened in the past and have some sense of it. And then they can develop the most sophisticated intellectual arguments later on. At the moment they haven’t got the facts so they might have lots of opinionated rants but about what?

Michael Buerk

Anne McElvoy?

Anne McElvoy

Yes [brief silence followed by laughter]

Michael Buerk

You were looking so awestruck I thought you had something valuable to add.

Anne McElvoy

It was just a moment of rare agreement between Claire and myself. Absolutely, there is a point where I do in the end diverge from Matthew. That there is just certain things I think are perfectly reasonable to be required to be known and many other countries do it. I don’t know why we’re ashamed of it. Thereafter you can rebel or be critical or you can just say ‘yeah, right’ and go on to something else.

Michael Buerk

Right, two seconds.

Giles Fraser

But dangerous people are people who just say they’re doing facts when they’re actually really doing values.

Michael Buerk

I thought that one of the astonishing things was that primary school children only get one hour of history a week. Astonishing. Well, that’s it for this week and the series. From our panel; Claire Fox; Anne McEvoy; Matthew Taylor; Giles Fraser; and from me, until the next series which starts in June good bye.

Credits

Chair: Michael Buerk

Producer: Peter Everett

Series Researcher: Kathryn Blennerhassett

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25th March, blog, THE INDEPENDENT, by gutsy philosophy doctoral student, Luke Brunning, Uni of Oxford

via @lukephilosophy & blogging @ lukebrunning.com

Michael Gove has saddened me this week. It is currently my seventh year in some form of higher education. My PhD thesis in philosophy is half-written, and I work hard to earn a shot at an academic job. The chances of finding a position are long, the pay is small, the hours extensive, yet I love teaching and researching. The personal and social benefits of higher education are, to my mind, indisputable. But I have always been aware of how easy it is to feel alienated from unfamiliar disciplines. So it is good to take the time to discuss and explain what I do, and why it is valuable, to those that ask.

But every year it gets worse. Curiosity has segued into hostility, derision, and cynicism. The value of higher education is increasingly called into question. My peers and I are demanded to justify our subject, to demonstrate its economic worth, to combat derision and insult. We are uncharacteristically fortunate in that a respectable subsection of philosophy engages with these very questions. (It has always been hard to thoughtfully critique the subject without accidentally doing philosophy, thereby demonstrating its value).

It is against the background of this ongoing devaluation of the humanities that Michael Gove launched his attack on the signatories to a letter in The Independent who had the gall to critique his curricular proposals. It is against this background that he summarily divided the academic sheep from the goats, under the inadvertently hashtagable phrase “bad academia.” It is against this background that the “enemies of progress” were subject to a lengthy jeremiad in The Daily Mail, in which Marx-teaching “intellectuals” were branded the “enemies of progress” that is, shadowy figures who generate the need for a “fight against ideology, ignorance and poverty of aspiration, a struggle to make opportunity more equal for all our children.”

Caricature

I cannot forgive this incessant denigration of those who work hard precisely to combat ideology, failure of aspiration, and inequality. This is a bitter caricature of what higher education is like. In the seminar spaces and ill-furnished tutorial rooms of the universities I have taught in, critical thinking, resistance to dogma and prejudice, and the bolstering of aspiration are the norm. Universities run on the labour of ill-paid graduate students, many of whom lack funding and suffer due to government cuts. They teach and write because they love their subject and want others to benefit from it. They participate in outreach schemes to ensure that university is more than a distant dream. They write articles and blogs because they are keen to promote debate about education policy, structure, and management.

As a PhD student in philosophy I have seen my fair share of badly written articles and questionable arguments, boring talks and unfunny jokes; theoretical cliques form, outbreaks of Jargonitus catch on, and disputes proliferate. But no sector, no discipline, no workplace, is immune from this, as contemporary political discourse, awash with notions of the “aspiration nation”, “shirkers and strivers”, “good and bad academia” illustrates so nicely.

For all its faults higher education, and the humanities in particular, offer the tools to examine, understand, and address the problems that concern Gove and our government. I know of no academic that actively wants to engage in bad research, write shoddy prose, or deliver a poor lecture. Indeed, I am sure that people would support the reduction of the general administrative burden, or the restrictions of the REF exercise, in order to devote time to addressing these vices.

Backfire

Yet instead of encouraging and fostering communities of better scholarship, communities that could benefit our school system even more than they currently do, Gove simply jolts us into despair with an admittedly wonderful example of performative contradiction (I hope you will forgive the jargon). I might even forgive the slopping thinking and anemic rhetoric of the article. As a "bad academic" I can always use the piece in a critical thinking class.

In the name of anti-ideology he blithely groups academics together externalising them as a political force rather than a group of concerned experts. In the name of aspiration, he dampens the hope of those like myself, who work so hard for an opportunity to teach in a sector that is now so undervalued. In the name of equality, he ridicules those who study gender, class, and economic deprivation. All of this in an article with a title tellingly containing the words “surrender”, “Marxist” and “enemies”.

The most bitter irony, of course, is that the attack on higher education and the hostility towards informed academic disagreement, is led by ministers who are armed with degrees in the very subjects they seek to strangle, and equipped with the skills they prevent others from acquiring. Like many young people, I have relinquished the ideal of an Education Secretary who sides with academia and can respect his critics.

These mounting denigrations make it increasingly hard to see why the best minds of our time would want to remain in the higher education sector. Some of the cleverest people I know have left, or are seriously considering it. I am committed to staying, but my commitment is increasingly tested as my sadness intensifies. Luckily, the things we value most are often most clearly visible in the contexts where they are under threat. Like many others, I have benefited inestimably from my time in various universities and hope to promote and share the values that underpinned my years there. If only I could trust Micheal Gove to do the same.

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24th March, GUARDIAN: bit.ly/14nPV3W

We need cross-party curriculum talks

Subject knowledge is vital to education and a national curriculum should represent the knowledge which is accepted as being important in our society (Report, 18 March). Additionally, children, young people and other learners have developmental needs (including cognitive, emotional, social and physical) which change as they grow older. Successful learning occurs when teachers, parents and others exercise judgement in bridging knowledge and development appropriately. In this way, one generation helps another. There are two main problems with the proposals for a new national curriculum in England. First, there has been no authentic attempt to achieve agreement on overall intentions and on the balance of knowledge, concepts, skills and attitudes which should form the curriculum content. The proposals for subject knowledge thus lack legitimacy in far too many areas.

Second, the proposals are imbalanced. Over-specification, implausible expectations and high-stakes control in relation to English and mathematics are combined with laissez-faire variability in relation to other subjects and issues. This produces a significant risk that many children will not feel motivated or engaged by the new curriculum. Teachers will do their best, as they invariably do. Cramming often does raise short-term performance, but it is doubtful if understanding and long-term capability will be achieved by provision of this type.

Within our democracy, the secretary of state has responsibility for this process and for making evidence-informed judgments about these issues on behalf of us all. His selective use and misuse of evidence and advice cannot be justified. In December 2011, the Labour party offered cross-party talks on the national curriculum following publication of the report of the expert panel, of which I was a member. School education needs stability if it is to provide appropriately for children's learning. Mr Gove should call a halt and do the job properly.

Professor Andrew Pollard
Universities of London and Bristol

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24th March, Telekopos blog by Rebekah Higgit: http://bit.ly/Zjc52H

School history: what worked for me

Much has already been said about the proposed new history curriculum. This piece by David Cannadine in the TLS is a good place to start, as is the Historical Association’s forum on the topic and, of course, Richard Evans in the FT. There is not much point in my adding to all this, but I did want to share something that looking at this contents-page of a curriculum made me recall.

As many of the critics of the proposed curriculum have pointed out, it all begins promisingly enough: it should allow children to “understand historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance”, and “how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims, and discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of the past have been constructed”. But what follows seems specifically-designed to undermine such aims, with a chronological list of names, abstract ideas and events that kids from as young as six are supposed to get through in just an hour a week.

There is much concern that this dry list, with often often age-inappropriate topics, will be a complete turn-off and that numbers taking history at GCSE will plummet. It will now be much harder for primary teachers to make history come alive by finding their local history, talking to people who remember past events, taking advantage of local museums, or discussing topics that fit the age of the children being taught – evacuation, for example, might be a powerful topic to discuss with children young enough not to be able to imagine leaving their parents. Instead, seven-year-olds will be discussing “concepts such as civilisation, monarchy, parliament, democracy, and war and peace”.

Thinking about what I don’t like about this curriculum got me thinking about my own experience of history at school. It didn’t make much of an impression on me at primary school: I got most of my history at home and on family trips to museums, monuments and galleries. It is this kind of thing, which many children will not have had, that Gove claims his education reforms make up for but, of course, it is never presented as a chronological ‘island story’. It involved going to places, asking questions, haphazard connections.

The little history I remember from primary school seemed equally haphazard, but that is no bad thing. You gain a sense of historical perspective not by slogging, over years, through a long chronology, but by thinking one day about Roman gladiators and then thinking about how different the world was when Henry VIII was on the throne, or when your house was built, or when aeroplanes were invented. The things that stick most in my mind had a connection to where I lived: the history of the city, the use of the buildings surrounding me. On one class visit to Edinburgh Castle, we dressed up as the French prisoners kept there during the Napoleonic Wars. We offered, as they had, our craftwork for sale and, of all things, sang the Marseillaise as we walked up to the gates.

At secondary school I started to really enjoy history, sometimes because of excellent teaching, sometimes in spite of it. Things were worst when we had to slog through a topic that covered a long period of history and when we were mostly obviously cramming in facts, people, dates and themes to prepare for exams. Things were best when we had discrete topics that we could cover in sufficient detail to get a feel for the period, the people involved and different perspectives.

Another post today from a fellow history of science curator – Charlie Connelly of the Science Museum – suggested one approach to counter that of Gove’s curriculum. This was to tell good stories, something with which many a watcher of TV documentaries and reader of popular histories would agree, not to mention many public historians and those who come to history outside the usual school and academic route. Charlie explains that it was good stories, even if ‘bad’ histories, like Sobel’s Longitude that got her to change her mind on history, having given up at 14 “finding it an unbelievably dry and tedious subject”.

I am a bit more doubtful, as readers of this blog will know, about using misleading stories as a hook. I also don’t recall “stories” being something that got me interested in history at school (although I do remember frequently getting a book called “100 Great Lives” out of the library over and again, undoubtedly a text Gove would have approved of). In fact, the thing that really excited me about history was that the more we know, the more we see that stories can be questioned. That was a powerful feeling.

Three lessons in my first year of secondary school stick out. For each of them the teacher prepared packs of images and texts and allowed us to go through them and draw our own conclusions, before class discussions and his conclusions. The first lesson was based on a fictional crime. We were given a range of evidence from the scene and about suspects and had to see if we could solve the crime. The next lesson did something similar, but with real images, newspaper reports, letters and statements, about the assassination of JFK. The final one looked at the assassination at Sarajevo.

For the real cases it became abundantly clear that the evidence we had was contradictory, that it could be very different in form and that different narratives could be created. This was exciting. We weren’t being taught facts, we were investigating, doing our own thinking and drawing our own conclusions or creating our own narratives based on the evidence we had. Aside from the fact that the evidence was given to us on coloured paper rather than our finding it ourselves in the archive, this really is a little bit like what real historians do.

It is also a little bit like what we all do, when we see the news, read newspapers, talk to friends and family and try to understand the world around us. These are the kinds of skills and the type of knowledge (not knowledge of facts but the knowledge that you are equipped to question or investigate) that school history can give to citizens and future voters. It goes without saying that they are also useful for many kinds of work. In what possible way can Gove’s curriculum compete with that?

About Rebekah Higgitt

Rebekah Higgitt completed a PhD in the history of science at Imperial College London in 2004 and did postdoctoral research at the University of Edinburgh. Since 2008 she has been Curator of History of Science and Technology at the National Maritime Museum and the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. Her research and publications have mainly focused on scientific institutions, scientific biography, history of science and the relationship between science, government and the public in 19th-century Britain.

View all posts by Rebekah Higgitt →

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23rd March, blog about Anthony Beevor via @schoolsimprove

History ‘taught by Blackadder’ says leading academic

A leading historian has criticised history teaching, claiming that Blackadder is being used to inform students about the First World War. This is from the Times…

Antony Beevor said that “fake faction” and the “democratisation of the truth” could lead to dangerous conspiracy theories taking hold.

During a discussion at the Oxford Literary Festival with the writer Kate Mosse, Beevor said that exceptions could perhaps be made for the fictionalising of “far away history”, citing Hillary Mantel’s novels centring on Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII. But he was scornful about the use of fiction to inform academic study.

“You even get it in schools,” he said. “I was lecturing to history teachers and told them that I had heard that Blackadder was being used to teach the [First World War]. I realised that half of them were shifting uneasily in their seats.”

More at: History ‘taught by Blackadder’ says leading academic (subscription required)

Have you found fiction useful to teach history in school? Share your opinions, experiences and schools improvement stories with our readers by sending them to us on this form. Please confirm you are happy for your contribution to be posted on the site and let us know your name/role (as relevant)

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21st March, New Statesman piece by Richard Evans

Michael Gove's History Curriculum Is a Pub Quiz Not an Education

Michael Gove’s new draft national curriculum for history, launched on 7 February, has been greeted with dismay by history teachers at every level, from primary schools to universities, and from every part of the political spectrum.

What has annoyed them most is Gove’s decision to ignore the consultation process and do it all himself. He initially asked the historian Niall Ferguson to come up with ideas for a new curriculum but Ferguson’s response, based on a positive presentation of Europe’s – and especially Britain’s – global ascendancy since the early modern period, did not appeal to Gove, because it advocated history with a global sweep instead of history focused on supposedly key personalities and events within the British past.

Sidelining Ferguson, Gove then asked another expatriate British television historian, Simon Schama, to take a lead. A process of consultation began. A large meeting was held with interested parties including the Better History Forum of conservative teachers led by a former teacher, Seán Lang. Clearly those selected to advise the secretary of state, such as Steven Mastin, a state school history teacher, were chosen partly for political reasons (Mastin was an unsuccessful Conservative candidate at the 2010 general election). With their participation, a draft national history curriculum was hammered out in January and prepared for consultation.

What was actually announced in early February came as a shock to everyone. Those who had taken part in the preparation process did not recognise it. The history profession, including the history sections of the British Academy, the Historical Association, the Royal Historical Society and History UK, complained that the “details of the [new] curriculum have been drafted inside the Department for Education without any systematic consultation or public discussion with historians, teachers or the wider public”.

Even conservative historians were dismayed. A group of 15 academic historians close to the Conservative Party gave their support in a letter to theTimes only “in principle” and hoped that the proposals “will no doubt be adapted as a result of full consultation”. Ferguson found the draft curriculum “too prescriptive” and complained that his advice to Gove on this point had been ignored. Lang complained on behalf of the Better History Forum: “Our proposal was ignored; Mr Gove has apparently shut his ears to anyone’s advice but his own.” Mastin said the proposed new curriculum bore “no resemblance” to drafts he had worked on as late as January of this year. “Between January and the publication of this document – which no one involved in the consultation had seen – someone has typed it up and I have no idea who that is,” he remarked.

The answer is inescapable: it was Gove. Just as Margaret Thatcher declared herself shocked and appalled when she saw her first national history curriculum, drawn up largely by education professionals, Gove must have reacted with dismay when he saw the final draft of his history curriculum. Neither document delivered what the politicians wanted, namely the learning of names, dates and facts strung together to form a celebratory, patriotic national narrative. Unlike Thatcher, however, who in the end reluctantly respected the professionals’ expertise, he tore it up and wrote his own.

What does the proposed new curriculum suggest? It begins well enough by reminding us: “A high-quality history education equips pupils to think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments and develop perspective and judgement.” Yet this introduction seems to have been left over from an earlier draft, for it is no more than a token gesture, almost completely forgotten in the rest of the text, which focuses on listing the facts that pupils will have to learn by rote.

The contradiction between aims and content is even more crass in the passage about the requirement that pupils “know and understand the broad outlines of European and world history”. Despite this laudable aim, they are given no opportunity whatsoever to do so in the rest of the curriculum, in which the emphasis is exclusively on British history. European and world history are included only where they are relevant to Britain.

At times, this verges on the comical. When pupils study the Enlightenment, for instance, they study “Francis Bacon, John Locke, Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, Adam Smith and the impact of European thinkers”, though not those thinkers themselves; clearly Voltaire, Montesquieu and Diderot are unimportant because they were French.

This is a curriculum that will produce a generation of young Britons with no knowledge of the history of any part of the world beyond the shores of the British Isles. “As far as I am aware,” Mastin has warned, “we will be the only jurisdiction in the western world that won’t teach world history.” The curriculum declares: “A knowledge of Britain’s past, and our place in the world, helps us understand the challenges of our own time.” Yet in today’s globalised world, it does no such thing.

How are history pupils going to be tested on their knowledge of, say, Thatcher’s election (oddly, the period that the curriculum specifies stops at the moment she comes to power and does not require pupils to know anything about her government), the Chartists or King Athelstan? The draft curriculum is no help at all here. Will they be given multiple-choice examinations? There are no clues; it doesn’t mention the skills whose varying level of deployment is the main basis for assessment. This is preparation forMastermind or a pub quiz; it is not education.

The new curriculum tells pupils what to think. The Dutch invasion that overthrew King James II was, it declares, “the Glorious Revolution”, ignoring its violent anti-Catholicism and deadly effects in Scotland and Ireland, which were followed by the discrimination against Catholics in the UK that lasted another 140 years. Not glorious for everyone, then. It also tells us what the causes of the First World War were (“colonial rivalry, naval expansion and European alliances”); the causes of the Second World War, meanwhile, were “appeasement, the failure of the League of Nations and the rise of the dictators”.

Evidence gathered in the recent Ofsted report History for All suggests that one of the chief attractions of history for school students is the opportunity that it gives them to find out about historical personalities and issues for themselves and to make their own decisions. The new curriculum is sure to put them off the subject.

Gove has said he wants pupils to study British heroes. However, is “Clive of India” a hero to the many British children of Indian parentage or descent? Historical individuals, including objects of left-wing admiration such as the Levellers or the black nurse Mary Seacole, should be presented as subjects for historical inquiry, not as heroes or heroines to be admired mindlessly.

The new chronology that forms the basis of the proposed curriculum isn’t workable. In practice, it will produce even more superficial knowledge than pupils have at the moment. With only one hour a week devoted to history, taught by a non-specialist teacher, how are primary school pupils going to work their way through the dense factual material of Key Stages 1 and 2? There is simply too much material to teach; only bits and pieces can be selected.

And how are seven-year-olds going to understand topics such as “the heptarchy” or “feudalism”? What will 11-year-olds make of the Putney debates? After the age of 11, pupils will study only modern history. They will come to maturity with a knowledge of the Middle Ages stuck at the level of a nine-yearold. The teaching prescribed by the draft curriculum is not appropriate to the ages of the children being taught.

Given the time available, the chronology will end up being taught as discrete episodes. Narrative or, to use a better word, chronicle, the recital of one event after another, will not help children understand change over time; to do that, they need to compare and relate events with each other and with their contexts, not just to learn that the Vikings came after the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans after the Vikings. In practice, sequential teaching of this kind does not provide a context; it rips events out of their context, leaving them insusceptible to analysis.

All of the new developments over the past half-century – in economic, social, cultural and other kinds of history – that have made history so exciting as a discipline are pushed to the sidelines in favour of a political narrative that might have been lifted straight from a textbook written in the 1930s. There are labels and concepts in the new curriculum that haven’t been used by historians for years – “gunboat diplomacy” and “Clive of India”, to name only two.

Gove wants the teaching of history to give pupils a positive sense of national identity and pride. Yet history isn’t a form of instruction in citizenship. It’s an academic subject in its own right. If he really wants more rigour in education, Gove should tear up his amateurish new curriculum and start listening to the professionals.

Richard J Evans is Regius professor of history and president of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge

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21st March Guardian : find full article via link gu.com/p/3etph/tw

"Michael Gove Labels Professors Critical of New Curriculum as 'Bad Academia"

Earlier this week 100 university professors published letter decrying Gove's new national curriculum for stiffling creativity

by Jessica Shepherd, Education Correspondent

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21st March Find political intervention in curriculum by Wilshaw. Setting himself separate from the arguments of academics, but also the subject associations: http://bit.ly/11mnTFd

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20th March

HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION STATEMENT via @histassoc

Consulted? Yes. Listened to? No.

On March 19 as a result of FOI requests the Department for Education provided a list of all those it had spoken to and been in discussion with in all subject areas for the draft National Curriculum. The HA were amongst those who were in discussion with the DfE along with colleagues that included, professors and education leaders, teachers and subject specialists. Unfortunately being consulted is not the same as being listened to. And whilst our time and expertise was given freely our research and qualified evidence was not used to shape, inform or create the Draft Programme of Study for History published on 7 February 2013. In fact, the published curriculum for history was as much a surprise to us as to anyone else. Sadly what this list does not indicate is which individuals were actually involved in authoring the curriculum.

The HA remains opposed to the proposed history curriculum and is happy to work with the DfE to reach a better solution but only if we are listened to and not merely listed for effect.

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20th March HODDER HISTORY BLOG

What knowledge? Whose knowledge?

Michael Gove says in the preamble to his proposed curriculum that children should ‘know and understand the story of these islands … from the story of the first settlers … to the development of the institutions which govern our lives today.’ So who are the people of these islands and why does it matter?

In 2006 Channel 4 screened a programme1 in which a reporter persuaded several people who regarded themselves as quintessentially English to let themselves be DNA tested. The results showed them to be a rich ethnic mixture with elements including Turkish, Italian, Romany and African. Many were less than fifty per cent ‘English’. At the time there was much discussion about British and English identity and much confusion between the two. Attempts to define both soon ran into the sand.

Now, as over half the population of London do not define themselves as ‘White British’ and Scottish independence is possible, whatever we mean by ‘Britain’ may have to change, Michael Gove is proposing a history curriculum that rests on an idea of who the British are or have ever been that is demonstrably false and possibly dangerous.

The African diaspora in Britain, for example, we know to have begun about two thousand years ago. As Peter Fryer writes2 , ‘there were Africans in Britain before the English came’. There were North African soldiers (‘the Aurelian Moors’) garrisoned near Hadrian’s Wall3 ; a Mauretanian in the Roman army is commemorated in South Shields4; the skeleton of a wealthy African woman has been found in York5; an African man lived near modern Stratford-upon-Avon 1,700 years ago6; and Roman Britain was governed by a Libyan and visited by an African Roman Emperor7. African faces appear as part of the general population in countless illustrations from medieval manuscripts8 to contemporary representations of the Gordon Riots9 , from a painting of the death of Nelson10 to photographs of Second World War evacuees11. Not only was the Black presence within the English working class considerable12 but some individuals played key roles in the struggle of those who wanted change and democracy: Robert Wedderburn, William Davidson and William Cuffay an organiser of the 1848 Chartist rally on Kennington Common13. Recent work by archivists looking at parish records14 has unearthed 17th and 18th century baptisms and burials of black people all over the country from Evesham to Erith, from Pangbourne to Plymouth, from Beverley to Bedford, from Chester to Clwyd. When 350 Black passengers sailed for Sierra Leone from England in 1787 they were accompanied by 59 white women, all wives or widows of Black Londoners15.

The first known record of an Indian in Britain was a baptism in 161616. There is an Indian baker in the painting The Tichborne Dole17 and there have been Bengali Londoners for hundreds of years. Prominent British Indians have included an entrepreneur who kick-started Brighton’s tourist industry18, a suffragette19 and - in the Second World War - a spy20, a fighter pilot21 and a major part of the British forces at Monte Cassino.

In Gove’s curriculum, however, there are no British Africans or Asians for primary children to encounter. At secondary level, apart from Seacole and Equiano Africans appear only when enslaved and then disappear until the arrival of ‘the Windrush generation’. As for British Asians, their first and only appearance is as refugees from East Africa. Indeed, if you were Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Jewish, African or Indian you appear only as a victim. It is also a curriculum devoid of women and ordinary people.

The draft curriculum also claims it will enable children to ‘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 only empires and civilisations to be studied, however, are European: Greece, Rome and Britain. How can we understand Greece without Egypt? How can we avoid racist understandings of the world if our knowledge of Africa omits the kingdoms of Mali, Songhay, Benin and Great Zimbabwe and begins only with European conquests? How does any understanding of world history completely omit China? Pupils need to understand not only ‘how Britain influenced the world’ but also how the world influenced Britain in terms of trade, acquisition of knowledge and, of course, migration. As for the decline of the British Empire, the part played by Africans and Asians living and studying here was crucial.

This matters because, as Gove is so keen to point out in defence of his approach, we see and understand ourselves through our past. If children in our culturally diverse classrooms are fed the lie that diversity is new and encounter a story that suggest ‘otherness’ in all who are not white, then millions of children will not see themselves in the story and feel school history bears no relationship to their own ‘rich mix’ sense of British identity. More ominously, seeds may be sown for more sinister and dangerous attitudes fed by a selective ‘island story’ that claims to be ‘the essential chronology of Britain’s history’ but is in fact only one of many and deals with a segment.

The Macpherson report on the murder of Stephen Lawrence22 recommended ‘that consideration be given to amendment of the National Curriculum aimed at valuing cultural diversity and preventing racism, in order better to reflect the needs of a diverse society’. We need to know the truth of our long history of diversity: all our young people need to see themselves in our history not as a form of tokenism but because they are there and this is the truth. The current curriculum goes some way towards that goal: Gove’s flies in the opposite direction.

Gove is right to assert the power of knowledge but that is not contentious: the questions that matter are: what knowledge? whose knowledge? A journey through history that erases whole sections of our community and puts them outside the narrative is a journey towards darkness.

Martin Spafford

References

[1] 100% English, Channel 4 (2006)

[2] Peter Fryer, Staying Power – the History of Black People in Britain (1984)

[3] Dr Richard Benjamin, British Archaeology 77, July 2004 ; also Michael Wood, The Great British Story: A People’s History (BBC 2012)

[4] York Archaeological Trust (2007)

[5] The Times and The Guardian, 26th and 27th Feb 2010

[6] Past Horizons, 26th January 2011

[7] Septimius Severus, who spent his last three years and died in Britain

[8] BASA Newsletter 57, July 2010

[9] Guildhall Library 4915 (1781)

[10] Daniel Maclise, The Death of Nelson (1859-1864), The Walker Art Gallery,Liverpool.

[11] Imperial War Museum

[12] the City of Westminster Archives estimate 15,000 Black Londoners by 1800

[13] Peter Fryer et al.

[14] BASA Newsletters, various

[15]http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/work_community/docs/passenger_lists.htm

[16] Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain – 400 years of History (2002)

[17] Gillis van Tilborgh (1671)

[18] Sake Dean Mahomed

[19] Sophia Duleep Singh

[20] Noor Inayat Khan

[21] Mahinder Singh Pujji

[22] The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report (1999)

Posted by Jim Belben on 20/03/2013 5:42:41 PM

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19th March THE INDEPENDENT

Michael Gove’s proposed new national curriculum will severely damage education standards by insisting children learn “endless lists of spellings, facts and rules”, experts are warning. In a letter toThe Independent, 100 education academics warn that the new curriculum promotes “rote learning without understanding” and demands “too much too young”.

The academics, all of whom are either professors of education or teach in university education departments, write: “This mountain of data will not develop children’s ability to think – including problem-solving, critical understanding and creativity.”

Their intervention means the Education Secretary faces dissent on yet another front over his education reforms – coming just 36 hours after teachers’ leaders warned of strike action over plans to squeeze their pensions and end automatic annual incremental pay rises for the profession, plus opposition to his plans to force under-performing schools to become academies.

The signatories to the letter, who include leading figures in the world of academia such as Professor Terry Wrigley, from Leeds Metropolitan University, who co-ordinated the letter with Professor Michael Bassey from Nottingham Trent University, said: “A system which is very, very heavily prescribed and which encourages cramming through tests actually reduces fairly sharply the development of thinking. The pupils memorise just enough detail to get over the hurdle of the tests.”

Professor Wrigley added: “I think if these reforms go ahead it will be miserable for the children. Secondly, I think it will put further emphasis on memorisation and rote learning rather than understanding.”

The academics’ intervention also follows a controversy over changes planned for the history curriculum – where historians and teachers claim the proposals neglect world history in favour of the chronological learning of facts about British history. Sir Richard Evans, Regius Professor of history at Cambridge University, said they would restore “rote learning of the patriotic stocking-fillers so beloved of traditionalists”.

Under Mr Gove’s plans – out for consultation until mid-April – children should be taught standard English with more weight given to spelling, punctuation and grammar. In maths, they should know their times tables up to 12 by the age of nine and start learning about algebra and geometry by the time they leave primary school.

In history, the document says pupils should know “how the British people shaped this nation and how Britain influenced the world”.

In languages, children will for the first time have to learn a language – ancient or modern – from the age of seven.

In their letter, the academics say of the proposed curriculum: “Much of it demands too much, too young. This will put pressure on teachers to rely on rote learning without understanding. Inappropriate demands will lead to failure and demoralisation.”

They say the plan “betrays a serious distrust of teachers in its amount of detailed instructions”.

“Whatever the intention, the proposed curriculum in England will result in a ‘dumbing down’ of teaching and learning,” they add.

It is also “too narrow”, they argue. “The mountains of detail for English, maths and science leave little space for other learning. Speaking and listening, drama and modern media have almost disappeared from English.”

A spokeswoman for the Department for Education said: “This distinction made by the signatories between knowledge and skills is a false dichotomy. The new curriculum is based on careful analysis of the world’s most successful school system. We are giving schools more freedom over the curriculum and teaching, not less. We are reforming the exam system to test deeper cognitive skills such as mathematical problem-solving and extended writing, which are neglected now, but these skills... depend on solid foundations.”

The DfE released the results of a Freedom of Information request which listed more than 400 people who had been consulted. It said it received 5,763 responses to its call for evidence to be submitted to the curriculum review.

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17th March, THE SUNDAY TIMES, by Sian Griffiths, Education Correspondent

Historian: Gove is facing his Waterloo

Sian Griffiths, Education Editor Published: 17 March 2013

One of Britain’s most distinguished historians has claimed that the government is facing defeat over its controversial new history curriculum.

In an uncharacteristically forthright interview, Sir David Cannadine, Dodge professor of history at Princeton, said last week that the proposals published by Michael Gove, the education secretary, last month were unworkable.

“The general response has not been favourable — even the people supporting it are pretty lukewarm if you read between the lines,” Cannadine told The Sunday Times. “On the basis of such reaction, there are going to have to be more conversations down the line, because I do not think Mr Gove will persist with the draft he has put out. I do not think he can do that.

"On subjects like what should be taught in schools, previous ministers have understood that you have to have academic support, parental support and teacher support, otherwise it isn't going to happen"

Cannadine said he had heard that Gove had written part of the draft history curriculum, despite not having "any appropriate qualifications for involving himself in such a complex task." "How much history does he know?" asked Cannadine. "Michael Gove studied English Literature... by anaology, would anyone ask the Secretary of State for Health, who was not a qualified Doctor, to prescribe the correct procedure for a hip replacement operation?"

The professor, who divides his time between America and Britain, is the latest distinguished historian to join the debate over the new curriculum. It has been hailed as a return to tradition, under which children from the ages of five to 14 would be taught in chronological order "our island story" from the Stone Age to the election of Margaret Thatcher.

Cambridge's Regius Professor of History, Sir Richard Evans, has already condemned the plans as "rote learning of patriotic stocking-fillers".

Cannadine has revealed that he was one of a small handful of people asked by Gove to comment on an early version of the seven-page 134-bullet-point draft proposals late last year.

He had recently written a book, "The Right Kind of History", which investigated the teaching of history in English Schools from the 1900s to the present. The book called for history to be made compulsory up to the age of 16.

"Along with others, I was asked to look at the curriculum drafts last December, and I said that since I do not accept that history should stop being taught at 14, I am not going to comment on these proposals," Cannadine said last week. "I was then asked to meet with Mr Gove again in January and put all my points again. On the basis of the curriculum that emerged he took no notice of the arguments."

Cannadine also criticises the draft curriculum as blinkered, too prescriptive and too concerned with Britain at the expense of world history: "We live in a multicultural Britain, and the history we learn has to offer an explanation of that,: he said.

Despite his criticisms, he is hopeful that Gove can be persuaded of the consensus he says is building among historians. "What is difficult is whether Michael Gove wil see this as a consensus bandwagon he ought to jump aboard... I am an optimist. I believe patience and persistence are in order."

He added: "In the end you have to get the teachers to teach the curriculum. It is clear that the relations between the teachers and Mr Gove are not very good, and it is very difficult to be an effective secretary of state for education if you have the teachers against you."

David Cannadine's latest book "The Undivided Past" is published this week by Allen Lane.

David Cannadine's previous book "The Right Stuff" is evidence-based research on the history of the history curriculum.

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15th March - Blog by Alix Green via wp.me/p2jNYE-4E

(Teaching) history in the news

I've had an interesting exchange with Robert Gordon VC, prolific Tweeter and blogger, Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski, over a post he put up about students’ apparent lack of awareness of a major news story: the French intervention in Mali. I mentioned that at the start of every workshop with my third year Public History class, the students bring along and present examples of ‘history in the news’ for discussion.

Having filled a whiteboard with all the many ways in which the past is present in the present, the students have found an impressive array of material. Royal and papal stories were easily idenitifiable. But they also started to tune into the role of anniversaries, and the calls for commemoration that often accompany them (such as the Bethnal Green Tube disaster of 3rd March 1943), and to pick up on international news (such as the burning of historic manuscripts in Timbuktu) and on history in politics (Michael Gove’s curriculum reform efforts providing a particularly rich seam).

The students quickly developed a capacity to read the news like historians, rather than consuming it. They already had the skills to do so, it’s just that they weren’t necessarily being exercised. Maybe ‘historianship’ was compartmentalised in their minds, something you only access when writing an essay. Doing public history has, I hope, given them a sense that historianship can be a habitual practice, a mode of thinking that can shape how they see and interact with the world.

‘History in the news’ generates some of the liveliest discussions – maybe because in a sense the students ‘own’ that part of the class. Having three exchange students has been particularly interesting and has made us all aware of the extent to which our referents and understandings are conditioned by context (and rarely inspected). Explaining Remembrance Day, Bonfire Night or the Battle of Britain (or indeed, Australia’s Sorry Day or Martin Luther King Day in the United States) has also helped us really get at some of the key issues in the scholarly literature.

‘History in the news’ is only one way of doing it, but making that connection in public history teaching between history as a scholarly activity and history as a mode of thinking and viewing seems to me a priority. Even if students never end up working in history, they can always be thinking with it.

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13th March: TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

The future of History

David Cannadine

The history lessons outlined in the draft National Curriculum are too prescriptive, Anglocentric and narrow – the only way to make the subject better, David Cannadine argues, is to give it more time in the classroom

The publication of Michael Gove’s draft National Curriculum in early February was initially upstaged by his simultaneous retreat (or, instead, his statesmanlike re-grouping) on the proposed English Baccalaureate. But as that story has receded, at least for the time being, discussion of the proposed new Curriculum has belatedly begun, and once again, it seems that history is the most controversial subject. This should come as no surprise. For more than five years, a debate has been running as to whether history is well or badly taught in our state schools, whether it is better or worse taught than it used to be, whether young people know enough of it or not, and whether the problem lies with the content of the present National Curriculum, or with the amount of time available for teaching history in the classroom. In a way that seems true of no other subject, the issue of history teaching in schools engages public attention and carries unmistakable political overtones: for unlike, say, economics or physics, where the content is similar the world over, classroom history is in large part about the national past, and thus about who we are, where we have come from, and what sort of country we are living in. Not surprisingly, then, the current debate about how history should be taught in state schools, and about what history should be taught in them, is not confined to the United Kingdom, but is also taking place around the world, from Australia to the United States, Germany to Russia, Japan to South Africa.

I am a participant in the British version of this debate because, with Jenny Keating and Nicola Sheldon, I co-authored The Right Kind of History (2011), which was the first attempt to investigate the teaching of history in English state schools (Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are different jurisdictions) from the early 1900s, when it effectively became a compulsory subject, to the present day. The book was the result of a lengthy research project, which involved working our way through a mass of government directives, official reports and surveys by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate for Schools (HMI), as well as the extensive and expanding literature on teaching, curricula and pedagogy; and we also conducted surveys and interviews with teachers and former pupils, which enabled us to get a feel for history in the classroom from the 1930s onwards. Our main aim was to show the variety and complexity of the forces that determined what was taught and learned in the classroom, and among these were (and are): the calibre of ministers in charge of education, and their aims and policies while in office; the role of local authorities and HMIs, and the types and the variety of schools at primary and secondary level; the training and ability of history teachers, and the evolving nature of history as an academic discipline; developments in pedagogic theory and practice and technological changes in the classroom; the age up to which boys and girls were compulsorily taught history and the age at which they left school; the curriculum they were taught, and the examinations they sat.

From these many, varied but interlinked perspectives, we traced the course of history teaching in English state schools, and our account necessarily encompasses both continuity and change. The advent of the radio, television and computer, the diminishing place of Britain in the world, the creation of a comprehensive school system, the introduction of O levels, A levels, the CSE and the GCSE, and the establishment of a National Curriculum have profoundly affected how history has been taught. Yet (and this is a seriously dismaying continuity) it has never been a compulsory subject in English schools beyond the age of fourteen, and there is scarcely any other European country of which that can be said. Not surprisingly, then, there have been constant complaints about the teaching of history for as long as it has been taught: that young people know too little about the national past; that they are ignorant about dates, battles, politicians and kings and queens; that (alternatively) the rote learning of dates, battles, politicians and kings and queens is excruciatingly boring and is not the same as history; and that there was once a golden age when history was better taught, and when boys and girls did know about the national past, from which there has been a recent and catastrophic decline. Across the whole of the twentieth century, there was scarcely a decade when points such as these were not being made. And when these criticisms were levelled, as they have again been recently, it was usually in complete ignorance of the fact that they had already been made several times before. Ironically enough, the criticisms of history teaching in English schools, made by people who, presumably, think history is important, are almost invariably lacking in any historical perspective.

Ironically enough, the criticisms of history teaching in English schools, made by people who, presumably, think history is important, are almost invariably lacking in any historical perspective

Our conclusions may also be briefly summarized. With so many schools, teachers and pupils, so many different ways of teaching history, and so much history that could be taught, the only generalization we could safely make was that few generalizations could safely be made. All too often, we noted, individual examples of bad teaching or of historical ignorance were irresponsibly deployed to stand proxy for an entire generation of teachers and pupils; and too much of the discussion of school history by politicians and pundits and professional pedagogues was excessively polarized, when the reality of history teaching in classrooms was often very different. Across the long twentieth century, both “traditional” and “progressive” versions of history have sometimes been well taught, sometimes badly taught, depending on the enthusiasm and expertise of the teacher. There have been regular complaints about repetition: of the Tudors before the Second Word War, of the Nazis more recently. There have been repeated laments that coverage has been superficial rather than in-depth, but also that there has been no opportunity to convey the “big picture”. There have been frequent criticisms that too much (or too little) attention has been given to the history of Britain, or the history of Europe or of the British Empire or of the wider world. And underlying these specific concerns has been the recognition that it will always be difficult to address these problems when so little space is given to history in the school timetable, and when most pupils give it up at the age of fourteen.

One of the prime purposes of our book was to provide a history of history as a taught subject in English state schools, because this had never been done before, partly in the hope that it might stimulate similar studies of history teaching in Wales, Scotland and Northen Ireland, and also because it might stimulate parallel histories of other taught subjects, which are urgently needed. But we were also concerned to provide the necessary evidence to inform the current debate on history teaching in schools, in the hope of influencing – and improving – government policy. To this end, we noted that there was no serious evidence to suggest there had been a recent and catastrophic decline in history teaching (and in historical knowledge) from an earlier but vanished golden age, which means in turn that the current challenge is not to try to get back to some past utopia of classroom history and historical knowledge that never in fact existed, but to try to make history teaching better in the future. Given the complex array of forces that determine the history taught in any particular classroom, what changes might best be made that might bring about such a substantial improvement? We argued that the solution is not to be found by blaming and changing the current National Curriculum. It is not perfect, but in outline, it strikes a good balance between the history of Britain and of other nations and of other parts of the world, and between broad chronological survey and in-depth study. The temptations to tinker with it, or to scrap it completely and begin again, we concluded, should be resisted.

Yet if the National Curriculum is not the problem, then what is? Our answer was clear, namely that since the 1900s, insufficient time has been given to history in the classroom: hence the rushed and superficial treatment of unrelated subjects; the lack of a firm chronological sequence and narrative structure; the difficulty of giving adequate attention to the big picture; and the risk of repetition at Key Stage Three and at Key Stage Four for those taking the subject at GCSE. Reforming the National Curriculum, we concluded, would not address these problems, and the only way to do so would be to make history compulsory to the age of sixteen. That had been Kenneth Baker’s original intention when he devised the National Curriculum; it would integrate the National Curriculum with GCSE, and it would align our teaching practices with those of other Western countries. By gaining more time for history in the classroom, the problems of superficiality, chronology, incoherence and repetition could finally be confronted. That was our recommendation, which was welcomed by professional historians and schoolteachers, by Ofsted and the Historical Association, and by the Independent and the Daily Telegraph. Our proposal was also endorsed by an Expert Panel set up by the Department of Education and by the Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Archives and History, who urged that “history should be part of a curriculum as a core subject to sixteen”.

But despite the wide range of support they have gathered, Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, seems determined to ignore these recommendations. He has repeatedly claimed that he wants to improve history teaching in the classroom, so that today’s pupils will leave school knowing more about the past than their forebears, and he has done so on the laudable grounds that this will be both intrinsically good for them and also help them to understand how the modern world came to be the way it is. But while we might all applaud these aspirations, there is a significant difference of view as to the means of realizing them: for Gove has not only refused the well-evidenced invitation to attempt something bold and innovative that would help bring this stated aim about, but he has instead gone for the safe and easy alternative that will achieve no such result. He has decided against making history compulsory to the age of sixteen, preferring instead to reform the National Curriculum, which is the exact opposite of what has been repeatedly recommended by people who know what they are talking about. Michael Gove may be in charge of the Department of Education, but on the subject of history teaching in schools, he has shown no interest in educating himself as to how he might best achieve his own objectives.

Michael Gove may be in charge of the Department of Education, but on the subject of history teaching in schools, he has shown no interest in educating himself as to how he might best achieve his own objectives

Late last year, and at Gove’s behest, officials in his Department were working on two drafts of a proposed new National Curriculum in history. But they were only concerned with pupils up to the age of fourteen rather than to sixteen, and their labours were largely carried out behind closed doors. When the first National Curriculum was put together during the 1980s, there was an extensive process of consultation, which meant the scheme of study that eventually emerged was widely supported by the teaching and academic professions and by the general public. But this time round, by contrast, there was no such systematic consultation or public discussion. Instead, a few people were asked for their views on the substance of these two drafts, on condition they did not mention this to anyone else. I was among those consulted; but I declined to comment on the detail because I did not accept that reforming the National Curriculum was the best way to improve history in schools; and at a meeting with Michael Gove early this year, I urged him to reconsider his refusal to make the subject compulsory to sixteen. I also pointed out (as many others had done) that the two drafts were little more than lists of names and subjects cobbled together, which did not constitute a history curriculum at all; that it would be impossible to teach the large spans of time that were to be covered in Key Stages Two and Three; and that the narrowing of the prescribed areas of study, away from world history and towards English history, would not equip young people to understand the multicultural country they inhabited or the globalized world in which they would be living and working.

Once again, these arguments fell on deaf ears, for the draft National Curriculum in history that has recently been published is worse than that which it is intended to replace. To be sure, its preamble contains wisdom and good sense: “A knowledge of Britain’s past, and of our place in the world”, it begins, “helps us understand the challenges of our own times”. All schoolchildren, it goes on, should “know and understand the story of these islands: how the British people shaped this nation and how Britain influenced the world”. They should also “know and understand the broad outlines of European and world history: the growth and decline of ancient civilizations; the expansion and dissolution of empires; the achievements and follies of mankind”. To this end, schoolchildren should “understand historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance”, and they should also learn “how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims, and discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of the past have been constructed”. Moreover, they should “gain historical perspective by placing their growing knowledge into different contexts, understanding the connections between local, regional, national and international history”, and also appreciate the links between “cultural, economic, military, political, religious and social history”, and “between short- and long-term timescales”. These seem admirably wide-ranging aims: although the history of “how Britain influenced the world” should be complemented by the history of how the world influenced Britain.

But it is when we turn from the preamble to the specific content that serious difficulties begin. At Key Stage One, boys and girls between the ages of five and seven will be expected to understand “the concept of nation and of a nation’s history”, as well as “concepts such as civilization, monarchy, parliament, democracy, and war and peace”, along with “the lives of significant individuals in Britain’s past which have contributed to our nation’s achievements”. At Key Stage Two, pupils aged from seven to eleven “should be taught about the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome”, but their prime task will be to learn “the essential chronology of our nation’s history”, from “early Britons and settlers” to the Glorious Revolution, constitutional monarchy and the Union of the Parliaments, via the Roman conquest, the Anglo-Saxon and Viking settlements, the Norman Conquest, the Crusades, the Plantagenets, the Wars of the Roses, the Tudors, the Renaissance in England, the Stuarts, the Union of the Crowns, and the Civil War. And at Key Stage Three, for those aged between twelve and fourteen, the focus will be on “the development of the modern nation” from the mid-eighteenth to the late twentieth century, encompassing such topics as Wolfe in Canada and Clive in India, the English Enlightenment, the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the growth and fluctuations of the industrial economy, the High Victorian era, Britain’s nineteenth-century global impact, the First World War, the 1920s and 30s, the Second World War, the retreat from Empire, the Welfare State, Commonwealth immigration, the advent and end of the Cold War, the election of Margaret Thatcher, and Britain’s relations with the rest of Europe.

Such, according to Gove, is the curriculum that will revive and reinvigorate the teaching of history in our nation’s primary and secondary schools, thereby ensuring that future generations will know more about our national past than their ignorant and unfortunate forebears do at present. But as others have already pointed out, there are serious problems with it. The first is that much of the proposed curriculum is not age-appropriate. How will five- and six-year-olds discuss and debate the concept of the nation? Why is it that children at Key Stage Two are uniquely well placed to learn about ancient Greece and Rome? Can under-twelves make sense of the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses or the Civil War? Are primary school teachers, many of whom will have had no specific training in history, adequately qualified and equipped to teach these exceptionally complex subjects? And why is there no provision for pupils aged over eleven to learn about ancient, medieval or early modern history? It will also be impossible to encompass this over-extended chronology in the limited classroom time available. To cover English history from the Stone Age to the early eighteenth century in four academic years at primary school in at most one hour a week cannot be done; and the proposal to go from the mid-eighteenth century to the late twentieth at Key Stage Three with no more teaching time is equally unrealistic. The only way to deliver such a curriculum would be to abandon any pretence that history is about understanding as well as about knowing, and to teach it in just the patchy, simplistic, superficial and disconnected ways that the Secretary of State deplores about the present arrangements. His proposal does not solve that problem: instead it intensifies and exacerbates it.

How will five- and six-year-olds discuss and debate the concept of the nation? Can under-twelves make sense of the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses or the Civil War?

There is also the serious matter of the narrowing of the focus of the curriculum away from European and world history. Certainly, there is mention of ancient Greece and Rome, the American, French and Russian Revolutions, the First and Second World Wars, and the Cold War, though how much attention any of these would in practice receive is anyone’s guess. But no provision is made for studying other countries or continents or cultures or civilizations, and the rest of the world is only deemed to be of interest when Britain impinges on it. Thus the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which were pan-European phenomena, are to be studied only with reference to England: so goodbye to Leonardo, Michelangelo, Montesquieu and Rousseau. And the national history that remains is decidedly blinkered in its scope: it is England rather than Britain, and kings and queens, ministers and battles, war and peace. No one would deny that these are important; but there is more to the nation’s history than that. This syllabus is too narrow and too prescriptive, and the criticism that it offers a version of our national past derived from 1066 and All That, published in 1930, is well made. For Britain is no longer the nation it was then, and its place in the world is not what it was then; while history is not the subject it was then, either in terms of its content or its methodologies. Would anyone, prescribing, say, a physics or economics syllabus at primary and secondary level, do so on the basis of the state of knowledge, and the approach to the subject, that prevailed eighty years ago?

There are two further problems, one of commission, the other of omission. The first is the serious disconnect between the broad ranging aims outlined in the preamble to the proposed curriculum, and the introverted insularity of the syllabus itself. Apparently, the preamble was the only part of the draft where expert opinion was allowed to prevail, whereas the syllabus allegedly bears the imprint of the Secretary of State himself. Yet as its limitations and shortcomings make plain, it is not clear that Gove has any appropriate qualifications for personally involving himself in this complex and challenging task. He deplores a lack of historical knowledge in others, but how much history does he know? (And, by analogy, would anyone ask the Secretary of State for Health, who was not qualified as a doctor, to prescribe the correct procedure for a hip replacement operation?) The second problem is that this draft curriculum merely highlights the central longstanding issue, that there is insufficient time in the classroom to teach history seriously, for it is impossible to cram in all that is prescribed to children between the ages of five and fourteen, which is why rewriting a National Curriculum that does not extend beyond the age of fourteen goes nowhere. The only way to bring about a quantum improvement in history teaching and in the general level of historical knowledge is to make the subject compulsory in the classroom until the age of sixteen, and to construct an integrated, flexible and outward-looking curriculum on that basis. But that is the option that Gove refuses to embrace.

Not surprisingly, the response to this proposed history curriculum from most professional historians and schoolteachers has been deeply critical – notwithstanding Niall Ferguson’s recent defence of Gove’s syllabus in the Guardian, which was distinctly unconvincing; while his spat with Richard Evans merely exemplified the unhelpfulness of argument by anecdote and excessively polarized posturing, which has for too long occluded serious discussion of the subject. Of course the media love it when professors fall out in public, and Gove may well be enjoying the spectacle of two distinguished historians apparently so divided. Yet behind all the bluster and the point-scoring, it is clear that Evans and Ferguson actually agree on several important matters: namely that the draft curriculum is too prescriptive, that it is too Anglocentric, that it pays insufficient heed to the broader world, and that more time needs to be given to history in schools if the subject is to be better taught – which is exactly what most informed people have been saying since the document was first published. In truth, there is much more consensus on this subject than such media-driven disagreement suggests, and it is a consensus with which Michael Gove urgently needs to engage. Like him, we all wish history to be better taught, and for pupils to leave school knowing more about the past than they do at present; yet what he is proposing in his new draft curriculum will not bring that about, but would only make things worse.

David Cannadine is the co-author of The Right Kind of History, 2011, and the author of The Undivided Past: History beyond our differences, published this month.

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13th March: Civil Service in Favour of Historical Advisors by Joshua Chambers

Experts back Butler in call to appoint historical advisers

Whitehall experts have backed former cabinet secretary Lord Butler in calling for all departments to appoint historical advisers

Writing in this issue of CSW, Butler says: “I believe that each department should appoint a historical adviser, not to advise on the historical background to every problem with which a department has to deal – no single person could have the expertise to do that – but to put the policymakers in contact with a source of such expertise.”

Since the tight spending review, many departments have dismantled their historical units. But Whitehall historian Lord Hennessy told CSW on Monday that “if just once or twice in a Parliament, on a big piece of policymaking, an element of historical context had prevented seriously flawed clauses from ending up in legislation, these historical advisers would be paid for several times over.” He added that “a historian can inject an element of humility when the politicians are singing themselves lullabies.”

Meanwhile, noted historian Sir David Cannadine – currently teaching at Princeton – also backed Lord Butler’s proposal, saying “most government ministers live very intensely in the present. They often don’t know much about the history of their department when they weren’t in charge of it. They aren’t allowed to see the papers of their predecessors, and live in some historical vacuum.”

Butler told CSW that historical advice would be particularly useful when considering civil service reform, noting that “a lot of what has been proposed in the government’s latest programme for reform was actually done in the 1980s and 1990s, when I was head of the civil service.”

Dr Catherine Haddon of the Institute for Government commented that “successive governments have failed to learn the lessons from history about how to achieve civil service reforms, and the current government has an opportunity to do this differently. Better historical advice in departments could also be a means to address their understanding of their institutional history.”

Hennessy also said that historical advice should be used to inform public expenditure reductions, noting that “the announcements on state spending at the dispatch box very rarely pan out as intended”.

He added that “there’s always an element of wishful thinking. For example, I really don’t think that the Territorial Army can be boosted to compensate for cuts in regular Army people. The past would suggest that this is going to be very difficult”.

Butler – who conducted a review of the intelligence around the Iraq war in 2004 – writes that “critics legitimately wonder how much those who took decisions about intervention in Iraq really knew about the history of those troubled regions.” And Foreign Office (FCO) chief historian Professor Patrick Salmon told CSW that “people should have known more about the complexities of Iraq – Tony Blair said that recently himself – and they should have known more about Afghanistan.”

However, the FCO has been praised for investing in its historical unit and research analysts under the coalition government. “I’ve seen the future and it works, and it’s the Foreign and Commonwealth Office,” Hennessy said.

Asked to comment, a Cabinet Office spokesperson said: “Improving policy development is a fundamental part of the Civil Service Reform Plan, which seeks to link more closely policy-making to implementation. Open policy-making will be the default, drawing on a wide range of views and expertise from inside and outside the civil service”.

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8th March, the very useful "NEST" for blogs at Hodder History already has the four pieces by Alex Ford on the proposed new curriculum, and now a blog has just been added with a summary of the Historical Association meeting that was held this week at the British Library. The piece is written by Richard Kennet, and he has come away hopeful, that the constructive discussions will feed into finding a way forward to influence the Gove ministry on the NC. You can find it here: http://bit.ly/WQ1Qzy

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7th March, BBC Radio3: Interesting that Danny Boyle was asked about his take on the History Curriculum whilst interviewed on BBC Radio 3''s Nightwaves this week. What does Danny Boyle think about the teaching of history in schools? He talked movingly about the responsibiity of the national historical narrative having resonance for kids today in multicultural Britain. To find section on history curriculum, you need to go to 7.57 mins IN to the podcast. Listen here to the master of Olympic ceremonies http://bbc.in/XUp9Lg (Also, recommend Jonathan Friedland in feature interview on Danny Boyle,where he reflects on "Isles of Wonder" & finding his inner patriotism: http://gu.com/p/3e8pj/tw via @guardian)

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6th March, Tristram Hunt has piece in The Times, "It's Right For Schools To Put British History First?" where he states that he has a soft spot for Tory Ministers (as the wonderful Raph Samuel had done) because "at least they cared". His piece ends elegantly saying that Gove is still working on the first draft of history !

"It’s Right For Schools To Put British History First" by Tristram Hunt

Michael Gove’s new curriculum has serious flaws. But at least he cares
about the subject.

The communist historian Raphael Samuel always had a soft spot for Tory education
ministers. Their version of history might be a Whiggish, tub-thumping tale of insular
heroism but “at least they cared about the subject”.

So too with Michael Gove. For all the criticism levelled at the Secretary of State for
Education’s new history curriculum he is passionate about the past. What is more,
he is right to put British history at the forefront of teaching. The extraordinarily
aggressive response by teachers and professionals to the Gove plans misreads
history’s place in the education system. Unlike chemistry or English literature,
teaching history involves not just traditional academic skills, but also difficult
questions of identity and citizenship. This is the reason why its revision inspires
such fury and why it is right for democratically elected politicians to be involved in
framing the content.

At the heart of the controversy is the question of Britishness. Critics suggest that in
a modern, globalised world, dominated by China and India, it is backward and worng-
headed to promote some updated version of “Our Island Story.” Surely, tomorrow’s
citizens should study Benin and Bangladesh as much as Great Britain?

In fact, in a multicultural society where civic ties are weaker, it is more important
than ever to put British history above other national narratives. And it is vital to
do so within the classroom as the traditional levers for inculcating a sense of the
past – extended families, churches and chapels, Cubs and Scouts, political parties –
are atrophying. A cohesive society requires a sense of national identity developed
through a sympathetic and reflexive account of the British past.

And I will, for a moment, leave aside the obvious contradiction in Gove’s schem:
given that most schools will soon be academies, none will be legally obliged to
follow any of his curriculum.

For progressives, a focus on British history should be welcome: a sense of
historical struggle – the line of march – was a traditional prerequisite for Labour
pamphleteering. Michael Foot liked to recall how his Liberal father Isaac’s
interweaving of past and present informed his political philosophy, “Historical
figures and their historical counterparts melted into one,” Foot wrote. “Brewers,
protectionists, papists, apologists for Lord North and the Chamberlain family,
Spanish tyrants and Stuart kings, men of Munich and Suez, sons of Belial and
Beelzebub, normally disguised as West Country Tories, an especially reprehensible
branch of the species.”

I think Michael Foot might have welcomed a curriculum that includes the Levellers,
the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists and Annie Besant. Let’s hope the publicity
surrounding the new syllabus might even help to address the criminal gap that still
exists in access to history between middle and working-class communities. In
Knowsley, near Liverpool, only 16.8 per cent of pupils entered for history GCSE,
in contrast with 45.4 per cent in Richmond upon Thames. Whole generations are
denied a sense of national belonging – let alone the sheer richness of the past.
But if that is the ambition, the tragedy is that Mr Gove’s curriculum is not the way
to do it. It is too dense, prescriptive and wholly unrealistic about the appropriate
learning. I think my five-year-old is a bright boy, but I fear Digby will struggle with concepts of nationhood and the heptarchy. There is no sense of priority and I doubt if non-specialist primary school teachers can guide pupils from 5th-century Athens tothe 1707 union of Parliaments.

The curriculum also reveals an engrained parochialism. Yes, let’s teach British
history, but in a global context. We want children to have a richer sense of our
national past, but to locate it in an international context. It would be wonderful to
more seven-year-olds to learn of Florence Nightingale, but they could be taught her
work promoting sanitary reform in Bombay. The curriculum highlights “the growth
and industrialisation of cities”, but can the history of Liverpool really be separated
from Ireland or China? And we do need to be very careful about the “unique evil of
the Holocaust”, when, in fact, that evil had a long and dark prehistory.

Ironically, the root of the problem lies in an unfortunate misreading of history. Tony
Blair often reflected that he was too slow with his first-term reforms and Mr Gove,
with his self-appointed bastard acoloyte, has responded with a breakneck programme
of change. As with GCSE abolition, the result is chaos.

Mr Gove needs the humility to listen to teachers and ease up. Gove, the perpetual
journalist, has produced the first draft of history, It requires serious revision. But at
least he cares.

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6th March Independent has a curious article "Chalk Talk" about teaching history as mystery: "ChalkTalk. How to Make Those History Lessons Go With a Bang" - Find the article here:http://ind.pn/10hgxlS

4th March Blog by Glen O'Hara with title "England's proposed History Curriculum: Should it really be a political football? is a good piece of policy journalism and Glen reflects that it is not much of a curriculum, and and not much of a 'debate' either. Find the blog:http://tinyurl.com/bv86xmp

4th March Rebecca Atkinson of the Museums Association has asked for feedback from museum practitioners and there are pros and cons from museum professionals to the changes, especially with some keen that a wider chronological range may make very good use of the resources in collections. However, there are concerns that the children and their learning capacity needs to be forefronted. The start of the Museum Association Conversation is here, and will be updated when they complete their consultation. See mus.ms/15zswdy

3rd March there was 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

----------------------------------

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

-------------------------

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

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.

----------------------------------------------------------

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

http://m.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/feb/16/historians-gove-curriculum

http://m.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2013/feb/16/history-curriculum-letters

Alex Ford

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

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Mr Gove and his horrible heptarchical history

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