History Wars

Question 1

Hobsbawm, 1997

Answer 1

‘History is the raw material of nationalistic or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies, as poppies are the raw material of heroin addiction’

Question 2

Tessa Morris-Suzuki,The Past Within Us:Media,Memory,History(London,2005),Chapter1:The Past is Dead

Answer 2

Out of kaleidoscopic mass of fragments we make and remake patterns of understanding which explain the origins and nature of the world in which we live. And doing this, we define and redefine the place that we occupy in that world

impelled by a sense of crisis in our relationship w the past - crisis of history

April 2001 - South K and Japan in diplomatic incident which had just prompted the recall of the Korean ambassador from Tokyo
Protestors on streets of Seoul had set up stalls w banners calling for boycott of Japanese goods
Serious political embarrassment for President Kim Dae-Jung

All this turmoil generated by a single hist textbook which the Japanese govt had just approved for use in junior high schools

Chinese and Korean govts and protest groups argued - text whitewashed hist of Japanese expansionism and colonialism in the region

Escalating dispute led to temp freezing of trade liberalisation measures between Japan and SK, as well as to an incident in which a group of incensed Koreans publicly cut off their own fingers w meat cleavers as a gesture of protest

1996 - nationalist Japanese academics, Society for History Textbook Reform
SHTR - Nishio Kanji, History of the Nation’s People
2001 - launched 2 junior high school texts
New History Textbook

Emphasis on unique glories of Japanese civilization, generally positive assessments of the impact of Japanese colonization on other parts of Asia

Nationwide campaigns to discourage education committees from adopting the texts were largely successful - in the end, less than 0.1% of Japanese junior high schools adopted the texts

Kanji use of a kind of ersatz postmodernism to add substance to nationalism - ‘history is not science… history is a world which is brought into being only by words’

Internal inconsistencies - while firmly admonishing students not to judge the past by the standards of the present, Kanji and his colleagues unhesitatingly use contemporary globalized aesthetic standards as a basis for asserting that various examples of early Japanese Buddhist art are ‘on a par w the works of the great Italian sculptors Donatello and Michelangelo’

Historical consciousness clearly not shared by whole Japanese nation bc Kanji castigates all Japanese hists of ‘the past half century or so’ for being ‘enmeshed in unbelieveable superstitions and immured in ignorance and blindness’
SHTR narratives intended to relieve contemp generation of Japanese from any sense of responsib for pre-1945 colonialism and military expansion in Asia

Treating all narratives as equally valuable implies we forgo the possibility that anyone should take responsibility for the past

Second problem of textbook debate = it’s all about textbooks
We learn about past from multiplicity of media

Many ppl today recall the assassination of President JFK in ways influenced by Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, while many mems of the current young generation of Japanese ppl perceive the events of the Asia-Pacific War through imagery influenced by Kobayashi Yoshinori’s comic books (mem of the SHTR)

Popular media, by silences as much as what they present, shape our imaginative landscape of the past
Need to look at political and aesthetic economy of mass media. Constrained by economic rules of market - what will sell

Pop culture works its effects by drawing on deep reservoirs of shared mem: we can readily make sense of the plot of a Hollywood western or a courtroom drama bc it follows the pattern of already familiar narratives

White - knowledge of the past conveyed through media that doesn’t follow conventional narrative forms: film, TV ‘docu-dramas’, CD

Such media oft intercut the real and the imaginary, so that the distinction between the two dissolves - according to White

White 1992 - some events such immensity and so much evd that threaten to overwhelm narrative hist

Sceptical of White’s emph on unprecedented nature of changes - early as 1820s Manzoni interweaving romance of novel with invented 17th C historical documents

in multimedia age, esp important to encourage students to understand how the visions of the past which they encounter in pop media are moulded by the nature of the media themselves

History as an interpretative ‘science of the past’ comes to be replaced by a quest to re-establish a personal connection w a vanishing heritage

History about both interpretation and identification - involves imagination and empathy.

Identification oft becomes basis for rethinking or reaffirming our own identity in the present. Sense of belonging

Question 3

national apologies

Answer 3

Czech and German govts have apologised to one another for prewar and wartime misdeeds
Queen of England has signed a statement of regret to New Zealand’s Maoris for their dispossession by the British

Question 4

Different narratives offering different perspectives on responsibility

Answer 4

Friedländer observes that each narrative offers a distinct perspective on responsibility. The conventional ‘liberal interpretation’, which focuses on the political and ideological dimensions of the rise of Nazism, emph the guilt of political leaders, while also to some degree acknowledges the reponsib of the mass of German bystanders who failed to resist the Nazis. F contrasts this to a structuralist narrative, which puts a much greater stress on the continuity of social structures, rooted in 19th C Imperial Germany, that offered the necessary breeding ground for Nazism in its rise and development, structures that, more often than not still exist within the [then] West German republic

Third, symmetric, narrative focuses on parallels between the crimes of the Nazis and those of others, particularly the Soviet Union

Fourth narrative - Soviet atrocities as pre-dating and in a sense providing a model for Nazi atrocities, thus seeking to shift focus of responsibility away from the German nation altogether

our understanding of history is never just an intellectual matter; any encounter w the past involves feeling and imagination as well as pure knowledge.

Academic hist = too wary of emotions

Implicated in the past - later generations beneficiaries.
Also, wider sense - we live enmeshed in structures, institutions and webs of ideas which are the product of history, formed by acts of imagination, courage, generosity

Reflecting on our implication in the processes of history does not produce a single authoritative ‘historical truth’. Does require ‘historical truthfulness’

Hisotrical truthfulness = ongoing dialogue, through which we listen to voices from past, tell and retell stories, and so define and redefine our position in the present.

Independence Hall visit in South Korea - as one student with me observed, when 1st visited as schoolchildren, had come away with feeling of hatred 4 Japan. Now, more interested in exploring relationship between signifier and signified in complex nationalist imagery of the hall’s displays and architecture.

What was valuable was that, in visiting the Independence Hall, we encountered… a series of cross-cutting accounts and questions which helped to break up those grand narratives of the nation

Media shape memories transmitted

What is important is not simply to learn the history of the other. The problem is how to equip people with the power to use various media creatively in an endless process of relearning and reimagining history
Dynamics governing the interaction between society and mass media are themselves transnational. Thus, no longer makes sense to examine these forces within the comfortable and familiar bounds of national frontiers

Question 5

Jos Perry

Answer 5

‘We recollect, therefore we are’

Question 6

Tóibín, 2013

Answer 6

Najibullah was president of Afghanistan between 1987 and 1992. There is a story that, while holed up in the UN compound in Kabul waiting for the Taliban to arrive, he busied himself translating into Pashto a book by Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game, which deals with the history of the invasions of Afghanistan in the 19th century.
Najibullah -
“Only ifwe understand history can we make steps to break the cycle.”

In Wexford, where I am from, because of serious scholarship and the level of debate caused by historians, it is not unusual for my fellow citizens to see the1798 rebellion – once viewed only asglorious, and the subject of many patriotic ballads – as both part of a struggle for liberty and a savage little sectarian revolt that achieved nothing. No one seems to have any trouble conjuring with opposites, except some politicians perhaps, and bad historians.

there will always begovernment ministers who think the case that every school student should study history has still not been proved. Ijust didn’t expect this to happen in Ireland, which has torn itself apart in the name of a single view of history, a history filled with myth and prejudice, rather than scrutinised with irony and intelligence

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present. Least of all, mine.

Question 7

Ofsted, History for All (2011)

Answer 7

Fairly neutral account of state of hist
Criticised fragmented nature of hist at key stage 2
Decline in ppl carying on w hist bc of attempts to climb league table w numeracy and lit rates
Hist too oft taught as part of humanities by ppl w/o specialist training
Hist could be improved thru specialist training
View too little hist = a myth

Question 8

SimonSchama, ‘My Vision for History in Schools’,Guardian(2010)

Answer 8

He had been appointed by Gove, newly appointed and controv Ed Minister. Gove v top-down, trad view of education. Canon in Eng lit and trad reading of what is import about Br hist

Based in Harvard

Yet commenting on cohesion and import of hist for young ppl

Even during toughest trials it’s our hist that binds us together

Hist crucial for developing collective identity

He says - hist = by definition bone of contention

It is indispensable in understanding identity

seeding of amnesia is the undoing of citizenship

Identity crops up many times

Making really humanist case - helping pupils understand who they are

Children need history most - generations who will pass on or not be interested
Imaginations could be held hostage in the now if no hist

History gives pupils key skills - scrutinise evd

Analytical knowl of nature of power

Understanding of how some nations acquire wealth while others lose it

Big decisions predicated on understanding of hist

Children being short-changed in hist - just 1 hour a week. Should get more attent bc central to civic ident

Need passionate and more specialist teachers

no true history that refuses to span the arc, no coherence without chronology. A pedagogy
that denies that completeness to children fatally misunderstands the psychology of their receptiveness,
patronises their capacity for wanting the epic of long time; the
hunger for plenitude.
storytelling is not the
alternative to debate but its necessary condition.

Some academy schools getting too utilitarian in approach - more exam-friendly approaches

Hist teachers claiming losing hist

two successive Historical Association surveys in 2009 and this year make dramatically clear (they are available online at
history.org.uk along with an excellent podcast debate about history in schools chaired by Sir David Cannadine creating two nations of young Britons:
those, on the one hand, who grow up with a sense of our shared memory as a living, urgently present body of knowledge, something that informs their own lives and shapes their sense of community; and those on the other hand who
have been encouraged to treat it as little more than ornamental
polishing for the elite.

encouraging academics to produce new books. Must involve museum curators, parents - all.

children come to understand that the value of
the house they live in is not measured by square footage, but the wealth of its memories, the abundance of its shared stories; for it is from that history that we recognise our membership of a common family. Like all
other families, it will row and rage and seldom sing from the same page. But somehow that common memory will make it
pause before it tears itself apart and shreds the future to ribbons.

What every child should learn - fundamentals, Thomas Beckett Etc, Black Death bc of incredible societal changes, execution of Charles 1st bc 1st time monarch really challenged. Indian moment - empire. Irish Wars. Opium Wars

Question 9

Sandbrook

Answer 9

Agreed with Schama

Need to return to stories that make up a nation’s collective mem, that fire the imagination, that bind the generations
Need citizens w sense of shared mem
Hist seen as source of national unity which can foster shared identity
Idea that current curriculum too much focused on skills. Should tell what happened in past to help us be better citizens

Question 10

Richard J.Evans,‘The Wonderfulness of Us:the Tory Interpretation of Whig History’,London Review of Books, Vol.33,No.6(2011),pp.9-12

Answer 10

Return to narrative = return to outmoded pedagogical practise

children aged 11-14:
70 per cent of assessment to be on content and only 30 per cent on skills.
bizarrely counterfactual complaint that the only names mentioned in the current curriculum are the abolitionists William Wilberforce and Olaudah Equiano
Better History’s Seán Lang pointed out that ‘no one would say that because only two names are in the official documentation these are the only two that people teach about

real problem
schools’ failure to deliver it, as history is taught all too frequently as part of ‘humanities’ or ‘general studies’ by teachers with no training in the subject, and key parts of it get neglected in the drive to boost literacy and numeracy rates

At A lvl, 1/4 of teaching time is spent on Britain

wrong for students to be able to repeat the same topics at GCSE and A level. And the time-frame should be longer: not just modern world history but remoter periods too. Yet this doesn’t mean that Nazi Germany should be ditched

The choice of Schama
largely derives from his successful multi-part television history of Britain, broadcast 11 years ago. It presented history as narrative good TV doesn’t necessarily make for good teaching. A return to narrative in the classroom – to passive consumption instead of active critical engagement – is more likely to be a recipe for boredom and disaffection

Gove, Schama and other advocates of the new Britain-centred narrative are all essentially proponents of the Whig interpretation of history.
Celebratory history

The present curriculum for children at least some attention to the multiethnic composition
critics want to replace this with a narrowly nationalistic identity built on myths about the ‘British’ past,

makes far more sense to teach British children of South Asian or Afro-Caribbean background about the parts of the world where their families originated

present curriculum takes due account of the undeniable fact
that Britain is part of Europe
globalisation. Undergraduateswant more world history

more calamitous is the prospect of history teaching in the schools confining itself to the transmission and regurgitation of ‘facts’.

source-criticism teaches students not to accept passively every fact and argument they are presented with. When I started teaching history at university in the 1970s, many first-year students were incapable of critical reading of this kind.
Better history teaching in schools changed all that

Better History declares that ‘it is by the acquisition and use of historical knowledge that historians are primarily judged’ – but in reality that only makes a Mastermind contestant.

It is possible to teach actual skills only if history is taught in depth, and that means a focus on a limited number of specialised topics. Of course, students need to know at least in outline the longer-term context of what they study. But if you make this context the core element in the curriculum, you are sacrificing depth for breadth, and you will end up with a superficial gallop through the centuries

Gove, Schama and their allies are confusing history with memory. History is a critical academic discipline whose aims include precisely the interrogation of memory and the myths it generates. It really does matter to historians thatNelson and Wellington weren’t national heroes to everyone. For those in power, this makes history as a discipline not only useless but dangerous too.

Question 11

Gove, Conservative Conference October 2010

Answer 11

young people should learn ‘our island story’, (a reference to Henrietta Marshall’s 1905 Our Island Story)

‘One of the under-appreciated tragedies of our time has been the sundering of our society from its past,’

current approach we have to history denies children the opportunity to hear our island story. Children are given a mix of topics at primary, a cursory run through Henry VIII and Hitler at secondary and many give up the subject at 14, without knowing how the vivid episodes of our past become a connected narrative.

The first task of the curriculum, as Gove and Schama see it, is to foster a sense of British national identity.

Question 12

James Vernon, ‘The State they are in: History and Public Education Funding in England’, American Historical Association,Perspective on History(March 2011)

Answer 12

Using a ‘TV History’ approach treats students as customers and history as a product
Neoliberalism and the marketisation of education

no one questions the public value of teaching history in schools. Yet even in schools, market models are being held up as the solution to its increasing marginality within the National Curriculum

In creating the National Curriculum alongside a system of funding predicated around test results, Margaret Thatcher’s administration of the 1980s sought to reconcile history’s public value with the introduction of market models of distribution and patterns of student demand. The current Conservative government is no different. Michael Gove, the new secretary for education who has removed public funding for the teaching of history at universities, wants to protect the position of history in schools. Seeing history as a training ground for patriotism and citizenship

because his prescription of an overtly “little Englander” version of history that essentially rejects the history of multicultural Britain smacks of too much government, Gove has looked to a market model of education for help.

Gove’s logic is beguilingly simple: with a better product, the “customers,” aka pupils, will come back.

As an exiled Brit in the American academy, Schama possesses little expertise in the English school system

Many historians have cautiously welcomed the appointment as they too have disdain for the diet of popular but unrelated examples of tyranny and suffering—from Henry VIII to Hitler—on offer in schools

Question 13

Mary Beard

Answer 13

Gove exploiting populism/ celeb culture

Question 14

Reaction to Gove’s curriculum

Answer 14

Ultimately Schama opposed final draft of curriculum

Was backed by Starkey and Ferguson

Only 4% of teachers thought Gove’s draft positive change

Question 15

Mycock’s two tribes

Answer 15

Traditionalists:
Dissemination of an agreed body of knowl
Encouraging patriotism and nat cohesion
Shared national past founded on a homogenous historical narrative

Revisionists:
Devel of critical-embedded analytical skills
Individs should devel own understanding of the past
Acknowl of plural hists

what brought both sides together was the implicit assumption that history was a powerful tool to shape young people’s identity, although there is a lack of an evidence base to support this.

Question 16

National Curriculum

Answer 16

established in 1988 by a secretary of education who styled himself as a historian.

history one of 10 required “foundation subjects” between ages 5 and 14

Question 17

Hist popularity in school

Answer 17

5th most popular A level and 7th most popular GCSE 2001-11

Question 18

Proportion of A level hist students from comprehensive schools

Answer 18

47.4%

Question 19

Better History Group

Answer 19

Gove is taking his cue from the Better History Group, a small think-tank which was set up in 2006 to advise the Conservative shadow team for education. The BH Group is led by Séan Lang, a one-time History teacher who now teaches at Anglia Ruskin University. Lang believes that historical knowledge has been ‘downgraded’ in schools in favour generic skills training. His Better History Group is keen on British history taught chronologically

Question 20

‘History, the Nation and School’, History Workshop Website (2011)
Peter Mandler

Answer 20

History has always had an ambiguous place in British education –
Unlike many other European nations,

British State for most of the 19th and 20th centuries was allergic to compulsory anything and to compulsory national identity most of all.
National self-definition in this country revolved around ‘liberty’,

Even after 1988 the national curriculum was careful not to prescribe too closely what national story should be told

British history has always had pride of place in the KS3 curriculum, and although the less prescriptive nature of curricula offered by the exam boards at 14-18 had allowed British history to decline at GCSE and A-Level in recent years (to the benefit of the study of 20th-century dictatorships), the latest government revision to A-Level requirements has restored British history to a minimum 25% of the A-Level content for all exam boards.

press coverage of the recent Ofsted report, ‘History for All’. This report gave a balanced account of the state of history in the schools at all age levels. It criticized the episodic nature of teaching at KS2, and the squeezing of curricular time at KS3, and queried the ending of compulsory history at 14. On the other hand, it praised the quality of history teaching at all levels. It praised the national curriculum and argued that current deficiencies could be rectified by restoring specialist teaching of history, and a curriculum of broad chronological and geographical range.
The biggest problems, it felt, lay in the squeezing of history at KS3. History was thriving at GCSE and A-Level. And it argued forthrightly that ‘The view that too little British history is taught in secondary schools in England is a myth.’ But this is not how the report was presented in the press. Instead it was almost entirely interpreted within the framework prepared for it by the government and the ‘history in danger’ lobby. The Telegraph’s headline was ‘History “marginalized” in schools, said Ofsted’.
‘The disclosures follow claims from the Coalition that children are growing up ignorant of British history’, concluded the Telegraph, even though the report had said precisely the opposite.
Daily Mail - again the thrust of the story was in support of a more prescriptive history curriculum; again the report’s findings on the state of British history were entirely omitted. Even the left-leaning Observer, no friend of the government, headlined itsreport ‘Schools failing on teaching of history

The Observer later changed this headline on its website to the narrower claim that ‘History textbooks are “failing pupils”’, I suspect because someone (perhaps Ofsted?) complained that the original headline was a travesty. The Ofsted report did have one paragraph which criticized textbooks, but ‘failing pupils’ appears nowhere in the report.
The Ofsted report doesn’t conclude that ‘history is in danger’, but it does identify some very specific places – particularly, KS3 in 20% of schools (many of them academies) – where slippage has occurred and needs redress.

I am concerned about any narrowing of the history curriculum which would deprive young people of one of the principal ‘lessons of history’ – that people did things differently in other times and places.

Something like half of all A-Level papers are taken in 20th-century history.
If I were to be ‘history czar’ and to bring my own prescription into the history curriculum, it would be to make compulsory some element of both pre-modern and non-Western history at GCSE and A-Level.

Like the Ofsted inspectors, I see no reason to hand over KS3 to British history; but unlike them, I see no reason to hand over GCSE and A-Level to Hitler and Stalin (or even to Martin Luther King) either.

England’s market-based system of qualifications and early specialization give considerable scope for student choice after 14. Each of these characteristics has its advantages as well as disadvantages

Many countries allow students to specialize in the last years of secondary school
In federal systems such as the U.S., Canada and Germany, there is considerable diversity at local or provincial level

If we teach more history, we will have to teach less of something else.

These are hard choices that are not best served by soundbites from ‘history czars’ or scary headlines, and least of all by a myth that England is somehow falling behind in the national-identity sweepstakes because our children haven’t learnt properly their ‘narrative national history’.

Question 21

‘History, the Nation and School’, History Workshop Website (2011)
Ed Webb

Answer 21

In 1930 Walter Sellar and Robert Yeatman’s hugely popular 1066 and All That satirised the way that children were being taught history at the time.

no room for any deviation from the ‘correct’ version of events.
This state of affairs appears to have continued until Mary Price’s 1968 article ‘History in Danger’ alerted its readers to the fact that school children rated history as one of the least useful or interesting subjects they studied. The subsequent work of Jeannette Coltham and John Fines led to a movement for a ‘new history’.
Fundamentally this called for an end to the regurgitating of received wisdom and replacing it with ‘doing history’. Students were to learn the skills of historians, and to understand that the past is contested

When it comes to content the brief is: British (medieval to 20th century), European and world history. The only prescription is to study the slave trade, the world wars, the Holocaust and decolonisation. There is no mention of specific dates and only two historical figures are mentioned. Neither is Winston Churchill.

KS3 can feel rather compressed.

The growth of academy schools outside local authority control and the introduction of a more skills-orientated NC in 2007 has seen history increasingly taught as part of ‘humanities’ by non-specialists. KS3 has been compressed into two rather than three years in some schools to allow more time for GCSEs

Historical Association has found that a growing number of KS3 students get a diet of no more than an hour per week of history

E Bac introduced, to tackle concern
some students are pushed by school management into ‘easier’ and ‘less academic’ subjects so that the school has a better chance of a good place in the league tables when measured by 5 A*-C in any GCSE subject

history is, with art, the most popular GCSE option and the fifth most popular A level. Is it really in danger?

Question 22

Key concepts taught at KS3 in latest NC

Answer 22

1. chronological understanding;
2. cultural, ethnic and religious diversity;
3. change and continuity;
4. cause and consequence;
5. significance
6. interpretation

Question 23

English Baccalaureate ‘E Bac’

Answer 23

introduced retrospectively for the league tables for the summer 2010 exam results
measured the percentage of students gaining A*-C grades in English, maths, science, a language and one humanity

Question 24

Andrew Mycock and CatherineMcGlynn, ‘Educating the Nation(s): History, Identity and Citizenship after Devolution’, History Workshop Website (2014)

Answer 24

Educating the Nation(s): History, Identity and Citizenship after Devolution University of Huddersfield 6 July 2013

increasing national divergence in education policy and history curricula outside of England that has become increasingly pronounced in the wake of devolution since 1998

Yeandle - debates about school history are themselves founded on distortion of past practice.
‘golden age’ of history teaching lauded by many traditionalists was actually only dominant for a brief period after the Second World War. Conversely, the origins of ‘New History’ of the 1960s with its emphasis on skills, emotion and critical thinking could be seen as a return to the approach espoused in the training of teachers recruited for the first wave of free and compulsory education during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Scott - slavery exhibitions. Hostile reactions by some visitors to negative depictions of the empire demonstrated how difficult it is to encourage people to engage critically with the past and relate it to contemporary dynamics of power and exclusion

Haydn - questioned the politicized mission to impose ‘Our Island Story’ on young people.argued such distortions required the creation of a single narrative that exacerbated the problem that ‘veracity is a forgotten aspect of school history

McGlynn- importance of banal factors in shaping young people’s understanding of the past and also the significance of family and locality in creating a sense of what was meaningful about history and identity.assumption that it was possible to impose any kind of narrative upon them was highly questionable.
Bringing the experiences of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to the fore highlighted commonalities and divergence in debates about school history.
teachers enjoyed much greater autonomy than those in England
invisible national curriculum’ was discernable in each case, thus replicating the narrow focus on national historical figures or events as evidenced in England

Dr Elin Jones, who has recently led a review of Curriculum Cymreig for the Welsh Assembly, lamented the lack of interest in history education.
her frustration with Welsh media outlets who, when they did cover this area, would often ask her about reforms in England

Neil McLennan, the president of the Scottish Association of Teachers of History, noted that developments in Scotland also had positive and negative aspects. Despite the name, the new Curriculum for Excellence focused on pedagogy rather than content.
Although the history curriculum had retained an emphasis on Scottish, British and European/world history, it did carry the disadvantage of creating silos and minimising the chance for students to perceive the interconnectivity of historical events and figures. However, it also prevented swings towards one particular aspect of history. This was particularly important, he noted, given that since devolution one could detect a stronger focus on the prominence of the Scottish national context

conference succeeded in its aim of highlighting divergent approaches to history education across the devolved UK, thus moving beyond the Anglocentric assumptions evident in much of the Westminster-led debate

Joke van der Leeuw-Roord, the executive director of Euroclio (the European Association of History Educators):
emotional attachment to history teaching
articulated in public debate in numerous countries
evidence base was finally being built to underpin discussion of the subject
the next challenge in research terms was to build transnational links to develop a truly comprehensive picture of this inherently controversial issue.

Question 25

National Curriculum Drop-in session comments

Answer 25

National Curriculum - national - broad aims
Organised thematically
Devel of church state in Britain
Engaging in local history
Has changed little 
British focus

Inevitably History limited bc of limited time. V British-focused, doesn’t pay attent to more global history, no country devels alone
Case for empire being more central part of the narrative

AQA - broad, overarching
Suggestions for wider depth studies
How realistic in context of one hour a week?

Question 26

Burn and Harris, Tracking the health of history in England’s secondary schools, Aug 2016

Answer 26

Despite all the concerns that teachers registered about the extent of the changes and the demands that the new criteria would make, the same teachers also made it clear that they essentially welcomed the changes as embodying a more appropriate conception of
historical knowledge and understanding. Despite the new subject knowledge
that many of them would have to acquire after years of teaching only twentieth-century history at GCSE, Figure 1(a), taken from the 2014 survey
report, shows that most teachers strongly approved the requirement that future
GCSEs should require the study of history on different time-scales, including a long-term thematic study over many hundreds of years

the concerns about the place of history in the school curriculum that first inspired the launch of the survey have largely disappeared

At Key Stage 3, these were concerns not about the content of the 2008 National Curriculum but about the way in which its presentation, particularly by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), seemed to have encouraged a range of cross-curricular and competence-based initiatives, many of which paid little attention to the distinctive features of different
subject disciplines and the different ways in which knowledge is generated and validated within them.

Many concluded that subject specialists were not necessarily required for Key Stage 3 and chose to cut the time for what they regarded as non-essentials, by reducing that stage from three years to two

That first survey, conducted in 2009, revealed that just over 7% of the schools responding were teaching some kind of competence-based or cross-curricular course in Year 7 (see Figure 3). In almost as many schools again, history was being taught as part of an integrated humanities programme,

In a further 10% of schools history retained a distinct identity as a subject in its own right but was taught within a humanities programme which often meant that the same teacher (sometimes a historian, but often not) taught all three or four humanities subjects in rotation. While history continued to be taught as a discrete subject in three quarters of the schools from which we received responses, it was striking how much higher this proportion was among the independent and grammar school respondents (at 97.1% and 94.1% respectively)

2009 survey, around a third of comprehensive school respondents reported that they allocated an hour a week or less to history teaching at Key Stage 3.

dramatic increase, since 2011, in the proportions of schools teaching history as a distinct subject in its own right (see Figure 3) and a process of stabilisation in terms of the time allocated to the subject at Key Stage 3

since the announcement of the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) as a measure of attainment
to be reported at the school level, the tendency towards integrated or competency-based curricula has been reversed and that history’s position within the Key Stage 3 curriculum now appears to be more secure.14 This period has, of course, also seen the introduction of a new National Curriculum (with effect from 2014)

dramatic rise in GCSE uptake from a very steady state of around 32% of the cohort each year to nearly 39% in 2013 and just over 40% in the following two years.17 This increase is undoubtedly due to the introduction of the EBacc

Students are not being forced to choose between history and geography

While the increase in GCSE uptake has in many contexts been the result of compulsion – with around 40% of respondents noting that some or all students are indeed required to take at least one of the two subjects – Figure 4 shows that only 4% of respondents in 2015 reported that students were forced to
choose between the two.

concerns registered by hundreds of teachers in their response to the 2013 survey were addressed in the final version of the revised National Curriculum for history published in the September of that year

, teachers from all types of school used the survey to show how appalled they were about many aspects of the draft: the sheer amount of content and the detail in which it had been prescribed; the requirement to teach it all in chronological order across the primary and secondary phases, with primary schools required to cover the time-span from the Stone Age to 1700; and the overwhelming predominance of British history:

Teachers were particularly alarmed that the detailed prescription of content to be covered would reduce teaching to the simple transmission of a list of events or developments with no opportunity to explore genuinely historical questions

two of the teachers’ main concerns were fully addressed in the final version of the curriculum which moved the boundary between the primary and secondary curriculum back to 1066 and reduced the detailed prescription at Key Stage 3 by mandating only the seven broad ‘aspects’ of history to covered and leaving the choice of specific content within each aspect up to teachers. While the British emphasis of the original draft remained, with five out of the seven ‘aspects’ devoted to local or national history, and a sixth focusing on the challenges ‘facing Britain, Europe and the wider world’ since 1901, the seventh aspect did at least require ‘at least one study of a significant society or issue in world history’.

Question 27

2011 OFSTED REPORT: HISTORY FOR ALL

Answer 27

n March 2011, OFSTED published a report on school history, History for All, which presented a mixed picture. In terms of primary schools: History teaching was good or better in most primary school

… However, some pupils found it difficult to place the historical episodes they had
studied within any coherent, long-term narrative.

decisions about curriculum structures within schools have placed constraints on history, and other foundation subjects, at Key Stage 3. In 14 of the 58 secondary schools visited between 2008 and 2010, whole-school curriculum changes were having a negative impact on teaching and learning in history at Key Stage 3.

Question 28

Tristram Hunt: If we have no history, we have no future (Aug 2011)

Answer 28

Tristam Hunt, writing in the Guardian, reflected on what such surveys might mean: Our national story is being privatised, with 48 percent of independent pupils
taking the subject compared with 30 percent of state school entrants. And academy schools, so admired by government ministers, are among the worst
offenders.

Question 29

Financial Times, ‗Too much Hitler and the Henrys: What‘s Wrong with the Teaching of History
in Britain?‘, 10 April 2010

Answer 29

According to 2006 exam data, 51 percent of GCSE candidates and a staggering80 percent of A-level candidates study the history of the Third Reich. As someone who wrote his DPhil thesis on inter-war Germany, I yield to no one in my respect for the historiography of Adolf Hitler‘s rise and fall. But there can be no justification for this excessive focus on the history of a single European country over a period of just a dozen years.

Western ascendancy was not all good, any more than it was all bad. It was simply
what happened and, of all the things that happened over the past five centuries, it
was the thing that changed the world the most. That so few British schoolchildren
are even aware of this is deplorable.

Question 30

HoL Debate, “To call attention to the teaching of history in schools”, Library notes

Answer 30

20 Oct 2011

Question 31

Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History, 1997

Answer 31

questioned the traditional view that there is an objective truth of the past
which historians have to simply recover or uncover and present to the world:
The past is not discovered or found. It is created and represented by the historian
as a text, which in turn is consumed by the reader… The idea of the truth being
rediscovered in the evidence is a nineteenth-century modernist conception and it
has no place in contemporary writing about the past

Question 32

Richard Evans, In Defence of History, 1997

Answer 32

Such has been the power and influence of the postmodern critique of history that
growing numbers of historians themselves are abandoning the search for truth,
the belief in objectivity, and the quest for a scientific approach to the past. No
wonder so many historians are worried about the future of their discipline

we really can, if we are very scrupulous and self-critical, find out how it all
happened and reach some tenable though always less than final conclusions
about what it all meant.

Question 33

Eric Hobsbawm, On History, 1997

Answer 33

Unfortunately, as the situation in large parts of the world at the end of our
millennium demonstrates, bad history is not harmless history. It is dangerous.
The sentences typed on apparently innocuous keyboards may be sentences of
death

Question 34

For much of the 20th century history appears to have been taught largely unchanged.
Chris Husbands, Alison Kitson and Anna Pendry argue that:

Answer 34

history teaching in schools, and particularly in grammar schools, was
dominated by the ‗great tradition‘. In this ‗great tradition‘ the history teacher‘s role
was ‗didactically active‘; it was to give pupils the facts of historical knowledge and
to ensure through repeated short tests that they had learned them. The pupil‘s
role was passive; history was a ‗received‘ subject. The body of knowledge to be
taught was also clearly defined

Question 35

However, traditional approach to history began to be challenged in the 1970s and 1980s, as
Christine Counsell has documented:

Answer 35

During the 1970s and 1980s, history teachers, curriculum developers and
researchers completely reconceptualised school history… Instead of emphasising
the cumulative memorizing of a body of facts, curriculum developers produced
and researchers analysed new cognitive domains that were deemed to be more
closely derivative of the practice of the academic discipline itself.4

Question 36

Writing in the

Independent in August 1989, Skidelsky set out his opposition to the history GCSE:

Answer 36

The National Criteria for GCSE refuse to specify a ‗minimum core of content‘. In
other words, no British history has to be taught for GCSE. Some pupils are doing
exotic syllabuses such as the history of medicine, taught by teachers who know
nothing about medicine. At the same time, no GCSE candidates in this country
are allowed to study British history over a large span of historical time. ‗Learning
by doing‘ has become entrenched in the form of projects and coursework
assignments, while chronology and factual recall have become marginalised.44

Question 37

October 2010, Michael Gove
said the following concerning the balance between skills and content in the teaching of
history:

Answer 37

It is critical that we ensure that every child has a proper spine of knowledge—the
narrative of the history of these islands. Without that, the skills of comparison and
of examining primary and secondary sources and drawing the appropriate
conclusions, are meaningless. Without that spine, history cannot stand up and
take its place properly in the national curriculum.

Question 38

Niall Ferguson

Answer 38

believed that there ―should be a compulsory chronological framework over the entire
period from entering secondary school right through to sixth form‖

Question 39

Susie Mesure, writing in the Independent, was also critical of what she saw as the skillsbased
bias of school history but also of the over-use of ‗empathy‘:

Answer 39

The fault lies in the national curriculum‘s skills-centred obsession, which decrees
it more crucial for a pupil to imagine the privations a soldier faced in the trenches
than to name any of the battles he fought. It wants students to emerge able to
empathise their way through coursework rather than retain any actual knowledge
that might serve them in later life.

The prescription to teach history through a politically correct prism—which
emphasises concepts such as slavery and imperialism, instead of dwelling on the
feats of those historical figures who make up the narrative that got us to today—
has stripped the past of much meaning. Where pupils do pause for breath during
the odd isolated era like the Tudors or the Nazis—the ―Henrys and Hitler‖, as
those critical of the current syllabus have dubbed the periods—they wind up only
knowing about a handful of events

Question 40

HoC Q and A on History Teaching, Nov 2010

Answer 40

Tony Baldry The Second Church Estates Commissioner -

We will never have an understanding of, for example, the need for greater religious tolerance if we do not understand the tragedy of why George Napier was martyred simply for being a Catholic or why Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley were burned to death in Oxford. If our children do not have the opportunity of hearing our island’s story, they will never learn the lessons of the past. What is my right hon. Friend doing to ensure that history is taught as a connected narrative?

Tristram Hunt Labour, Stoke-on-Trent Central -

the real issue not the syllabus, but the fact that the average 13-year-old has only one hour of history a week for 32 weeks a year, thanks to the growth of citizenship and other well-meaning additions to the syllabus that surely need to be pulled back?

Philip Davies Conservative, Shipley -

I hope it will be done in a way that allows us to be proud of our country, rather than always apologising for our history

Michael Gove The Secretary of State for Education -

The changes we are making to the national curriculum and to accountability, through the English baccalaureate, will ensure that history is taught as a proper subject, so that we can celebrate the distinguished role of these islands in the history of the world, from the role of the Royal Navy in putting down the slave trade, to the way in which, since 1688, this nation has been a beacon for liberty that others have sought to emulate. We will also ensure that it is taught in a way in which we can all take pride.

Question 41

Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (1990)

Answer 41

cause - Charles I failed to manage challenge of governing three different kingdoms with different institutions and each with its own internal religious divisions

Question 42

Smith, History of the Modern British Isles

Answer 42

from the union of the Crowns of England and Scotland in 1603 to the union of the kingdoms in 1707

explores the intersecting histories of the Stuart monarchies and considers how events in each nation were shaped by being part of a multiple kingdom as well as by their own internal dynamics

Question 43

March 2011 Jesus College History Debate, held at Law Society in London, What History should British children be taught?

Answer 43

Niall Ferguson vs Richard Evans

Ferguson - appalled that only 34% of students admitted to read History at a Welsh University knew who was monarch at the time of the Spanish Armada