“Fewer and fewer students want to study the past,” complained the Tory MP and historian Chris Skidmore recently, adding: “[G]iven the way it is currently presented in schools, who can blame them?” In 2011, in 159 schools no pupils at all were entered for GCSE history. “We are facing a situation,” he warns, “where history is at risk of dying out in schools and regions in the country.” His remedy is to reorient the GCSE towards “our national history, rather than focusing on Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia or the history of medicine. We should introduce a narrative-based exam that covers every age in British history across a broad chronological span”, instead of focusing on isolated “bite-sized” chunks of history. “Local history,” he adds, would bring it all to life and “can easily be woven into the school curriculum”.
Skidmore joins a swelling chorus of voices clamouring for a restoration of a British history narrative at the core of the curriculum as a means of halting the subject’s decline in schools. It has been led by the Education Secretary, Michael Gove. The current National Curriculum, he says, neglects our national history: “Most parents would rather their children had a traditional education, with children sitting in rows, learning the kings and queens of England.” David Cameron has lamented the “tragedy that we have swept away the teaching of narrative history and replaced it with a bite-sized, disjointed approach to learning about historical events . . . [in a] shift away from learning actual knowledge, such as facts and dates.”
Some historians take the same view. “The syllabus,” thunders Dominic Sandbrook, “has been a shambles for years. Fragmented and fractured, obsessed with the Nazis and apparently indifferent to the pleasures of narrative, it leaves students struggling for a sense of the contours of our national story.” The Labour MP and historian Tristram Hunt has added his voice to those demanding a replacement of the current National Curriculum with a British-focused national narrative, showing there is a cross-party consensus behind these criticisms.
But is history in our schools really in a state of terminal crisis? As David Cannadine has shown in his new book The Right Kind of History: Teaching the Past in Twentieth-Century England, such complaints are not new. They were made by Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s and by others long before, all of whom wanted history-teaching to be a vehicle for the creation of a unified sense of national identity. Indeed, at the beginning of the 20th century, history was barely taught in schools at all. When GCSEs were introduced in the 1980s, history, unlike many other subjects, was not made compulsory; still, about a third of all GCSE candidates voluntarily studied it as one of their exam subjects. Over the following years the spread of thematic and social history approaches pioneered by the Schools History Project, including the history of medicine, far from plunging the subject into crisis, actually led to an increase in its popularity and GCSE history entries reached 40 per cent by 1995.
The introduction of league tables in the 1990s, however, focused schools’ attention on maths, English and science at primary level. The result was a rapid and drastic fall in history teaching, so that nowadays only 4 per cent of class time in primary schools is devoted to the subject. League tables based on GCSE and A-level results have led secondary schools to focus on subjects in which better GCSE results can be achieved, and pupils often prefer to take a GCSE in a subject that’s compulsory until the age of 16 than add to their workload by taking one that’s not – such as history. All this has led to a 10 per cent drop in history GCSE entries since 1995, putting it back to around 30 per cent. However, this is roughly where it was when the GCSE was introduced; it’s not, as Skidmore implies, a decline from some past golden age when all 14-to-16-year-olds took the subject.
Blaming the curriculum is wrong. In 2007 the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority reported that a survey of 1,700 children, two-thirds of whom gave up the subject at 14, found that half of them liked and enjoyed the subject. And it’s important not to exaggerate the decline either. A recent Ofsted report on the teaching of history in 166 primary and secondary schools noted that between 2007 and 2010 “there were more examination entries for history than for any other optional subject at GCSE level apart from design and technology”.
The number of students taking GCSE history remained stable from 2000 to 2010. Moreover, Ofsted reported that “numbers taking the subject at A-level have risen steadily over the past ten years”, making history one of the “top five subject choices at A-level”. The report found the subject was well taught at a majority of schools at all levels, and that pupils enjoyed their lessons, found history fun, and praised it for making them think. Far from being in a state of terminal decay, then, history in schools is actually a success story.
Still, nobody seriously interested in the subject would want to disagree with the proposition that more schoolchildren should study it. Is the way forward to focus it exclusively on British history? In fact, the National Curriculum for children up to the age of 14 already has a chronological account of British history from 1066 to the present as its core, surrounding it with forays into European and extra-European history to introduce pupils to other countries and cultures. And local history is also a key part of the curriculum, as Skidmore would discover if he actually bothered to read it. So the Ofsted report, surveying the content of teaching across the country, concludes firmly that “the view that too little British history is taught in secondary schools in England is a myth”. Complaints about the “Nazification” of the curriculum are mere rhetoric and nothing more. One can smell more than a whiff of Tory Euro-scepticism in the complaint that pupils learn more about Russia and Germany than they do about England.
Would a greater emphasis on kings and queens help? Dominic Sandbrook notes that, “for all the efforts of academic historians, popular history is still dominated by vivid characters and bloody battles, often shot through with a deep sense of national pride”. But many of the most popular history books don’t deal with British history at all, even if they do focus on vivid characters and bloody battles: Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad, for instance; or Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Untold Story; or, in a rather different way, Edmund de Waal’s bestselling part-history, part-memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes. And many popular history books deal with social and cultural history, including, ironically, Sandbrook’s own marvellous, best-selling trilogy of books on post-war Britain; some of the greatest bestsellers of recent years, such as Dava Sobel’s Longitude, are on subjects about as far away as one could imagine from kings and battles.
How about teaching narrative rather than analysis, then? It is wrong, David Starkey has asserted, that history in the schools has modelled itself on university research. What we need, he declares, is to give children “a sense of change and development over time . . . The skills-based teaching of history is a catastrophe.” But what sells in the bookshops or what succeeds on TV is not necessarily what should be taught in schools. Teaching is a profession with its own skills and techniques, different from those needed to present a television programme (as Starkey’s performance on the reality TV show Jamie’s Dream School dramatically indicated). Physics, biology and every other subject in schools is taught along lines that reflect research in the universities. One wouldn’t expect physics teachers to ignore Stephen Hawking’s ideas about black holes, or biology teachers to keep quiet about the discovery of DNA. So what makes history so different? Chemistry devotes a large amount of time to transmitting skills to students; why shouldn’t history?
The narrative that the critics want shoved down pupils’ throats in schools – as they sit in rows silently learning lists of kings and queens – is essentially what’s been called the “Whig theory of history”; that is, telling a story of British history over a long period of time, stressing the development of parliamentary democracy in a narrative that culminates in a present viewed in self-congratulatory terms.
This theory was exploded by professional historians more than half a century ago, under the influence of the classic tract The Whig Interpretation of History by the conservative historian Herbert Butterfield. Yet it still has strong support in the media. The Daily Telegraph and the right-wing think tank Civitas even campaigned to get H E Marshall’s patriotic textbook Our Island Story put on the National Curriculum. Dating from the Edwardian era, this book, with its stories of how the British brought freedom and justice to the Maoris of New Zealand and many other lucky peoples across the world, has rightly been described as “imperialist propaganda masquerading as history”. In what other academic subject would people seriously advocate a return to a state of knowledge as it was a hundred years ago?
Perhaps instead of this outdated volume they might therefore use Simon Jenkins’s new A Short History of England. But its message is in the end not very different. Interviewed in the Guardian, its author intoned with breathtaking complacency his view that “England really is a most successful country” and claimed that English history was separate from that of the other European powers. “The British talent,” if we are to believe Jenkins, “had always been to keep away from wars overseas. We had kept out of Europe all the time.”
Jenkins talks as if there had never been a Norman conquest, an Angevin regime, a hundred years war, a Dutch invasion (in 1688), joint rule of a large chunk of Germany (Hanover) from 1714 to 1837, or a series of wars with France, ranging across the world from India to the Americas, from the age of Louis XIV to that of Napoleon; as if there had never been any immigration or any cultural exchange with the Continent; as if our history had not been part of Europe’s through two world wars and the ensuing decades of peace. The thought of such an ignorant and insular approach to English history finding its way into the hands of children is frightening; but on the other hand, its errors of fact and perspective are so egregious that it might provide a good starting point from which they can sharpen their critical faculties.
It’s all very well demanding that the curriculum should be filled with facts, but what facts you choose depends on what vision you have of British national identity. The concept of “British history” itself is contentious and politically debatable, which perhaps is why some of the National Curriculum’s critics advocate a narrative history of England instead; though in the case of Jenkins the justification for this, that “England is an island”, is a geographical howler that even six-year-olds should be able to spot. Time and again, the advocates of a national narrative confuse English history with British history, in a way that would not go down well in Cardiff or Edinburgh.
History at every level, not just in the universities, is endlessly contentious and argumentative. How can this provide a basis for a unified national consciousness? Rote learning suppresses critical thought; narrative isn’t something you can teach unless you subject it to critical analysis and for that you need the skills to interrogate it. For analysis, especially in depth, you need to study selected topics, even if it has to be within a broader chronological context. Critics who complain of the breaking up of the seamless web of chronology have no concept of what history teaching and learning actually involve.
Forcing students to study a narrowly focused curriculum based on British kings and queens would soon lead to students in their thousands being put off history as a subject. There would be a collapse of take-up at GCSE and A-level. Our culture and our national identity would be impoverished. A quack remedy for a misdiagnosed complaint, it would only make things worse. The real threat to history teaching in our schools doesn’t come from the curriculum, it comes from somewhere else, not mentioned by Skidmore at all: it comes from the academies, Michael Gove’s flagship secondary schools, which are free from local authority control and don’t have to follow the National Curriculum. In 2011, just 20 per cent of academy students taking GCSEs included history among their subjects. As academies – which already make up 10 per cent of secondary schools – spread further, with government encouragement, the teaching of history really will be in crisis.
Richard J Evans is Regius Professor of History and president of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He is the author of “The Third Reich at War” (Penguin, £12.99)
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