LONDON LETTER:The teaching of history in English schools is a mess, warn leading historians, writes MARK HENNESSY
IN A room in Winston Churchill’s Chartwell home in Kent, a teenage boy was looking at a painting of a Spitfire. Turning to his father, he asked: “What’s that about?” Looking up, the father replied: “That’s from the Battle of Britain.” “What’s that?” asked the son. The father, embarrassed, looked around, then hurried his boy along.
The boy’s gap in his knowledge of English history is not unusual. Indeed, it is rapidly becoming the norm, says a new report from historians.
“England is unusual in giving so little value to history at school. Compared with other western democracies, history counts only as a small part of our education,” said the report, published by the think tank Politeia today.
“History seems to have become a subject for an elite minority, for the brighter pupils, taught to relatively few – fewer than one in three GCSE candidates in comprehensive schools take it, and many schools do not even offer it.
“So, most children are deprived of the possibility of understanding their own history. When we lament declining political participation, or alienation, we should bear this in mind,” says Cambridge historian Robert Tombs.
Pupils do not acquire “a broad and coherent sense” of history, while both pupils and teachers face top-down instructions from the department of education that are “artificial and sterile”, leaving success to be achieved “in spite of the system, not because of it”.
“Most alarmingly, genuine intellectual insight is discouraged and even penalised,” says Tombs, a professor of French history and the author of France: 1815 – 1914, and That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present.
The existing curriculum in English schools fails “to teach a broad range of British, or for that matter, European, history”; with “the same few topics tend(ing) to be repeated over and over again”.
Unlike many of his predecessors, perhaps, education secretary Michael Gove is interested in history; and to the fury of teaching unions, he argues that teachers are failing to instruct pupils in the key dates of British history.
In a somewhat contradictory report last year, the schools inspectorate, Ofsted found that history teaching in all bar one of the schools surveyed was excellent, or satisfactory.
Nevertheless, the questions asked by examiners in the GCSE tests had become formulaic, giving teachers the opportunity to drill their charges to do well in getting results, rather than understanding, it said. The universities are left to pick up the pieces for those who move to study history at third level, said George Garnett, a 17-year veteran who has judged 1,500 essays from final-year secondary pupils competing for prizes.
The best continue to be outstanding, Garnett wrote in History Review, but more and more pupils put together “a tessellation of quotations” from historians, making it “very difficult, often impossible, to detect any line of argument.
“In the current jargon, they tick the boxes; but they are in truth not much more than cut-and-paste exercises, some from textbooks, some from the internet,” he said.
Often the pupils favoured by Garnett and his fellow prize judges, because they had displayed some of the ingredients necessary for great historical writing, secured mediocre marks from A-level or other examiners.
One pupil, Ella Raaf, went to the trouble of writing to the London Review of Books to express her frustration, saying pupils are faced with accepting “dull”, “often absurd” examination tactics if they want to get good grades.
“We don’t spend our history lessons doing anything very much beyond trying to understand the marking scheme,” she said in a letter quoted approvingly in Tombs’s pamphlet Lessons from History: Freedom, Aspiration and the New Curriculum.
Everything should be so different, Tombs argues: “Teaching it well should involve imagination, sympathy, cultural exploration, enthusiasm and excitement both at the variety of human cultures and at the particular experience of England.
“But it should be neither narrow nor insular and should introduce what may today seem the remote and strange – lost civilisations, mysterious beliefs, and unfamiliar practices – helping to provide the foundations for understanding the diversity, the achievements and the problems of today’s world.
“It should allow for the discovery of traces of the past on our doorsteps, whether ancient field and street patterns, medieval churches, castles, pictures, objects, works of art and literature, cottages and pubs, schools, hospitals and housing estates.” Tombs, urging root-and-branch changes, says the goal must be to leave pupils with a breadth of knowledge, understanding, and the ability to analyse and formulate a cogent argument: “More rigorous marking of fewer and simpler examinations, testing knowledge, understanding and truly useful abilities, should be the rule.”
The prize is not just a generation of pupils able to quote dates in quizzes. History, says the Cambridge academic, is not just about trying to understand the past. Instead, it should allow pupils to gain insight into other societies and cultures. Most importantly, it should help pupils to learn how to think.