Make history compulsory for the right reasons | Richard J Evans | Comment is free | The Guardian

Quote:

The annual dissection of GCSE results, announced on Thursday, is well under way, and as usual, commentators have been wringing their hands about the decline of history as a subject. Conservative MPs have described the situation as "alarming", while the Daily Telegraph accuses schools of "refusing to offer GCSEs in history". They echo concerns voiced by Michael Gove, the education secretary, and historians Niall Ferguson and Simon Schama, who advocate a facts-based approach to a core narrative of British history as a means of stopping the rot. Much of this alarmism is exaggerated. History has been an optional subject since GCSEs were introduced in the 1980s Then it was taken by just over a third of students; in 2011 by just under a third. The decline in entries this year has been just over 1%. Hardly drastic. And a major reason why more students aged 14-16 don't take history is the requirement to study English, maths, science, religious studies, citizenship and ICT up to school-leaving age, while history is optional after 14. Alarmists conveniently pass over the fact that entries for history at A-level have been steadily increasing for a decade, with numbers up an astonishing 9.5% this year. So complaints that history is "disappearing from our schools" are misplaced. Nevertheless, there are undeniably problems that need to be faced: most seriously the tendency of some schools to reduce history teaching up to the age of 14 in favour of subjects more central to league tables; notably Maths and English,merge it with other subjects in generalised "humanities" teaching; and appoint non-historians to teach it. There's clearly a case for making history compulsory up to age school-leaving age. But it needs to be done for the right reasons. Both main political parties want a greater focus on the teaching of British history. It has been promised by Gove. The Historical Association has echoed Schama in complaining that a continuing decline of the subject will mean that "young people will know little of the country or society they live in". But this is to misunderstand the purpose of historical teaching at any level, which is – or should be – about getting pupils to learn and understand other cultures separated from us by time and space, not about encouraging a narrowly patriotic sense of national identity. The current national curriculum, laying down requirements for history teaching up to the age 14, fulfils this broader task brilliantly. While it does contain a core element of British history over the long haul, it also asks students to study Europe and the wider world. And it treats history in a grown-up way as an academic discipline that aims to equip students with the skills to ask difficult questions about the world around them and its past. Ditching this for learning selected "facts" celebrating supposed national triumphs or national heroes – such as the battle of Waterloo or Admiral Nelson – would be a drastic form of dumbing down. Modern European and American history topics are deservedly popular among school students. History really will plummet in popularity if the study of the British past takes over the lion's share of the national curriculum. Indeed this may already be happening. In 2009 the Labour government, at one with the Tories on this issue, introduced a requirement for at least 25% of the GCSE history syllabus to be devoted to British history. The decline in take-up, such as it is, two years after this measure was introduced may be in part a reflection of this narrowing of the curriculum. The recent Ofsted report on history teaching quotes many students as saying how much they enjoy the way it sharpens their critical faculties. We'll have to wait for the government's committee on curriculum reform to report, but if it downgrades the transmission of skills for the rote learning of facts from the national patriotic narrative, history in the schools really will be in crisis.

This is wrong for two reasons:

1. Modern European and American history modules aren't popular. Appart from the lethally dull local history essay*, they're the most tedious items on the syllabus. They're loved by right-on educational science types because they're ever so "relevant"* and are a great opportunity to make kids write huge long mea culpas about the blacks or the Irish. Kids hate them because, as I say, they're indescribably boring. Given a choice would you rather learn about Burke and Hare or Bertie Ahern? I rest my case.

2. Since when did "facts" come to be synonymous with "a list of English victories"?

*Of which, to my eternal shame, my mother did most, just so that I wouldn't fail the whole course. Even as the sort of 16 year-old who reads Aeschylus for fun this thing made me want to cry. I was literally, physically incapable of doing it, it was so boring.
*Boring

__________________
Standard disclaimer: the disgusting statements contained in this post are the views of the poster, and unless specified do not represent the views of the moderators or the site's owners.

If we have no history, we have no future | Tristram Hunt | Comment is free | The Observer

Quote:

My history education began in dramatic fashion. "In a rather deep hole, in a curve of the Medlock and surrounded on all four sides by tall factories and high embankments, covered with buildings, stand two groups of about 200 cottages in which live about 4,000 human beings, most of them Irish. The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions…" This was Friedrich Engels's account of 1840s Manchester, as depicted in The Condition of the Working Class in England. And it was the text which my inspirational history teacher, Mr Mackintosh, decided it would be interesting for a class of 11-year-olds to study. So, week by week, we travelled through the mills, workhouses and lodging rooms of urbanising England; the accounts of effluent-bubbling streams, smog-laden skies and overcrowded tenements. We met typhus-ridden Irish immigrants and philistine factory owners. And it was wonderful: a beguiling mixture of gore and grime along with a sense of the visceral, foreign, unknowable past which we all wanted to get our hands on. Sadly, last week's exam results revealed far too few students are receiving the history teaching I enjoyed. But more worryingly, the figures showed not just a fall in numbers taking GCSE history, but that the study of the past is becoming the preserve of the private sector. Our national story is being privatised, with 48% of independent pupils taking the subject compared with 30% of state school entrants. And academy schools, so admired by government ministers, are among the worst offenders. This elimination of the past is nothing short of a national tragedy. We can rehearse the arguments about the "competencies" history provides – the ability to prioritise information; marshal an argument; critique sources. But such utility fails to do it justice. History is so many things: the material culture of the past; understanding lost communities; charting the rise and fall of civilisations. Yet history also provides us with a collective memory; it gives us a sense of connection to place, time and community. And that sensibility is being lost. As Eric Hobsbawm has put it: "The destruction of the past or, rather, of the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late 20th century. Most young men and women at the century's end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in." Naively, government ministers think the problem lies simply with the syllabus. Indeed, education secretary Michael Gove has launched a review of the history curriculum, blaming political correctness for a failure to teach "one of the most inspiring stories I know – the history of our United Kingdom". However, key stage 3 of the national curriculum allows for a perfectly decent chronological history of Great Britain. The problem is that teachers aren't allowed to teach it. In most schools, the average 13-year-old is lucky to get one hour a week of history, making it difficult for even the most gifted classroom performer to develop a strong narrative arc. And when it is taught, history is too often batched together with other subjects into a vapid and generalised "humanities" course which fails to do it justice. This state-sanctioned amnesia is becoming acute in some of our most deprived communities. In Knowsley, near Liverpool, just 16.8% of pupils were entered for history, compared with 45.4% in Richmond upon Thames. In fact, across the UK, pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds have been systematically steered away from academic subjects to be placed on grade-inflating semi-vocational GCSEs. All too often, these provide neither the skills which employers require nor a route into further education. Academy schools have proved particularly adept at this manoeuvre. Data are hard to track, but research by the thinktank Civitas has revealed that, for example, in one academy in the Yorkshire and Humber region, out of 150 students only nine were entered for history in 2008-09. In an East Midlands academy, just 5% of entries were in history and geography. This matters because of what is being lost. "The soft bigotry of low expectations", an assumption that those in communities of historically low educational attainment should not be challenged, means young people are being denied the patrimony of their story, an understanding of their country and society. This is the mindset that cuts off their history of the English Civil War, the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire. This is wrong because history is a national asset for Britain: we have a lot of it and we are very good at explaining it – in books, radio, museums and film. And if historical understanding is going to become the preserve of the private sector, the nature of our national story will also shift. The signal achievement of the postwar years was to take history teaching out of the preserve of the public schools and inspire the likes of David Starkey and Linda Colley to research and reveal the past. History, in the hands of grammar school and comprehensive-educated scholars and TV producers, became far more accessible. The current trend puts that achievement at risk. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four had it right. "Who controls the past," ran the party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." Last week's figures are a wake-up call. We need to ensure that our national past remains available to everyone, and does not become the preserve of an elite teaching itself a certain type of history which could fast define the national narrative. We need the discordant, uncomfortable, jarring voices of the past, as well as Michael Gove's homely tales of national heroism. Peterloo as well as Pitt the Younger. What is needed is a culture shift. Ministers need to stop interfering; headteachers need to be braver about league tables and the type of education they are offering; local authority directors need to stop second-guessing the professionals; and parents should not accept uninspiring teaching or grade-massaging at the expense of their children's appreciation of the past. The coming generations are in real danger of becoming detached from the past, of losing their capacity as citizens to call power to account, as well as simply to revel in the contradictions, achievements and misdeeds of our forebears. Every pupil deserves a Mr Mackintosh.

Well yeah, but it's not like people are doing all that for the fun of it (well, except the local authorities, whose motto in all matters is clearly "evil be thou my good"); the incentives are in the system.

__________________
Standard disclaimer: the disgusting statements contained in this post are the views of the poster, and unless specified do not represent the views of the moderators or the site's owners.

If we have no history, we have no future | Tristram Hunt | Comment is free | The Observer

Quote:

My history education began in dramatic fashion. "In a rather deep hole, in a curve of the Medlock and surrounded on all four sides by tall factories and high embankments, covered with buildings, stand two groups of about 200 cottages in which live about 4,000 human beings, most of them Irish. The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions…" This was Friedrich Engels's account of 1840s Manchester, as depicted in The Condition of the Working Class in England. And it was the text which my inspirational history teacher, Mr Mackintosh, decided it would be interesting for a class of 11-year-olds to study. So, week by week, we travelled through the mills, workhouses and lodging rooms of urbanising England; the accounts of effluent-bubbling streams, smog-laden skies and overcrowded tenements. We met typhus-ridden Irish immigrants and philistine factory owners. And it was wonderful: a beguiling mixture of gore and grime along with a sense of the visceral, foreign, unknowable past which we all wanted to get our hands on. Sadly, last week's exam results revealed far too few students are receiving the history teaching I enjoyed. But more worryingly, the figures showed not just a fall in numbers taking GCSE history, but that the study of the past is becoming the preserve of the private sector. Our national story is being privatised, with 48% of independent pupils taking the subject compared with 30% of state school entrants. And academy schools, so admired by government ministers, are among the worst offenders. This elimination of the past is nothing short of a national tragedy. We can rehearse the arguments about the "competencies" history provides – the ability to prioritise information; marshal an argument; critique sources. But such utility fails to do it justice. History is so many things: the material culture of the past; understanding lost communities; charting the rise and fall of civilisations. Yet history also provides us with a collective memory; it gives us a sense of connection to place, time and community. And that sensibility is being lost. As Eric Hobsbawm has put it: "The destruction of the past or, rather, of the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late 20th century. Most young men and women at the century's end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in." Naively, government ministers think the problem lies simply with the syllabus. Indeed, education secretary Michael Gove has launched a review of the history curriculum, blaming political correctness for a failure to teach "one of the most inspiring stories I know – the history of our United Kingdom". However, key stage 3 of the national curriculum allows for a perfectly decent chronological history of Great Britain. The problem is that teachers aren't allowed to teach it. In most schools, the average 13-year-old is lucky to get one hour a week of history, making it difficult for even the most gifted classroom performer to develop a strong narrative arc. And when it is taught, history is too often batched together with other subjects into a vapid and generalised "humanities" course which fails to do it justice. This state-sanctioned amnesia is becoming acute in some of our most deprived communities. In Knowsley, near Liverpool, just 16.8% of pupils were entered for history, compared with 45.4% in Richmond upon Thames. In fact, across the UK, pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds have been systematically steered away from academic subjects to be placed on grade-inflating semi-vocational GCSEs. All too often, these provide neither the skills which employers require nor a route into further education. Academy schools have proved particularly adept at this manoeuvre. Data are hard to track, but research by the thinktank Civitas has revealed that, for example, in one academy in the Yorkshire and Humber region, out of 150 students only nine were entered for history in 2008-09. In an East Midlands academy, just 5% of entries were in history and geography. This matters because of what is being lost. "The soft bigotry of low expectations", an assumption that those in communities of historically low educational attainment should not be challenged, means young people are being denied the patrimony of their story, an understanding of their country and society. This is the mindset that cuts off their history of the English Civil War, the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire. This is wrong because history is a national asset for Britain: we have a lot of it and we are very good at explaining it – in books, radio, museums and film. And if historical understanding is going to become the preserve of the private sector, the nature of our national story will also shift. The signal achievement of the postwar years was to take history teaching out of the preserve of the public schools and inspire the likes of David Starkey and Linda Colley to research and reveal the past. History, in the hands of grammar school and comprehensive-educated scholars and TV producers, became far more accessible. The current trend puts that achievement at risk. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four had it right. "Who controls the past," ran the party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." Last week's figures are a wake-up call. We need to ensure that our national past remains available to everyone, and does not become the preserve of an elite teaching itself a certain type of history which could fast define the national narrative. We need the discordant, uncomfortable, jarring voices of the past, as well as Michael Gove's homely tales of national heroism. Peterloo as well as Pitt the Younger. What is needed is a culture shift. Ministers need to stop interfering; headteachers need to be braver about league tables and the type of education they are offering; local authority directors need to stop second-guessing the professionals; and parents should not accept uninspiring teaching or grade-massaging at the expense of their children's appreciation of the past. The coming generations are in real danger of becoming detached from the past, of losing their capacity as citizens to call power to account, as well as simply to revel in the contradictions, achievements and misdeeds of our forebears. Every pupil deserves a Mr Mackintosh.

Well yeah, but it's not like people are doing all that for the fun of it (well, except the local authorities, whose motto in all matters is clearly "evil be thou my good"); the incentives are in the system.

__________________
Standard disclaimer: the disgusting statements contained in this post are the views of the poster, and unless specified do not represent the views of the moderators or the site's owners.

What incentives in what system?

__________________
Unless otherwise specified, I am posting as a regular poster. When I will act as a mod, I'll make sure you're in no doubt.

Head teachers need to be braver about league tables? It's like saying "You should be braver about standing up to your boss". No doubt it would be better for the company as a whole, but that's cold comfort when you've been fired.

__________________
Standard disclaimer: the disgusting statements contained in this post are the views of the poster, and unless specified do not represent the views of the moderators or the site's owners.

Right, yes, okay, I am with you.

I thought you meant there were incentives to teaching History in the PC deconstructed fashion that makes it quite difficult, it seems, for kids to have a coherent chronological view of what went on when...

__________________
Unless otherwise specified, I am posting as a regular poster. When I will act as a mod, I'll make sure you're in no doubt.

I like history, with a passionate lecturer it can be interesting. History teachers in the US are like politicians or preachers, they really get into it.

__________________
Give unto Caesar that what is Caesar's, and lie like hell to keep as much of the rest of your shit as you can.

"If you want something said ask a man...if you want something done, ask a woman" Margaret Thatcher

Originally Posted by Zichao

2. Since when did "facts" come to be synonymous with "a list of English victories"?

It more or less was before, as parodied by 1066 and All That, and will be again if Gove has his way.

Well I guess we could just invent stuff. We could just tell kids that actually we lost at Trafalgar and in Quebec. Sure, it's not "true" in the most literal sense of the word, but we can hardly help it that real history happens to be hopelessly un-PC. This way prevents any unlean thoughts of patriotism from marking these impressionable young minds, which is the main thing.

On the other hand, though, we mustn't overdo it - too many losses and we'll start to look like victims, meaning that there'll be no room for post-colonial guilt. Tricky business.

__________________
Standard disclaimer: the disgusting statements contained in this post are the views of the poster, and unless specified do not represent the views of the moderators or the site's owners.

Oh please. Once again anything short of rampant nationalist jingoism is dismissed as "PC" and "post-colonial guilt".

I would have thought that whitewashing the realities of Empire is just as programmatic and doctrinaire, turning a blind eye to the horrors wrought beneath the Butcher's Apron is firmly propagandist and an utter distortion of historical reality.

So what do you want? Do you actually want history, or do you want patriotic propaganda? Because you can't have both.