History Proving a Touchy Subject in Britain (and so will it be in South Sudan soon!)
8 min readBy D.D. GUTTENPLAN
LONDON — As the novelist George Orwell observed, he who controls the past controls the future, so it is perhaps not surprising that Orwell’s home country is the latest setting for a battle over what history is and how it is taught. In recent weeks, two conferences here have seen the polite tones of academic debate shattered as historians traded accusations of racism, dumbing down and just plain ignorance.
David Cannadine, a professor of history at Princeton, at a conference in London last week on the teaching of history. He said claims of a crisis were based on the myth of a golden age.
At the same time Michael Gove, the education minister, has been urged by some of the country’s most eminent historians to abandon his plan to revamp the way history is taught in schools.
David Starkey, the author of several books about Henry VIII and his wives and a frequent guest on British television programs, argued at a historians’ conference in London this month that schools ought to focus more on Britain’s “own culture.”
When another historian argued that contemporary Britain was “rather diverse,” Mr. Starkey replied: “No it’s not. Most of Britain is a mono-culture,” adding that large parts of the country were “unmitigatingly white.” Mr. Starkey made headlines last summer after claiming, in comments on several days of riots, that Britain’s poor whites had “become black; a particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion.”
Last week, David Cannadine, a professor of history at Princeton, told Mr. Gove that claims there is a crisis in the way students are taught history are based on the “myth of a golden age” when boys and girls could recite all the kings and queens of England. Speaking at a conference at the University of London to launch his new book, “The Right Kind of History,” which examines the way the subject has been taught for the past century, Mr. Cannadine said: “Complaints about the inadequacy of teaching history in English schools have been going on for as long as history has been taught in English schools.”
Currently high school students in Britain are allowed to stop studying history at the age of 14 — unlike most other European countries, Mr. Cannadine said. If the government wanted to improve the state of historical understanding it should make the subject compulsory until the age of 16, he said. But the curriculum, he said firmly, “really ought to be left alone.”
Because it tells a country’s own story, history is often a controversial subject. Last year in Texas, the State Board of Education voted to require that textbooks used in the state’s schools portray conservatives in a more positive light and emphasize the role of Christianity in American history. The board’s initial decision to delete Thomas Jefferson from a list of thinkers whose work inspired other revolutions was widely derided — and eventually reversed. But the Texas board did impose many other changes to the state’s history curriculum.
In Germany in the 1980s the Historikerstreit, or historians’ quarrel, began after Ernst Nolte, a professor at the Free University of Berlin, published an article in which he described the Holocaust as essentially “a reaction, born from fear” of the Russian revolution. His argument that Germans should stop apologizing for their past, and that Hitler’s actions were “understandable, and up to a certain point, indeed, justified,” prompted a dispute that raged for several years.
Richard Evans, at the time a young historian at the University of East Anglia, took an active role in the controversy, pointing out the similarity between some of Mr. Nolte’s arguments and those long used by anti-Semites in Europe and the U.S.
The current British battle began in the spring of 2010 when the Harvard professor Niall Ferguson made a speech at the Hay literary festival complaining “in this country, the vast majority of school pupils learn only about Henry VIII, Adolf Hitler and Martin Luther King,” adding that his own children had never been taught about the original Martin Luther. Mr. Gove, who was in the audience, raised his hand and asked “Will Harvard let you spend more time in Britain to help us design a more exciting and engaging history curriculum?”
It was later announced that Mr. Cannadine and Simon Schama, a British historian who teaches at Columbia, had also been recruited to help revamp the national curriculum. Then in March Mr. Evans, now the Regius professor of history at Cambridge, launched an attack on the whole project in The London Review of Books.
Mr. Evans accused the government of wanting to foist “a celebratory history” that would gloss over the darker parts of Britain’s past — and neglect the contribution of darker peoples to the country’s heritage. The result, he warned, “would be a radically ignorant form of dumbing down.”
Mr. Ferguson denied any such intention. “I don’t know why he feels the need to create the fiction that I’m some kind of reactionary monster — a hate figure for the febrile liberal imagination,” he said in an interview. “Anybody who reads my stuff knows I’m not arguing for the imposition of some kind of Tory meta-narrative.”
Mr. Evans, who attended both recent conferences, said that the effort to “convert history teaching in the schools into a means of forging a national identity went beyond party politics.” The former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown “was also very keen on this,” he said.
Mr. Ferguson also found an unlikely defender. Eric Hobsbawm, author of “The Age of Revolution,” described Mr. Ferguson as “a very smart man, and a very good historian. Loath as I am to take the Tory line, on this issue they have more of a point than most of us academics are prepared to admit.”
“History is supposed to teach people perspective and proportion,” Mr. Cannadine said, bemoaning the way the current debate has become “polarized around a set of entrenched positions: those who stress the importance of historical knowledge — facts — over historical skills, those who want a narrative of national greatness versus a warts-and-all portrait of the past, and those who want to focus on the country you’re in rather than our relationship with the broader world.”
Part of the fault, Mr. Cannadine said, lies in the nature of the discipline. “If you’re taught geometry in Adelaide or Vancouver it’s pretty much the same subject. History is taught very differently.
“I was much struck by the fact that this discussion of how history is taught was totally devoid of historical perspective. What’s being said now has been said for 100 years,” Mr. Cannadine said.
At last week’s conference, Mr. Gove partially disarmed his critics. Though he complained again about the neglect of British history in favor of either “Hitler and the Henrys” or a unit on the American West, which he referred to as “cowboys and Indians,” he added: “It’s dangerous if politicians impose too many of their own prejudices on the national curriculum.”
He also said he had “a totally open mind” on whether history should be taught till age 16.
He refused to abandon plans to revamp the curriculum, saying he thought “much more history should be taught” and in a “more demanding” way. But in an exchange with Mr. Evans, he conceded the importance of placing British history in a global context.
“He backpedaled a little,” Mr. Cannadine said afterward. Mr. Gove, he added “is clearly someone we can work with. And we have to work with him.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/world/europe/28iht-educLede28.html?pagewanted=2&ref=world&src=me
Gove: pupils know more about the (American) Wild West than their own (UK) country
Education Secretary wants GCSE curriculum to focus more on key events in British history
Pupils studying for GCSEs in British secondary schools know more about the history of the American Wild West than they do about their own country, the Education Secretary claimed yesterday.
Michael Gove, below, produced figures showing that pupils were far more likely to study the Wild West or the Nazis than any aspect of British history. He called for history lessons to focus more on British events so children would “take pride” in their country’s history.
“I don’t believe it’s necessarily propagandistic to have a national curriculum broadly sympathetic to our past and our values,” he said. “Of course, we don’t want our national curriculum to be the scholastic equivalent of the Last Night of the Proms. But nor should it be a morale-sapping exercise in self-flagellation.”
Mr Gove, who was addressing a conference of historians at University College London, said 40 per cent of pupils chose history for their GCSEs, but in the case of the AQA exam board, only 8 per cent chose to do British history. Another 48 per cent opted for the American Wild West and 44 per cent chose Germany between 1919 and 1945. A similar picture emerged at Edexcel, where only 4 per cent chose British history. “It has often been said that pupils are concentrating too much on Hitler and the Henrys [the Tudor period],” he added. “However, there is very little concentration on any of the Henrys and quite a lot of enthusiasm for the American West.”
Mr Gove singled out the signing of the treaty at Runnymede ; the Glorious Revolution and the Great Reform Bill as three events that showed Britain was on the side of freedom and democracy. He also cited a survey by Cardiff University which showed that undergraduates struggled to name the British general at Waterloo; the monarch during the Spanish Armada; Brunel’s profession; the name of any 19th century Prime Minister and the location of the Boer War.
On Waterloo, twice as many thought Nelson was in charge as Wellington, and nine thought Napoleon was in charge of the British. He said most students would still have gained A grades at A-level.
“There is evidence that even among those who are passionate about history, it is still the case that what they’re being fed is thin gruel intellectually,” he said.
Mr Gove is reviewing the national curriculum and is facing calls to make history compulsory until the age of 16.
Know your history? Take the gove test
Mr Gove singled out three key dates from British history which would help pupils develop a pride in the country’s past. But can you pinpoint them all? They were:
a) The signing of the Runnymede Treaty by King John
b) The Glorious Revolution
c) The Great Reform Bill
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