SIMON SCHAMA spoke at the Hay Festival #Hay13 and slammed Gove's reforms to the history curriculum as "1066 & All That without the jokes".  It was a call to arms for history teachers to confront Gove's "insulting and offensive" attitude over the draft history curriculum changes, because of the disastrous impact they would have, if implemented,  for history teachers and students, and to rise up and "tell Michael Gove what you think of it".  A FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Schama event at Hay is available here (please scroll down in this window) see below! 

The history curriculum debate has been given air time and prime news space numerous times over the past months 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

In this section, 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 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 transcription of the Moral Maze R4 debate.  The latest content is a transcription from historyworks of the excellent interview on April 25th on BBC Radio 3 with Simon Schama about Dead Certainties & his views on the National Curriculum proposals, also the debate on BBC Radio 3's NIGHTWAVES of 2nd April, foregrounding an interview with David Cannadine, followed by a debate with Stephen Drew, Sheila Lawlah, Dinah Birch, and Tristram Hunt, MP.

Please browse through the content below, and please credit historyworks if you use one of our broadcast transcriptions.

SIMON SCHAMA SPEAKING AT THE HAY FESTIVAL 30TH MAY 2013 #Hay13

Please note that Simon Schama was speaking in a huge rush of energy and dynamism, so when you read the text below you'll have to imagine Simon pacing about and interacting with the audience, without a lot of punctuation, and sometimes small segues that are not well conveyed in a transcript, when they make total sense when spoken as parenthesis!  

Please do use this transcription for discussions and quotations, especially #historyteacher, and #histed, and all that is asked is that you acknowledge that this website content is creative commons rather than copyright, so you credit @historyworkstv

Simon Schama (with thanks to Hay Festival Wire for sharing the sound files for this transcription)

Hay Festival 30/05/2013 4.30pm/5.30pm

My heroes, history teachers! Welcome! I’m just your warm-up act and your enabler today!

There are lots and lots of you, stand-up wherever you are – I’ve always wanted teachers to stand-up. [APPLAUSE] The rest of you have to do the exam before we let you out of here… [LAUGHTER]

Teachers, I’m one of you actually (in my minor function at Columbia University in New York), and you know that history is a serious matter, never more so than perhaps now. It’s not just a stroll down memory lane and it’s not Downton Abbey, it’s Westminster Abbey or Tintern Abbey. It’s not just the romance of bustles and butlers. It counts, it matters, and it effects how we feel about each other as a connected family of memory.

It’s very appropriate we’re [at the Hay Festival] having this conversation on the border of England and Wales. I hope some of you will actually talk in a bit, or vent as this is an opportunity for venting – venting actually sounds like a Welsh word- it probably isn’t - but maybe we’ll turn it into one!

History matters perhaps now more than ever because we’re at that moment in our country’s history where we’re not quite sure where the borders of our country are and what connects and what might disconnect us.  We’re at the moment where there’s a kind of fierce political movement inside England, which is all about turning its back on Europe (UKIP).

We’re at the moment when it’s possible that Scotland might become an independent country once more. It’s interesting to me that in the checklist of Michael Gove’s desiderata for things that must be known, the Act of Union whereby Scotland (in a kind of shamefully corrupted way) became part of the Union is not one of the necessary topics.

We’re also at a time when issues of allegiance are very distressing. We’re faced constantly with the issue of whether or not fanatical religious ideology should overcome and overturn any other bonds of the allegiance of memory and the stories that we share together.

So history is not just a stroll down memory lane, as all of you fantastic teachers know. It’s an important thing and it’s something that’s not just simply the antique furniture polish that covers our culture. It will determine for our children whether we do feel connected as a country. It’s important that the Royal family does what it does, it’s important that we felt as good as we seemed to have felt last year about the Olympic Games and the Jubilee.

There has to be more than that and it has to be a living thing. Our kids have to know and probably all you kids out there do know already why the Magna Carta (coming up for its 800th anniversary) made a difference, not just to England but to the world. A difference which turned out to be in some places, but not in others, happily irreversible.

[The teaching of history in our schools] is an important issue and with this in mind, about two and a half years ago I was weirdly volunteered by Michael Gove, (who in many ways I admire and respect), to not be what was preposterously called History Tzar – I’m not a Tzar, - Jews feel very funny about being the Tzar of anything if you’re on the receiving end of Tzarishness. But [I was asked] to say a word or two about how the national curriculum might be looked at once again.

I was, along with other people, concerned a bit about what seemed to be the disconnectedness of history teaching in schools, not because the national curriculum, as relatively recently revised and reconstructed, did not provide for a coherent continuous chronology.  The importance of the aim [for a continuous chronology] is announced yet again in the rubric to the most recent suggestions set out in Michael Gove’s document (in February of this year). 

Because those of you who are history teachers know that in theory you look at the [present] national curriculum and it does take you through - the Middle Ages, Early Modern European period - and it talks about the relationship of Royal power, Parliament and the Industrial Revolution, - but in practice it works out rather differently.

It wasn’t long before I discovered what really counted and what made it very difficult to actually fulfill or realise the aim of coherent and continuous chronology, (and of infrastructural things that have absolutely nothing to do with the ostensible content or subject guidelines of the national curriculum) - namely not enough hours of teaching, -not enough specialist educated history teachers, - and for my part the unsatisfactory situation by which it is possible to finish an education of history - at the age of fourteen!

There are some huge differences between what independent schools are able to offer by way of number of hours, (amount of classroom time), and what state schools and academies could or are prepared to offer – now that’s barely scratched the surface [of where the issues are that we need to talk about]  I hope I have some primary school teachers here that can talk about the particular difficulties they face. With this in mind, there were these hard-core knotty infrastructural problems that got in the way of the old national curriculum delivering on what it had promised.

I went to sit in classrooms and I listened to what teachers had to say - and very quickly I found how brilliantly and heroically many of you actually manage to enrich the lives of the students - while having to deal with these really fierce constraints of time. The issue of the constraints of time [are real] – I know we’re in a difficult period in terms of the job market, economic skills, and the practical skills that we want our kids to actually acquire.

The non-functional subjects are inevitably going to be squeezed a bit. I know also, because look at all of you here, that many of you are passionate about giving our kids a sense of the kind of country or countries to which they belong. As I say, I was really incredibly impressed when I went to sit down with kids.

I went to Docklands Primary School for example, where a very limited number of the children had parents for whom English was a first language and yet these very little kids were doing a unit about Queen Victoria’s childhood and the process by which she became Queen. It was entrancing and they were completely into it and that was rather wonderful.

I went to Grey Coat Hospital School in Westminster, a school of mixed cultures again, and there, even though there wasn’t a deliberately specified module set out, the history teacher there taught a wonderful unit (that was maybe early Keystage 3) on what the experience of London was like where we were sitting. It wasn’t just an academic [lesson] with a big A or a small a, it was really about the fate of London in the years between 1665 and 1667. It followed that incredible trifecta of catastrophe that occurred in the country from the Great Plague, through the fire, and to the Dutch invasion of 1667.

They were engaged not just by the accounts of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn but with maps of London, trying to imagine what would happen when you began with a pandemic. So the very clever teacher was thinking about the difficulties of SARS or influenza epidemics and what that would be like in a culture and a time long ago with very limited public health facilities and no aspirins or pharmaceuticals.

They were both effortlessly wiring together the experience of a long time ago with how the kids might actually internalise it in their contemporary lives. This was not a dumbing down or a vulgarisation of a knotty historical question because buried in there the teacher was doing exactly what great history teachers do, namely telling a story that generates questions.

That is what history is, - it is storytelling - that generates an analytical sensibility - and serious, - deep, - profound, - questions!

I went to Cottenham Village School in Cambridge and there was the Hitler bit, and it was a good hour on the Reichstag fire -  and I was one of the people who thought ‘enough of the Third Reich already’ – I always remember that Alan Coren, the Punch humourist, had to collect a volume of his essays and he was told that Punch humour might or might not sell. [He was also told that] the three categories of books that always sold were animal books, books about golf, and the third one were any books about the Third Reich. So he called his book Golfing for Cats and on the front cover there was nothing but an enormous swastika. So I went into the swastika classroom and these kids were absolutely brilliant.

There was a good whiteboard presentation and they knew what the architecture of the Reichstag looked like before it was burnt, they knew about the shifty relationship between the ultra-nationalists of the right and completely way-out Nazis. There was nothing really that I would have asked of my own undergraduates at university that they were not engaging with!

I thought this was extraordinary and that it still might be possible, - given changing the infrastructural constraints,  - to structurally make something of the curriculum we have. However, I was sympathetic and still am sympathetic to an attempt to give an over-arching chronological story from the beginning to the end, - as Michael Gove wants, - but then this document appeared before us all in February of this year!

Now I’m sure that Michael Gove did not actually want to give us 1066 and All That without the jokes, but that is pretty much what we’ve got I think!

What is extraordinary, and history teachers I’m sure you’ve looked at this since you might live in trembling fear and trepidation of having to teach a nine year old the heptarchy, is I want to say to Michael Gove, ‘Now Michael, let’s you and I go into a class of nine year olds and do the Kingdom of Mercia with them shall we? How are you proposing to do that?’

I would love also to bring Michael into a classroom and to do the entirety of not just the English but the English, Scottish and Irish Civil Wars in something like forty five minutes. If you actually take the number of statutory, non-negotiable, indispensable items on the document that we now have [as set out Gove’s draft national history curriculum] and that all my friends out there are going to have to teach, that’s what it comes down to!  Whoosh, there was Disraeli!  Whoosh, there was Gladstone! All whipping past one. The French Revolution, if it’s lucky, may get a drive-by ten minutes!

It’s sort of the Gradgrindian philosophy of historical pedagogy!

All you can do, is put salient facts up on the board, have the kids remember them - and see if they remember them - or have forgotten them next week - or the week after. There is no possibility of telling the story to generate questions even though question asking is actually specified in a rather eloquent and sympathetic way in part of the rubric to the new syllabus.

It may have been a little bit much for the New Statesman to say this is not a curriculum and that it is more like a pub quiz, but they were on to something!   How much faith can you put in a document which seemed to believe that Adam Smith was English? Truly astonishing that he’s in a list of figures who are said to be part of the English enlightenment – don’t tell that to Alex Salmond!

The list of subjects seems to be essentially memories of A Level work circa 1965 embalmed in an aspic, and then sprinkled over the aspic is a garnishing of tokenism. Mary Seacole is there for example but not Mary Wollstonecraft. You wouldn’t know that British history is also about people other than white males, except that there was some little tokenism of the wrong kind here and there. It’s absolutely the wrong kind in my view…

But as I say, it makes it completely impossible to engage the kids, particularly in Keystage 3, with the issue of asking hard questions and having questions generated out of the narrative which you’re providing. If you take one example that I thought screamed of a kind of insulting, offensive, imperviousness to what it takes to wire together the past to the gloriously but challengingly changed character of Britain. It was three words in one item on this new national curriculum and these three words were “Clive of India”.

Think of what Britain is like now. This is not tokenism, it’s very important - and not just for those from an Asian origin, - but for all of us to know what the relationship between our eighteenth century Britain and the fate of the Indian subcontinent was. Couldn’t Michael Gove (or whomever was talking to him) put himself in the position of a small boy in Bradford, - Southall - or somewhere like that - saying ‘Dad, what are we doing here?’ [This could apply] for different cultures too, for a Jewish, Afro-Caribbean culture. How did this happen to be? How did we come to be British?

And believe you me, the answer is not "Clive" "of" India” ! The reason it isn’t Clive of India is because Clive of India, along with Wolfe and Quebec, was also embalmed in those foxed pages of ancient imperial histories in our island and empire stories of the 1950s and 1960s. Robert Clive was a sociopathic, corrupt thug, whose business in India was essentially to enrich himself, his co-soldiers and traders as quickly and outrageously as possible. He makes Fred Goodwin look like a combination of Mary Poppins and Jesus Christ by comparison.

Maybe that was Michael’s idea! That you actually have an example of someone for whom criminal squalor was the point of the exercise.

The issue I take with Robert Clive is his ultimate insignificance. There is a huge story behind Clive of India, - namely - how did the British come to be in India in the first place - and how did a trading company, The East India Company, - come to be a government of pretty much an entire subcontinent of a hundred million people?

That is an extraordinary story and that is one of the great stories of how we came to be the Britain we are, and how we were the Britain that we were in the period of the Durbars in the high nineteenth century. To answer that question - you certainly need more than the kind of forty minute drive-by you’ll get if you abide by the national curriculum guidelines.

You need to ask one much bigger question than knowing all you can know about Clive of India: what was eighteenth century India like? What was wrong with the Mugal Empire, what was the Maratha Confederacy and why was it incapable of resisting the intrusion of the British? But more particularly, and this is not to make a kind of cheaply anti-Imperial point, is neither to congratulate nor to deplore the experience under the British Empire, it is tounderstandits causal reality.

The crucial thing is what was that shift by which a failed trading company, The East India Company, discovered it could make more money by putting itself in charge of the government of Bengal, then of Madras, then of Bombay and then of an enormous expanse of the subcontinent? How was it that the business of government came to supplant the business of business? That is the story!

Now, to do that, you need to know real Indian history (not in impossible detail) with the help of myriad online sources, maps, diaries and all the things you’re using. It does presuppose that you are interested, as the rubric of the national curriculum says we all ought to be (and bravo to it), in the history of other people than ourselves.

This brings me at length to a sense of a conversation we might have in a minute, about why history is important for children and what we want to give our kids. The glory of history in the western tradition, about which we need not be apologetic for a minute, goes back to its founding fathers, Herodotus and Thucydides.

In my view it really does [go back to the founding fathers] because history in the end, for those of us who have been lucky enough to practice it, write it and read it, does certain things – in the first place the word itself in Greek, “historia”, is simultaneously a narrative and it is a matter of enquiry. I’m told by classical scholars more learned than I, that it meant the two things indistinguishably and it occurs in the first line of Herodotus’ great history.

So it is storytelling from which question asking is necessarily inseparable. Secondly, it is about the history of other people and people disconnected from us in time and space and sometimes in culture too.

One of the most remarkable things about Herodotus’ history is that he is so fascinated with the Persians, the enemy, as well as the remains of the Syrian and Babylonian culture and the Egyptians. It’s the first real attempt at an Egyptian ethnography and it’s not coincidental because Herodotus was not from Athens, he was an Ionian and inveterate traveller.

I always think of him as one of those people you come across in a carriage in a train (going to, say Newcastle) and he will not shut up!  Then you realise - after having been irritated - how grateful you are the Herodotus figure will not shut up - telling you where he’s been in his life and times.

That is the glory of chatty, pluralistic, open-mindedness about the enemy and about people who are not like us. Thucydides is, of course, the flintier figure altogether. To Thucydides we owe the more aggressively analytical and philosophically embedded sense - that history will tell us what the human condition is - and it will tell us about the uses and the abuses of power. It too will tell stories - but they need to be chastening stories.

Thucydides was a general who had fought on the northern theatre of the Peloponnesian War - and looked upon the history of what became the Athenian Empire when it committed the act of hubris, which was the campaign to Sicily - with horror. The narrative arc is meant to culminate in those great debates about whether or not to go to Syracuse.

The great confrontation between the young and feckless glamorous adventurer Alcibiades and the wise old Lysias, who nonetheless is prepared to follow orders even though he knows it’s going to lead to catastrophe. And for Thucydides history is not about self-congratulation and it’s not about tracing the pedigree of the wonderfulness of us, nor is it about tracing the pedigree of the reprehensibly awful nature of us either.

It is a chastening, disenchanted, honest, tough-minded version of looking critically at ourselves and seeing what we have become and where we came from.

Historians, for Thucydides, are meant to keep the powerful awake at night and keep them honest.

I come from a culture where I teach in America and there is a lot of tremendous history being written and being taught!  But, if anything,  it suffers slightly from a sense of insular self-congratulation. If we take our two Greek founding fathers together: you take Herodotus’ aversion to the insularity of history and his attempt to say we cannot understand what makes us Greeks and what makes us come together as a particular cultural force in the world unless we understand Persia, Egypt and Asia Minor.

Then you take Thucydides’ aversion to history as a chronology of national self-congratulation, you have the glory and honour of western history. That is really what we need to instil and those are the things in my view that ought to animate a construction of a national curriculum.

Some of you teachers may not feel the same way - and feel we have enough time to teach history, - that it’s just the way that the national curriculum is set out now that it is so misguided that we can’t do it. Although - it seems to me - that it is not impossible to do this coherent chronology. It needs to be somewhere between the national curriculum as was, (in other words these only slightly arbitrarily connected modules), and this [Gove’s] pedantic and utopian scheme of knowing the names of the main Chartists!   It does need to have nodes (I don’t want to call them modules), - it wants to have concentrations ofquestions.

Here’s one, for example, - it was absolutely astonishing to me that in this national curriculum that something that was incredibly important to British culture - and I mean Scottish, Irish and Welsh culture, - namely -everyone, - is missing and that isreligion!

Religion and its relation to secular power. I mean it says Henry II and Becket but of course the absolutely crucial issue lying behind that very dense knotty and all important issue of medieval history, which we’re supposed to teach to our ten year olds or younger, is the relationship between the Papacy and the Angevin, later Plantagenet, sense of their own independent sovereignty.

Why would our children not understand the importance of a debate between allegiances to God or to the King? Should they clash? To God in the figure of the Pope or to the King? I think that is something pretty much all our kids, I would have thought, would be able to get to grips with.

Staggeringly the word 'Puritanism' does not appear in the national curriculum list of must know-abouts. Whereas it’s inconceivable that you’d be able to understand how we came to chop Charles I’s head off, how Cromwell came to be Cromwell, if you don’t actually know the substance and content of Puritanism! There’s not a word on the Union of Crowns or how the King James Bible came to be conceived of as an act that would bind the different Christian communities of the country together.

I think there are concentrated areas where these big questions might be asked. For example, the relationship between industrial energy in the nineteenth century and an extraordinary presence of what we might call the social and moral conscious of the tribunes of Victorian England. It is rather amazing that the great and immense read figures of Victorian Britain are those who are most hostile to the ethos of material accumulation, namely Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens and John Ruskin.

In a sense they’re the top three, I can think of all sorts of other people too,  such as Pugin,  and so on. Not to mention that the Manchester manufacturer Friedrich Engels and the importance of the 1844 report The Condition of the Working Class in England don’t feature on the list. You can’t not only understand the nature of the Victorian conscience but you can’t understand where the Labour party and trade unionism will eventually come from unless you understand how electrifying, dramatic and powerful the social conscience was in Victorian England.

It’s something to be proud of, to celebrate - and something for the kids to engage with when they think about our own condition now - and the relationship of the public conscience to private cupidity - and the roaring nature of the economic system.

The issue I want to hear from you about is - should you as teachers just fling this back in the teeth of the Department for Education as full of impossibilities and absurdities, - or should we work with it?  Are there things in the national curriculum with which you’re working now - that are just fine - or should that be abandoned altogether? What is it you want and how do you feel?

Parents too, you’re absolutely part of this debate!  Tell me, what’s on your mind? I want to now go to as many questions as possible…

Q&A (text of the Q& A session coming here soon...) 

Nightwaves - Simon Schama

Reflections on Dead Certainties & views on Gove's History Curriculum proposal

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ryv0x

First broadcast: 22:00, 25th April 2013

CREDITS: BBC Production Team @BBCNightWaves

Presenter: Anne McElvoy @annemcelvoy

Producer: Philippa Ritchie @PippaRitchie

Link to BBC audio: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ryv0x

TRANSCRIPTION

ANNE MCELVOY Simon Schama is a prolific historian and broadcaster, best known for his prize-winning work on the French Revolution, America and the inter-twining of history and art. But one of his books that has unleashed some fierce arguments about his approach to the past isDead Certainties. It’s a mixture of fiction and meditation on the unreliability of historical versions centred on two inter-linked stories. The first is the death of General Wolfe, -  and the link between personal destiny and the need to create heroes, a convenient truth constructed in this case by Benjamin West’s famous portrait of the heroic death of Wolfe at the battle with the French for Quebec.Dead Certaintiesis alive and kicking and has just been republished two decades after its first outing.  But, in an era of first person memoirs and deconstruction of narrative history, -  does fictionalising history still perturb us? Simon Schama joins me.

Simon, the book did create quite a stir at the time, - why do you think this response to the intermingling of fact and fiction was so strong?

SIMON SCHAMA Who knows? It didn’t cause Tolstoy any problems. Whoops, no I’m not comparing myself to Tolstoy. It was because I broke with the guild rules. It was perfectly okay for novelists to write a bit of non-fiction every so often, -  or in the case of Penelope Lively who wrote an absolutely wonderful book calledMoon Tigerthat won the Booker Prize – it ought not to be forgotten and I don’t think is. It was about an elderly historian trying to do the same thing and write a history of the world while facing her end. It was possible to write a work of fiction about the problems which all historians face whether they’re doing fiction or non-fiction. Even Hilary Mantel would admit she faced it. Are you actually really there? What do your sources tell you? What do you imagine? Can you ever bridge the distance between your imagined sense of what goes on among the dead and the way you write about it?

ANNE MCELVOY But they sound like very reasonable questions, -  and questions that have stalked history since Thucydides or Herodutus?  But it DID cause a stir, -  and you say you broke the rules of the guild?

SIMON SCHAMA Simply by creating two novellas. It came afterCitizens, my book on the French Revolution, - and that was a book where none of the seams were allowed to show - both of which are actually homages to nineteenth century history writing and their difficulties. ButCitizens, - was meant to deliver a smooth-faced epic of something that was very troubling. What I really wanted to do was turn the quilt round, -  and show the seams, the ragged edges and the different bits and pieces -  that had to go together to make a story. I actually wanted  to have the freedom to be able to imagine the troubles of historians doing that – living and walking and listening to the murmur and rustle of the ghosts. I was just pathetically naïve.  I thought, -  “I’m a writer, a historian, a Prof, I have students and I’m not going to tell them that there is no difference between fiction and non-fiction”.  Once you invent anything at all, - you’re committing fiction, - I happily do so!  So this funny book is essentially a book of fiction which has bits of non-fiction in it, hence the slightly outrageous, presumptuous non-comparison with Tolstoy!

ANNE MCELVOY I was going to say, having not quite compared yourself to Tolstoy, you do …

SIMON SCHAMA I so didn’t!  But, -  you know what I mean…

ANNE MCELVOY I do but it’s just so much fun to tease you about that. You do mention Thucydides versus Herodotus and this long standing tension about the writing of history and indeed what history really is. Tell us about that.

SIMON SCHAMA The wonderfulness of Herodotus is myth, legend and bizarre things that couldn’t possibly have happened being embedded in that story of Greeks against Persians. He almost has this Homeric quality. It’s a kind of gossipy magic world that Herodotus inhabits so he’s the kind of warm-blooded, incontinent, gossipy figure from the Ionian Islands. I always ask my students, -  “if you were trapped on a desert island, -  would you want to be with Thucydides or Herodotus”  -  and there are no votes for Thucydides!  That is because Thucydides is basically our friend Paxman or Humphrys [BBC Current Affairs] Thucydides is ferocious, analytical and thinks of himself as really hard-edged, -  and never going beyond the documented fact. Well, -  guess what, - Thucydides makes Pericles’ speech up!  He admits it whilst castigating Herodotus!  He admits the fact that he based the most famous speech in the defence of democracy on what someone had told him might have been the case when Pericles addressed the citizens of Athens!

ANNE MCELVOY So you obviously have great fun in this book, -  turning the quilt over, - knitting these two ways of looking at history together, -  as well as the enjoyability of writing fiction, - which must be quite nice?

SIMON SCHAMA I did want to write something set in Boston. There was a weird and extraordinary coincidence last week with the book coming out.  It made it feel so poignant that I lived in Boston for thirteen years. Rather unusually for a Professor, -  we lived in Boston nearby the State House, -  and I loved the kind of strange, tweedy, slightly surly, repressed half-curmudgeon and half-whimsical quality of old Boston. There’s a wonderful place, -  in Massachusetts Historical Society, (near the Museum of Fine Arts), - and it is one of those great old Bostonian places with a processional staircase. I asked to see the papers that they had about the second story inDead Certaintiesabout the killing of a Harvard benefactor by a Harvard Professor. The archivists came to me with a box, -  and turned the box up, -  and these letters spilled onto the table. They were the letters to the Governor of Massachusetts, (a lay preacher named George Briggs), - at the time of this internationally famous murder trial. I thought, -  here they are, - these things screaming in funny little inks, - some of it actually green from the 1840s, - and if I can reproduce the kind of slightly terrifying strangeness of this in the Boston story, -  that would be worth knowing and doing.

ANNE MCELVOY They were waiting for a historian to come along all those years, -  weren’t they?  The thing that interests me a lot about this, -  is that things have moved on quite a bit since you first brought out this book. We have a lot more first person narrative, -  and some very serious academic historians write in this genre, - some of whom we’ve had on the programme recently, - talking about the industrial revolution through diaries and letters.  So this idea, -  that it’s okay to find other prisms into history than just the direct source, - things that you can say are absolutely solid or can be checked against something else, - seems to be more accepted. Do you therefore think thatDead Certaintieswas ahead of its time, -  but it’s no longer as shocking as it was?

SIMON SCHAMA You’re absolutely right, - it’s like one of those things you find in old Quality Street boxes or something. It’s charming of its time. I’m not really selling this book very well am I? I think you’re absolutely right, however I would say that what I think is becoming much more popular and rightly so, -  are historical events which don’t necessarily need a hard-focussed resolution. You can line up all these versions of history and not come out necessarily with a final version – I wouldn’t want to do this in primary school Michael Gove, if you’re listening…

ANNE MCELVOY Oh well, funny you should say that!  As we’ve got you, an eminent historian on the programme! Where do you stand now on the Gove debate, -  on how much history should be taught on facts and dates, - and how much of that on differing interpretations?

SIMON SCHAMA They shouldn’t be mutually incompatible. The real horror of history teaching is that you only get an hour per week in most schools, an hour and a half if you’re lucky. Actually you can’t do Michael Gove’s facts and dates if you’re only going to have an hour and a half a week or less.

ANNE MCELVOY Most people asked about their subject would say, -  there’s not enough of [hours] it.  If you have to boil it down, -  there is a big argument there. There is Richard Evans, Regius Professor at Cambridge, - who said “this is the wrong way to go” and “that it is the pub quiz version of history”.  Are YOU backing or sacking Gove?

SIMON SCHAMA Well,  that is the sneering Professor really saying that it is ‘the pub view of history’ – what does that mean? It is important that kids know who Nelson was, - I don’t feel apologetic about that, -  but it’s important that they also know how suffragism happened. It’s important for them to know that there are competing views, [for example] - should Britain have been involved in the First World War? And, above all [it is important for it] not to be parochially British - that is what I have against the current Gove proposals.

ANNE MCELVOY Are they parochially British?

SIMON SCHAMA Yes they are too parochially British.

ANNE MCELVOY In what way?

SIMON SCHAMA What I’ve seen is essentially a procession of British events, -  with a nod to embracing the history of the world when Britannia ruled the waves. That is not good. You can’t really understand why we got into our own drug war (the Opium Wars of the 1840s and I’m not sure that is on the hit-list of Michael Gove) unless you understand the decay, humiliation and impotence of the Qing Empire at that particular moment.

ANNE MCELVOY It’s interesting that you talk about historical focus on events away from Britain. You took General Wolfe who is very much a romantic figure of empire, admittedly you take lots of figures, but why him and not somebody else?

SIMON SCHAMA It could have been somebody that became a celebrity martyr. He was pretty much the first.

ANNE MCELVOY So it’s not him, it’s the manner…

SIMON SCHAMA Yes, it’s the fact that…

ANNE MCELVOY …you say he dies many times.

SIMON SCHAMA Yes,  I do!  Because Benjamin West copies the painting he makes of Wolfe’s death and it becomes a matter of monument in Westminster Abbey. He becomes that very worldly, Hanoverian culture’s equivalent of a Christian saint and martyr. And all the way to Gordon of Khartoum, Florence Nightingale,  and David Livingstone,  Empire…

ANNE MCELVOY I wonder if you’ve set off something you can’t entirely control, -  because there is also such a postmodernism about the study of history. People say there is an eternal relativism, -  and that you can never get to a truth. Would that be an unwelcome conclusion?

SIMON SCHAMA No, I don’t hold that view at all. I think history’s job, even if it does say it is difficult to get to the truth, is to say this is how it really happened. History should do everything it can to flee from falsehood,  and it has an awful lot of work to do in order to make that happen. This was just a book, a piece of fiction about how hard it is to do even that!

ANNE MCELVOY Thanks to Simon Schama, and Dead Certainties is published by Granta this week: 

http://grantabooks.com/Dead-Certainties-2

BBC 3 Night Waves - History at School

CREDITS: BBC Production Team

Presenter: Rana Mitter

Producer: Neil Trevithick

GUESTS:

David Cannadine, Sir (Prof of History, Princeton)

Tristram Hunt MP, (History Lecturer, Queen Mary, University of London)

Sheila Lawlor, (Director of the think tank, Politeia)

Stephen Drew, (Headteacher, Brentwood County High School)

Dinah Birch (ProVC for Research & KE, Prof of English Literature, Liverpool)

Link to audio:First Broadcast: BBC Radio 3 : 2nd April 2013 via @BBC3Nightwaves:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01rl338/Night_Waves_History_in_Schools/

TRANSCRIPTION produced by team at Historyworks (do credit/acknowledge if you use our transcript: see our policy on our website for copyright is Creative Commons)

RANA MITTER Hello. “The future is certain, it is the past that is unpredictable.” That comment is attributed to an old Soviet bureaucrat. But in recent weeks the person who has being putting the unpredictability into the study of the past is the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove. He is unhappy about the way in which history is taught in our schools and in particular the lack of concentration on British history.

In February his office announced a new draft history curriculum. Many welcomed it as a return to traditional historical values and chronology, but to its critics it seems to concentrate on the British Isles to the exclusion of Europe and the wider world, as well as being keener on transmitting facts than fostering debate.  All the same, history remains at the heart of arguments about national identity  - at a time when - immigration, Europe, and globalisation are more important than ever. At the moment, in many respects, history is the national debate so Nightwaves is bringing its spotlight to bear with a special edition - on what the present should make of the past - as taught in schools.

Earlier I asked David Cannadine, one of Britain’s most distinguished historians, his views about how we should teach history.  But first I asked him to reimagine himself as a precocious schoolboy and tell me what he first remembered being taught in a history class.

DAVID CANNADINE The first thing I remember being taught or asked to do was to draw a map of a farm with the agricultural rotation system, and I can’t now remember the different crops but I can remember there was a fallow field. There were three crops I think and there was a fallow field which had to be left to recover and then the next year it all altered. I’m pretty sure that that’s about the first thing I learned.

RANA MITTER How old would you have been then?

DAVID CANNADINE I think I was probably about 8 or 9.

RANA MITTER So it did kind of stick in the memory? It comes to my mind because you’ve written several times in the recent past about the way in which history can be taught in schools and to a wider audience - a couple of years ago The Right Kind of History and most recently The Undivided Past which is actually about advocating that perhaps there should be more history that stresses unity rather than difference. Now, with that second message what are the implications for public education in Britain would you say?

DAVID CANNADINE Well the book is primarily addressed to politicians, pundits, policy makers and editors of newspapers and is mainly concerned to attack or regret the rhetorical irresponsibility of public figures and commentators who seek to ratchet up confrontation and conflict, and who seek to tell us that the world is very simple and is divided between us and them. I’d have thought on the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq that was hardly a point that needed labouring. It’s Peter Hennessy’s point that the purpose of historians is to tell truth to power.  Or, to put it another way: - while it’s the job (or weakness) of politicians and pundits to say the world is very simple - it’s the job of historians to say it’s very complicated.

RANA MITTER …The historian David Cannadine.

 We did invite Michael Gove to join but he wasn’t available - however I am joined by the top of the form when it comes to the UK’s history boys and history girls.

Dr Tristram Hunt is a historian and Labour MP, Stephen Drew is head teacher of Brentwood County High School, Dinah Birch is Professor of Victorian Literature at Liverpool University, and down the line from Cambridge is Dr Sheila Lawlor, is a twentieth century historian and Director of Politeia, an independent think tank which works on economic and social policy.  I’m going to put the cruel Cannadine question to each of you as well.  Stephen, you’re a history teacher, - what was the first thing you can remember being taught?

STEPHEN DREW I can remember being eleven and drawing long barrows and then going home to make models of long barrows.

RANA MITTER How about you Dinah?

DINAH BIRCH My memory is rather different. As a very small girl in the infant class our motherly teacher told us stories of heroic deeds, -  and the one that really sticks in my mind is Grace Darling. Do you remember the heroic Victorian girl who rode out with her father to rescue shipwrecked sailors clinging to a rock? But I have to say, -  my response was based on a complete misunderstanding because I thought she was a brave little bird – a Grey Starling – and I could never work out how she managed the oars with her wings, it must have been so awkward.

RANA MITTER I think you better inside and do a hundred lines Dinah. Tristram, how about you?

TRISTRAM HUNT I think my first historical memory was a school trip, -  and it was a really impressive school trip to the sites of the industrial revolution. We went to Iron Bridge and we went to the Black Country, -  and the object that I remember - is actually a ceramic flower - so I’m thinking we might even have gone to my constituency of Stoke-on-Trent.

RANA MITTER And how about you Sheila?

SHEILA LAWLOR I think it was being really puzzled when I was told that Henry VIII, King of England, had rebelled against the Pope. We can’t have been older than eight and nine and I was puzzled about the reason, because we were give two, - was it because he wanted to divorce his wife who was Spanish, -  or was it because he wanted to get hold of the church lands?

RANA MITTER Well I think Michael Gove would be proud of all of you in terms of both the facts and the debate you bring to bear upon them.

Stephen, there’s been a lot of argument, often much of very ill-informed, in the last few weeks and months about what is actually taught in history in schools. Now obviously it’s a massive curriculum but can you give us a concise account of what is covered and what isn’t?

STEPHEN DREW I think the first thing to say is that there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of government ministers and a lot of people who work in academic history in universities about what actually goes on. I think often the way in which it’s presented actually ties in with the prejudices that people seem to have,  in order to attack what goes on in schools. I think for myself, when I last wrote a curriculum for schools as head of history, about ten years ago, and we wrote a curriculum that was based on the national curriculum model of studying a focus on British European history, starting in 1066 as it’s a natural dividing line through to the twentieth century. But reading some of the comments that ministers and others have made recently – suggestions of ‘I’ve learnt about Francis Drake going round the world by standing on a table’, suggestions that somehow it’s all a joke - and that somehow history teachers are creating some kind of entertainment world – and not focussed on what’s going on, this misses the point. The young people who I’ve taught history to over the last fifteen years have learnt about everything from the Norman Conquest through to the American Revolution, French Revolution, and Industrial Revolution. We do it all - but we don’t focus on a narrow, solely British version of history, -  which is a fallacy in itself.

RANA MITTER Ok, we’ll come back to what is taught and how it is taught in some depth later on. But,  Dinah,  I wonder if I might ask you to put on your hat as an expert on the Victorian world? People often hark back to the good old days of school teaching as an example of what we should be doing now. What exactly would Victorian schoolchildren have been learning in their history classes? Would they have had them?

DINAH BIRCH A great many Victorian schoolchildren wouldn’t have been learning about history at all. Whether they would or not would have depended very much on what kind of school they were attending. Of course many Victorian schoolchildren attended no school at all, -  and that’s worth remembering. Those who did study history,  would primarily have focussed on a national narrative, -  and it would have had an ideological - or as the Victorians would have put it, - a moral content. I think that was almost exclusively true. There was of course,  no national curriculum,  so what was taught would vary widely from school to school.

RANA MITTER Would boys and girls have studied the same things in those days?

DINAH BIRCH Unlikely, although it depends – you say “those days”, there was an enormous range of development from the early Victorian decade right up to the end of the nineteenth century. There was more convergence towards the end of the period …

RANA MITTER Broadly speaking, was history a subject that was taught only to boys, or to boys and girls?

DINAH BIRCH It was taught to boys and girls. It was often however taken more seriously (it seems to me) in girl’s schools, primarily because the boys were focussing exclusively on the classics, -  and for many boys it was classics that was their introduction into history because they were learning about the history of Greece and Rome.

RANA MITTER And that was learning the languages as well?

DINAH BIRCH Absolutely, very much so. Whereas girls often had, ironically, a broader curriculum because they weren’t so focussed on Greek, Latin, Greece and Rome. So they often had rather more of a focus on a national history. But it is worth reminding ourselves that (history is full of surprising facts) in the early 1860s only around 5% of kids in school would be staying on in education beyond the age of eleven. There was very little sophisticated historical narrative , - for almost all British children.

RANA MITTER Well,  there is now compulsory history, at least up to the age of fourteen, which is actually less than in most European countries, -  but nonetheless it is part of the curriculum. Tristram, you’re a Member of Parliament,-  but you are also a published and specialist historian on the subject of the Victorian period. One of the things that David Cannadine said later on when I talked to him, -  is that actually the national curriculum that we have in history at the moment is ok, - the problem is that there isn’t enough space and time within the curriculum to cover the material.  Isn’t that a fault of the politicians? 

TRISTRAM HUNT Yes, I agree with David. If you were in the Education Department, would you put all your activity into trying to rewrite the history curriculum? No, because actually, you look at key stage 3 and keys stage 4 (ages 11-14 and 14-16) and those are not bad curriculums, -  and also they allow for a pretty good degree of focus on the teaching of British history (I don’t have a problem with the slight foregrounding of it). But the average thirteen year old only gets one hour of history per week, - and your ability to deliver detailed historical understandings through that – while also often with  history teachers having to teach citizenship and other classes -  means that the space for historical understanding is limited.

RANA MITTER Sheila, this is the problem isn’t it? You’re obviously a published historian as well (of the twentieth century),- isn’t the issue not the content of the curriculum, - so much as the fact that there’s so little time in British schools, -  to actually teach it?

SHEILA LAWLOR I think that is a real problem. We have far too little school time. For instance this one hour which Tristram mentioned – Tristram, that is sometimes quite generous, -  because some schools have one period of maybe 40 minutes per week. In France, by contrast, children have three hours of history on average. So I think that the amount of time available in school is definitely a problem, but I also (and I go further than the others) think the [current] curriculum is too prescriptive. Too much is demanded of tiny, often irrelevant details and yet there isn’t really enough time. I would much prefer something which gave teachers far more freedom and simply gave us the bare bones, (if you like the skeletons), perhaps - I would suggest the dates and chronologies - so that teachers could put the flesh on that in any way they liked.

STEPHEN DREW As the head teacher in the conversation, I’ve been teaching history for fifteen years in schools, I’ve taught in four different schools, my brother is a history teacher and he has taught in three different schools. I know dozens and dozens of history teachers across the country and I have never ever seen a secondary school which has as little as 40 minutes a week of history, ever. I have never spoken to a head teacher or history teacher who has as little as 40 minutes a week of history.

TRISTRAM HUNT But are you seeing (which I’m certainly seeing in schools that I visit) the pressurising of history teaching? So actually you are getting not only history being given up in schools around the age of thirteen, you’re also seeing history effectively dismantled, - by combining it (in a kind of generic humanities course), mixing it with geography, religious studies and whatever you want, - so actually your space for real history teaching is increasingly limited?

SHEILA LAWLOR That’s exactly it.

STEPHEN DREW But, curriculum models are based on the national curriculum. When I first started teaching, -  citizenship didn’t exist, - politicians made the decision to add citizenship to it - so therefore that puts another thing into the field.  R.E remains something that the government and DFE push as being central to schools - so at what point do we balance everything together? There is only so much time?

RANA MITTER Dinah?

DINAH BIRCH One of the things that has emerged very clearly from the national debate we’ve been having over recent weeks, -  is how very closely bound up these arguments are with politics. That’s no new thing, history and politics have always been closely engaged.  But, as Stephen has said (rightly I think) is that the problem rising from that, -  is that positions become polarised and they become detached - from what really happens in schools. What I would very much like to see. -  is for people to take a deep breath, - to step back from their own polemic agendas, - think about what really happens in schools, - what might happen more effectively, -  and in a way step down from their political soapboxes.

RANA MITTER Ok, we’ll talk about the politics of it in some depth,  - but I do want to get to some of the details of the draft curriculum that has been proposed - and which has both been praised on some sides - and attacked on others. Tristram, I turn to you as a historian of Britain. There is a much stronger concentration on the British Isles in this proposed curriculum, - is that something that gladdens your heart? More sales of your books perhaps?

TRISTRAM HUNT I don’t have a problem with that, -  partly because I think the lack of historical knowledge out there is so stark and so profound, - and because I think that the traditional organs through which people came to understand the past - whether it’s churches, or chapels, or families, or political parties, or trade unions, or scouts or cubs, or all those civil society groups - are justnot there to the same degree…

RANA MITTER So, -  you back Michael Gove [on his history curriculum]?

TRISTRAM HUNT  So, actually, the inheritance which people need to have some sense of (in terms of British history) needs to be fore-grounded. But where I diverge from Michael Gove,  is that you cannot teach it in isolation.  What I like is a fore-grounding of British history - but within a global context.

14.41 RANA MITTER Sheila, would you agree with that take on the question of the British Isles as the spine of the history curriculum?

SHEILA LAWLOR I’d rather the draft took more account of the very strong interconnection between Britain and Europe, because you can’t understand English or British history, without that constant interaction with European politics, religion and war. I’d also like to see greater emphasis on Britain and the world, -  because Britain was an island race, - and politics, power, wealth, economics, -  were bound up with the world. 

RANA MITTER That sounds to me Sheila like a polite way of diverging from the proposal though, because essentially the curriculum that exists now has British history running through it, -  but engages with the wider world. One of the things this draft does,  is to celebrate the island story, it seems.

SHEILA LAWLOR You have to start somewhere and I certainly agree, - you start with the history of your own country, -  but you bring in more.  And I think you have to start on a chronological basis and go through. And yes,  we need to have a spine, - which is the spine of the history of your own country. This helps you to understand where you are and all those other things you need to know about; the evolution of politics; the battles over religion; and why Britain today may be a much more secular country than other contemporary democracies of the same sort; the nature of economic power and decline, if necessary. All those things are part of the story, but I think that you in order to understand that story you have to know more about the relationships of this country - just take the Reformation, the Counter-reformation, and the successions …

RANA MITTER You’ve given us some very good specific examples, -  but Tristram Hunt is looking rather sceptical, I have to say…

TRISTRAM HUNT I just feel for Stephen and his colleagues, -  trying to deliver this to thirteen-year-olds on a Thursday afternoon. I think Sheila’s original point was good, that actually what politicians should do is create the over-arching structure and allow some autonomy for teachers.  But also, I think we need to include the importance of local history, - because, how else do you get young people who are not necessarily interested in history, -  passionate about the past? You begin with their street names, you begin with the names of the local pubs, and the parks, and all the rest of it, -  and you build up a history there. 

RANA MITTER Dinah Birch?

DINAH BIRCH There would be real advantage in integrating the national curriculum with the syllabus of GCSE courses and A’Level courses, - because one of the difficulties that many children have experienced as things are currently framed - is that of repetition, because there is not a significantly coherent connection…

RANA MITTER Okay, that makes sense, -  but we don’t want to get too bogged down in the technicalities of how the curriculum fits together, - but Stephen, as a teacher or head teacher who might have to oversee the new curriculum, -  how does it strike you in terms of content and practicality?

STEPHEN DREW I think that if the Department for Education believe that the key stage 2 history curriculum is ever going to happen in any primary school -as it is set out on this document - “they are [having us on]”, - to use a very colloquial phrase, - “they are joking”.

RANA MITTER There is a difference [of opinion about] eight-year-olds learning about the Heptarchy …

STEPHEN DREW I look at the list I have here, - there are sixteen bullet points - running from early Britons and settlers including the Stone, Bronze and Iron Age through to the Glorious Revolution. The idea that that is teachable in the four years of Key Stage 2, -  by a group of primary school teachers who are covering every single subject going, - who are extremely unlikely to be history specialists – I read that as somebody who has GCSE, A Level, degree history and has taught history for fifteen years - and that scares me! And I’ve spent all day for fifteen years teaching history!

TRISTRAM HUNT And also there is the raw practicality, -  which is if they want to deliver this, -  they have to start training teachers in it from this September, -  which means they need everything prepared over the next five weeks, in order to start training in September for next year…

STEPHEN DREW And it’s also the case, that  if you look, (for instance), at the thing we talked about already, - about the idea of it focusing on Britain. I know that as the draft has gone through, -  that  people have been added to it, - Mary Seacole was the great debate about how she wasn’t in it originally and then she was added…

RANA MITTER This is the nurse?

STEPHEN DREW Yes, the nurse. I know that it becomes something to hang everything on, - is it Nightingale - or is it Seacole? And if you are involved in teaching history it is an ongoing [debate], - but for me it strikes at the core of what is going on here.  It strikes absolutely to what Mr Gove is trying to do, -  in that when the first draft came out, -  the focus on Britishness, - the focus on identity, -  is so clear, - and if you read things, (for instance), -  when it says  - “The Tudor period: including religious strife and reformation in the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary.” How on earth can you possibly do that,  - without looking at what was going on in Spain at the time, -  and the work of Martin Luther, - how can you possibly even begin to expect someone to understand that? But the point is, - is  if the Department for Education and those promoting this curriculum are arguing actually:  “no, no, it isn’t just solely British-faced, it isn’t solely based on that” -  then why aren’t the references to a wider cultural context (in Europe and the World) in there?

RANA MITTER Sheila, isn’t this part of the problem, -  that there is a story of British, actually mostly English national identity being threatened through this, -  but it is one that is largely Protestant, - and it’s also one that is largely celebratory, -  and whiggish,  in its terms?

SHEILA LAWLOR I’m not so sure that that’s the main problem. I think…

RANA MITTER But you agree that that is the case?

SHEILA LAWLOR It is one way of looking at it, -  but I think that it will have to go further. For instance,  we’re going to have to look again at medieval history, -  and we’re going to have to look again at the whole Anglo-French relationship is brought in …

RANA MITTER Who is “we” in this context?

SHEILA LAWLOR I think “we” as a country, - now that a consultation time [is in process] -  when historians, teachers and other people involved in the subject, - will have to respond - to make it absolutely clear where they think there are gaps. But remember, even when the first Education Act came in, -  in 1944, -  there was a huge debate about how much you put into a school curriculum, -  and in the end,  some wiser wag said, “you know it mustn’t become a basket for everybody’s pet idiosyncrasies otherwise there’ll be no freedom!”

RANA MITTER That’s fair enough, Sheila,  but would you say that in the year 2013, -  for a curriculum to be proposed that uses the term “Indian Mutiny”  - maybe shows a lack of sensitivity to the way in which history has changed over the last half century?

SHEILA LAWLOR Well, I don’t know whether one wants to be anachronistic or not, -  if one is telling the history (or the story of one country), -  and every country – (look at the French curriculum or what happens in Germany, at least in the twentieth century), - you have to start somewhere, -  and if this  is the term which has been commonly used, (was used at the time and was subsequently), -  it will be up to the teacher to explain how people thought at the time. Remember history is about teaching how others lived and how others thought, -  and not imposing our own prejudices on that….

TRISTRAM HUNT I think that Rana is right to pick up that language, -  and I also think he’s right [because] you look at the curriculum, -  and it talks of “Clive of India”, - it talks about “gunboat diplomacy” -  without quotation marks. There is a sort of anachronism, and a certain world view, embedded in this. The real problem though, is that Michael Gove has put out this draft curriculum, -  and it needs to be thinned out incredibly, - more power needs to be returned to the teachers.  This idea that you’re going to have seven-year-olds learning about “the heptarchy”, -  from primary school teachers who may not have a first qualification in history, -  is crazy!  So, it does need to be rethought.

RANA MITTER Dinah?

DINAH BIRCH One of the things that strikes me as really strange about this draft, is that there is a mismatch, -  between what is said in the prefatory material, -  and then what goes on in the detail of what is proposed for study.  Because it begins by making all kinds of quite sensible observations about what history can do and should do for children, - and there is an emphasis in that Preface, -  on what are described as the connections between local, regional, national and international history. It’s describing a much broader approach, -  than seems to me,  - to emerge from the details of the curriculum. It’s as if the two halves of the document have been written by two different people, - or groups of people, -  which may well be the case!

RANA MITTER Stephen, can I ask you as someone on the coalface (if that’s the right metaphor to use) – I mean that Sheila has said, -  that we, collectively,  need to feed back - to refine this curriculum. Do you feel you have a mechanism to do that? Is that practical?

STEPHEN DREW  No. I don’t look at Mr Gove and Mr Wilshaw as some kind of …

RANA MITTER Mr Wilshaw is the Chief Inspector of Schools?

STEPHEN DREW (Yes, Mr Wilshaw the Chief Inspector of Schools )– I don’t look at the two of them, - as they are often presented by many people involved in teaching unions and others in the profession, - as the great enemies of what’s going on in schools and the rest of it. However, it is clear that when Mr Gove says something, -  he is not for moving, -  and this, for me, represents - what is at the moment the absolute vision of what a certain group of politicians working around Mr Gove, - believe education should be about.

TRISTRAM HUNT I think he is for moving.  He moved on his disastrous plans for GCSEs. I think the consultation ends on April 19th or something, -  and I would urge Stephen and all interested parties – to submit to the consultation - because I actually think this is a starting point, -  and I think there will be a lot of redrafting and re-editing of it.

RANA MITTER Well,  I should say that not everyone would have characterised them as disastrous. Sheila, you’re obviously not here to defend Michael Gove, -  but one of the things that worried me slightly, -  was that his first reaction to the statement by a large number of academics that they were concerned, - was essentially to use a public speech to mock academic historians as being unwilling to allow children to actually learn any facts. It was a complete misrepresentation,  surely,  of what was said?

SHEILA LAWLOR Well, you know the academic community is like any other, it’s deeply polarised even in a subject as innocent as Latin. We, as a country, have huge debates amongst Latinists, -  about whether to teach language at school, -  or whether to wait until children go to university. And it’s exactly the same with mathematics. I don’t think for a moment, that you have to put in exactly precise things in the curriculum,  but I think dates are pretty non-controversial, and so if you said, - the Romans in Britain, - Anglo-Saxon England, - the coming of William the Conqueror…

RANA MITTER  Do you know the exact dates of the heptarchy, yourself, Sheila? I don’t think I do…

SHEILA LAWLOR No!  I tell you, thank God it’s not my period!

RANA MITTER Dinah, let me bring you back to a comment that you made almost in passing (and Sheila said something similar too) which is that , of course, as part of a history curriculum we need to learn the national story. That’s something we would say about history, -  that we wouldn’t say about mathematics or physics or some other subjects, -  but why do we need to use history in that sense?

DINAH BIRCH Because if we know where we’ve come from, -  we are better placed to know who we are, - and I do think that the enlargement of sympathy and of mind that rises from having a clearer sense of the experience of the people who lived in the place where we live, -  is exciting for children, - and it is a way of giving them a clearer sense of their own identity, their potential, their own place in a community, and their own future.

RANA MITTER Stephen, is that the way it looks in the classroom, -  on that wet Thursday afternoon, -  that Tristram mentioned?

STEPHEN DREW First of all,  I would like to say,  that I’m not entirely convinced by any argument at all that suggests that the purpose of history education is to somehow transmit any sense of national identity. We don’t agree on a national identity as a country. It’s predicated on an assumption that we have an agreed version of national identity, - and we don’t! We live in one of the most diverse countries in the world. If you are teaching history in an inner city London school. - you could be teaching to a group of children who come from different parts of the world for every single child in the room, - and the idea that history somehow should be used to transmit some kind of national identity through the use of the content of the curriculum, - I just think is a false idea. It’s using schools to deliver something (and obviously it’d be fine if the government stayed the same all the time and  they agreed all the time on what they were going to do, that would be absolutely fine), -  but we have had a period of ten years during the time of Labour government, we now have a Conservative and Liberal Coalition, we may well have a different government in the future, -  if things are so politicised then people are driving the curriculum based on what they believe,- we then run the risk of constant change and undermining any sense of validity.

TRISTRAM HUNT I very much agree with Stephen, that politicians when they come in and out of office, -  should not be rewriting the curriculum to suit their own political viewpoints, - [because] that happened in India when the BJP came into power, - that happened in Croatia when other politicians came into power, - and it’s a bad form. But where I do disagree with Stephen is that I think it is more important than ever, - because of the nature of our multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious society, - that kids from Somalia, and Croatia,  and Bangladesh,  - have a sense of British history because they will be British citizens!

RANA MITTER But, which British history should they have a sense of, Tristram?

TRISTRAM HUNT I am not wholly opposed to many elements of what Michael [Gove] has proposed. I would tinker around the edges with it… But, - should they learn about the English Civil War? Yes! -  Should they learn about the Industrial Revolution? Yes!  - Should they learn about the nature of Empire? Yes! -  But you can teach those [subjects] within a global context, - so immediately it appeals to someone from Bangladesh, - it has a relevance to someone from Somalia, - but you foreground British history, -  and that’s why I think it’s perfectly acceptable for politicians to be involved in this process in a responsible manner, -  because you are teaching an element of citizenship. I would much rather have kids understand identity and citizenship through history, - rather than through very flabby citizenship courses.

RANA MITTER Sheila, isn’t one of the answers to this, -  perhaps not to depoliticise history, -  but explicitly to repoliticise history ? We all know as academic historians  -  that there are often politically informed positions on everything from the English Civil War to the role of Winston Churchill  -  why not use a new curriculum explicitly to make those political positions clear in opposition to each other?

SHEILA LAWLOR Well, I’m a bit uneasy with this idea that the aim of any curriculum is to provide a given national identity. I certainly don’t think that is the intention of the present attempt to reform history teaching, -  but I think it is vital that we do give children a framework to understand the country in which they are growing up. It isn’t …

RANA MITTER But someone has to choose the framework Sheila.

SHEILA LAWLOR Well look, in no other European country do people tie themselves up in knots about, quote, “whose history”!

RANA MITTER Oh! you’ve never been to Germany?  Sheila, come on…        

SHEILA LAWLOR That’s from twentieth century history, -  but if you look at the broad outlines of history as she is taught in most contemporary countries like our own…

RANA MITTER I think the African-American community might disagree with you very strongly on that. If you go to a large number of democratic countries there is a very healthy debate about the nature of history.

SHEILA LAWLOR Yes,  but if we look at what other similar European countries expect their children to know by the time they leave school, -  it will be a broad outline - and may I say that this outline of teaching basically  a chronological framework - which teachers are free to debate and discuss within the history lessons-  is the most liberating for anybody because you are giving children the knowledge on which they can decide on which bits they agree with and which they don’t. And, I think, the other problem is, -  if you start going down this route of  - (what sounds to me, like trying to please everybody) -  you end up denying children the essential knowledge which helps them to form judgements about information, about detail, about the kind of past that we are evaluating…

RANA MITTER But Sheila, if you don’t want please everyone (in your phrase) who do you elect not to please?

SHEILA LAWLOR It’s not a matter of pleasing anybody. If you look at the dates and the major landmarks - the skeleton,  which everybody has, -  and we want to put the flesh on it, - let’s leave it to the teachers and the textbooks to fill up the preferred flesh, -  but I do think we can agree that the Romans came to Britain, that there were Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, that there was a spread of Christianity, we can agree that the Normans came to Britain, we can decide what we want to emphasise during certain periods such as the plague…. There are all kinds of emphasises, -  but there is a chronological framework, -  and I think that the Education Secretary,  Michael Gove, is the first person who sees that children have a right to know the past as they do in Germany, France, Switzerland, anywhere that you choose in Europe.

RANA MITTER Dinah?

DINAH BIRCH Well I share the general scepticism about the difficulty of using history to construct a national identity, -  (as Stephen says), - we don’t agree about what that might be. Nevertheless, that doesn’t seem to me to rule out giving children a strong sense of the worlds that made their world, -  and that can sometimes be a way of giving them, it seems to me,  a sense of their own values. If you are a kid growing up in Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, -- it’s genuinely engaging to learn about Liverpool’s history as a port city, one of the great cities of the world, - Sheffield’s history in the Industrial Revolution and its history of steel manufacture, - or even if you’re in a rural school in East Anglia, to learn that Britain was the home of the Agricultural Revolution. There are all kinds of things that have happened in Britain that matter to us now!  But I’m not saying anything new, this is all going on…  in schools…

TRISTRAM HUNT It’s important to stress, -  because if we actually think about the last twenty, twenty-five years - there has been, understandably, a degree of relativism about teaching different cultures and different stories - relative to Britain’s own. Where I agree,  is [there is needed] just a slight hand on the tiller, -  to say we’re in a different world now, - we’ve experienced incredible change in this country over the last ten to fifteen years in terms of new communities and in terms of multicultural Britain, - and we should be unapologetic about the foregrounding of the teaching of British history.

STEPHEN DREW To give an example - thinking about one of the things that seem to have been talked about quite a lot with the curriculum - is to say, well,  it’s a framework, it’s a skeleton, -  and teachers will be able to do to do whatever they want to do. But I question whether or not the Department for Education and OFSTED and others are going to be happy about - a teacher,  who (for instance),  teaches the Industrial Revolution starting by the fact of saying -  the only reason why Britain had the money to carry out an industrial revolution was through the money they had made through their empire, through taking money from other parts of the world,  and through promoting the slave trade, - and saying that many historians would argue that is actually what the basis was of the funding for the Industrial Revolution. One of the things we also see, -  is a lot of criticism of human rights records for other countries in the world, - so we’re talking at the moment about China and other places,  and about how we are able to have cheap goods in our country because of factory-based revolutions going on in China, - which then crushes people’s rights. But are we going to be proud to teach our Industrial Revolution in a way that we’re supposed to promote British identity - but actually the only way we were able to have the Industrial Revolution was because we operated a situation where there was no recognition whatsoever of the rights of workers, and those workers had very, very low wages and suffered early deaths.

TRISTRAM HUNT It shouldn’t simply be about pride. You can teach the Industrial Revolution, -  and when I’ve gone into schools in Stoke-on-Trent to teach the Industrial Revolution - I take my well-thumbed copy of Engel’s The Condition of the Working Class in England with me. His account of child workers in Stoke-on-Trent working for Dalton and Wedgewood and all the rest of it in the 1840s – about skin peeling off their fingers because of the chemicals they’re involved with, -  is terrifying and wonderful and exciting, -  but that doesn’t mean everyone has a slap on the back,-  but they begin to know about the nature of industrialisation, - they know about the nature of Stoke-on-Trent, - they know about the nature of art history. We shouldn’t over-worry about the fact that was within a colonial context,-  it’s just good if you’ve got an hour with these kids - that they should know about that history!

RANA MITTER Sheila, are you concerned about the way in which teachers might take the framework (as you put it) - and inevitably put some sort of explicit or implicit ideological coating on it - as they transmit it to thirteen or fourteen year olds?

SHEILA LAWLOR Not in the slightest. If you have a history teacher who knows history and who is educated in history - they will have either a favourite period or special interest -  but nobody I think ever learnt about the Industrial Revolution without learning that history is warts and all!  And that’s the great thing about a proper curriculum - where you have an outline, - there are good times or bad times - but with every good time there is an ugly side to it. Remember, nobody would have learned of The Great War (which as you know Britain won) without hearing about the horrors of the trenches for many, many youngsters called up at very young ages…

RANA MITTER Britain won! But I think we had some help along the way, Sheila…

SHEILA LAWLOR I know. It was supposed to be an Allied victory, -  but if you continue with the story - and this is also part of the new proposal, - right through the twenties and thirties - you find out - that all in the garden wasn’t rosy - and victory comes at a terrible price for countries, economically, and indeed,  socially. So you can’t keep pretending that there is one view and this curriculum isn’t going to do that. By giving people the liberation of a longer framework to judge over time, - and remember, -  it’s the special knowledge of history that you learn about the past as it evolved in its own way, - warts and all, - over time. And I think it’s marvellous that we’re going to get the opportunity to do this, - but it’ll need refinements - and everybody should write in [to the consultation process].

RANA MITTER OK, Dinah?

DINAH BIRCH Sheila mentions a really crucial point, which I think we’ve neglected so far in our discussion. The successful delivery of this curriculum, or any curriculum,  - will depend on the enthusiasm and the commitment of excellent teachers, -  and we have a lot of excellent teachers in this country. If we impose upon them the task of delivering a history curriculum which is simply impossible to cover (and I do think the detail of the curriculum as it is currently drafted is not feasible within the time allowed), -  then most teachers will inevitably be alienated, demoralised, detached from their task, - and it is the children that will pay the price for that. We need to redraft this proposed curriculum, -   so that it gives teachers some flexibility,  - and actually gives them the possibility of covering , - what is asked of them.

TRISTRAM HUNT And I think that involves the Secretary of State stepping back and listening to the historical bodies, the associations, the teachers,  and the teachers’ unions. The politics of this, are that he did do [consultations], - and there were lots of discussions, - then everything went quiet, - and as far as we can understand Michael took the draft history curriculum away for the weekend, - put in some of his language and inclinations - because he was basically attempting to please the Prime Minister - and out came this end product. I think we need to go back to where we were in December, -  when there were proper grown-up constructive conversations happening about it.

RANA MITTER Well, some might say that it is actually quite pleasing that there is a Secretary of State that cares enough about history, -  to want to take it away for the weekend.!  One issue, that I’d just like to touch upon is the way that we sometimes give a rosy, tinted view of how history was studied in the past, - and we sometimes make a careless assumption that the kids today learn nothing except about the Nazis, (and I think that’s probably not true),  but is it true,  Stephen,  that the older generation actually had a better understanding of the narrative, the chronology, and the facts?

STEPHEN DREW I don’t believe it is at all. I think one of the things you discover as you study history, (at whatever point), is that the past isn’t some rosy garden, -  and that we haven’t at any point throughout history had some amazing education system where people have been so full of their story of their nation’s history that they understood what’s going on. I have conversations with members of my own family who are in their seventies or in their eighties, - who according to some versions may have been taught history at a time that [the curriculum] was fantastic, -  and they don’t know who great figures of history are, they don’t know what the story is…

RANA MITTER Do they know the heptarchy?

STEPHEN DREW Absolutely not. One of the things that was said earlier, when you asked: “when was the heptarchy?”, - the answer historians often give is that  - ‘I don’t need to know that, because it’s not my period’ – and, as an historian,  you absolutely accept that. I am much stronger on studying history from 1700 to the present day, take me much further beyond that, and I’m not miles ahead of the stuff I’m teaching the children.

TRISTRAM HUNT I think one of the really exciting things in the classroom at the moment is (this can be an excuse for bad teaching or for brilliant teaching) is the use of IT facilities - which means you can get up incredible primary sources, - incredible details to excite the interest of pupils through that first-hand authenticity, - the looking at the scrolls – that looking at the stuff of history - which you can then build a bigger lesson on…    

RANA MITTER And popular history,  too,  Dinah Birch? The Horrible Histories by Terry Deary are kind of big sellers, right?

DINAH BIRCH I’ve often thought that Terry Deary is unacknowledged as one of the most influential historians in the country. Whatever you may feel about the quality of his work he does engage the kids, certainly my own kids.

RANA MITTER  These are the Horrible Histories…

STEPHEN DREW Can I ask why you think he engages children?

DINAH BIRCH It’s partly to do with the way in which the illustrations work - I’m talking about the books (and I’m talking about the books as they’re experienced by my own kids who are now in their mid-twenties) - it’s partly to do with the very clever (and I don’t mean that in a negative way) way in which he creates a sense of engagement with his audience and disengagement with authority, that irreverence…

SHEILA LAWLOR It’s right…

RANA MITTER Sheila Lawlor.

SHEILA LAWLOR It’s right because they are irreverent,-  it’s like Roald Dahl, - you and the children are on the same side, - and you’re cocking a snook at these events!

STEPHEN DREW If children were reading the Horrible Histories books,  would we have a massive problem with them reading them in a non-chronological order? Wouldn’t we just be pleased that they are interested in history? They might read the First World War one,-  then they might go back to a Tudor one,  - then they might read a twentieth century one, -  and actually shouldn’t we just be pleased that, as children and as young people, they are interested in history?  They read one of the books and they maybe want to visit somewhere else, - and therefore, actually, what we should be pleased about is - that they’re interested in it, - they’re excited by it, - it’s slightly irreverent for them, -  and actually they might not understand the complete chronology of it, - they may not understand exactly what is going on, -  but they get a sense of that history. It ties in with the way that we’ve taught history in schools for a number of years. We’ve focussed so much on the skills, -  and we focus so much on making them into good historians, -  and the content, -  to some extent, -  is somewhat secondary.

RANA MITTER I’m sorry but we’re getting to time,  - and I want to just ask one question to all of you - and I want a very brief answer. In the end, is school’s teaching of history in Britain at the moment - basically ok - but needing a bit of adjustment - or does it need a fundamental change? Sheila?

SHEILA LAWLOR Fundamental change. They need to learn the pattern of what happens over time.

RANA MITTER Tristram Hunt?

TRISTRAM HUNT It’s absolutely clear from the very good Michael Maddison OFSTED reports - that teaching of history in schools - is fundamentally fine. What I’m happy to see is a further foregrounding of British history, -  but what we don’t need to do - is to rip everything up and actually undermine the real progress of the last ten to fifteen years.

RANA MITTER Dinah Birch?

DINAH BIRCH I’m with Tristram here, I don’t want to see a demolition job. I think a lot of good work is happening. It’s not perfect, there are opportunities for change,  and development,  and those are what we should take forward.

RANA MITTER And the man that is actually doing the teaching, Stephen?

STEPHEN DREW I think your question was unfair in the first place. Because  the only things you offer were - ‘it’s fine’ - or ‘bad’, -  I think the teaching of history in schools in Britain is outstanding, -  and I have been to schools all over the country, -  and I have seen outstanding history teachers delivering outstanding lessons. They are passionate,  - and they care deeply about what they’re doing. Yes, - of course we can change!  Yes, -of course we can improve!  But- actually I don’t think we need to change something that isn’t fundamentally broken.

RANA MITTER Well, I would expect nothing less from a group of such distinguished historians as complete disagreement, -  so I’m glad to leave that particular chronicle to end there, -  but no doubt the next episode will be taken up sooner rather than later.

Many thanks to all of my guests today; Sheila Lawlor, Tristram Hunt; Dinah Birch; and Stephen Drew.

We must stop Britain turning into a land without memory

29th March, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, by Charles Moore

The Moral Maze debate

28th March, 18.00: TRANSCRIPTION COMPLETED BY HISTORYWORKSTV (see pasted BELOW - NB  in process of edit and proof-reading so if you find any mistakes, please DM me @historyworkstv) - I'll tweet when checking & sign-off is completed

27th March, BBC Radio 4,  "The Moral Maze" - Duration: 43 minutes  First broadcast: 20.00 Wednesday 27 March 2013

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

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

Letters and articles 4 March - 25 March

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

via @lukephilosophy & blogging @ lukebrunning.com

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

We need cross-party curriculum talks

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

School history: what worked for me

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

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.

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

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)

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.

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

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]

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

Letters and articles 18 Feb - 27 Feb

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

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

Mr Gove and his horrible heptarchical history

David Aaronovitch 

LETTER TO THE TIMES 

Richard Evans, Regius Professor, Cambridge University

Beware Meddling with the History Curriculum