This elimination of our national story in many of our schools is nothing short of a tragedy
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.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/28/tristram-hunt-history-teaching-schools
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