POLITEIA History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum David Abulafia Sheila Lawlor D. H. Robinson A FORUM FOR SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC THINKING POLITEIA UM FOR SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC THINKING A FOR Reforming Legal Aid Sheila Lawlor Gavin Rice Commentaries QC han Fisher t Jona Hardy Max Edite Ligere James Taghdissian In schools across the country today, pupils benefit from the curriculum introduced a decade ago by Michael Gove’s reforms. It puts core knowledge of the subject at the heart of what is taught in the classroom. In history pupils are to be taught about this country’s past from Roman times to the present day along with some European and global history. Now, however, a Whitehall led initiative, prompted by the government’s own proposals, intends to establish a new ‘model curriculum’ and linked resources to ensure that, instead of taking pupils through developments as they emerged at the time, school history mirrors today’s ‘multi racial’ Britain. In History, Whose History: The Battle for the School Curriculum, three historians explain why the government’s proposals will be damaging to history teaching. The authors, Professor David Abulafia, Dr Sheila Lawlor and Dr Daniel Robinson, consider the matter from three different perspectives, yet each reaches the same conclusion. The present curriculum is academically rigorous, historically neutral and respects professional freedom, allowing teachers to extend and build on its broad remit. If the plans go ahead, school history will be subverted by the political ideology of racial theories, the integrity and independence of the subject destroyed, and children will leave school without knowing the history of the country in which they live. £10.00 HISTORY, WHOSE HISTORY? POLITEIA

POLITEIA A Forum for Social and Economic Thinking Politeia commissions and publishes discussions by specialists about constitutional, economic and social ideas and policies. It aims to encourage public discussion on the relationship between the state and the people. Its aim is not to influence people to support any given political party, candidates for election, or position in a referendum, but to inform public discussion of policy. The forum is independently funded, and the publications do not express a corporate opinion, but the views of their individual authors. www.politeia.co.uk Subscribe to Politeia's Publications! For £35 a year you will receive an electronic copy of each of our publications, plus hard copies of two new publications on request, and, if you wish, free hard copies of your choice from our back catalogue. You will also receive advance notice and invitations to Politeia’s conferences and flagship events, with guest speakers from the UK and overseas. More information can be found on our website: www.politeia.co.uk. Or, write to the Secretary at [email protected] A Selection of Recent and Related Publications Freedom to think, Freedom to Speak: Why UK Universities must Change Course Arif Ahmed, Nigel Biggar, John Marenbon The UK, The WTO and Global Trade: Leading Reform on Services Trade David Collins Rules for the Regulators: Regulating Financial Services after Brexit Barney Reynolds Reforming Legal Aid - Next Steps Anthony Speaight QC Reforming Legal Aid S. Lawlor, G. Rice J. Fisher, M. Hardy, E. Ligere, J. Taghdissian The Battle for Britain’s Identity: Against the New Normal John Marenbon The Lawyers Advise: The UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement - Unfinished Business? M. Howe QC, B. Reynolds, D. Collins, J. Webber and S. Lawlor The State, National Identity and Schools S. Lawlor, C. Legras, P. Mattei, C. Michon, R. Gildea,R.Tombs, J. Marenbon What Happened to the Art Schools? Jacob Willer Latin for Language Lovers: Ancient Languages, the New Curriculum and GCSE D. Butterfield, S. Anderson, S. Lawlor, K. Radice, D. Sullivan History in the Making: The New Curriculum: Right or Wrong? David Abulafia, Jonathan Clark and Robert Tombs Primary Problems for the New Curriculum: Tougher Maths, Better Teachers David Burghes

History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum David Abulafia Sheila Lawlor D. H. Robinson POLITEIA 2023 First published in 2023

by Politeia 55 Tufton Street, London SW1P 3QL E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.politeia.co.uk ISBN: 978-1-7392079-0-8 © Politeia 2023 Cover design by Sonia Pagnier Politeia gratefully acknowledges support for this publication from The Foundation for Social and Economic Thinking (FSET) and The Institute for Policy Research Printed in Great Britain by: Blissetts Unit 1, Shield Drive West Cross Industrial Park Great West Road Brentford, TW8 9E

The Authors David Abulafia is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and Professor Emeritus of Mediterranean History at the University of Cambridge. He is a fellow of the British Academy and a member of the Academia Europaea. His publications include The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans (2019), which won the 2020 Wolfson Prize, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (updated, 2014), Frederick II and The Discovery of Mankind. His Politeia publications History in the Making: The New Curriculum: Right or Wrong? (2013). Sheila Lawlor is Politeia’s founder and Research Director and until recently was its executive director. She is responsible for its constitutional, economic and social policy programmes to which she has contributed as author and editor. Dr Lawlor’s background is as a 20th century British political historian, who started working life in Cambridge. Her academic publications include Churchill and the Politics of War 1940-41, and she is now writing on British Politics and Social Policy in the 1940s (working title). She was created a life peer in October 2022. Daniel Robinson is Fellow of Policy at the Department for Levelling Up and a former Fellow in History at Magdalen College, Oxford. In both academia and public policy, his work has concentrated on the history of nationalism, unionism, and regionalism, primarily in Europe and the English-speaking world. Dr Robinson’s recent publications include The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution and Natural and Necessary Unions: Britain, Europe, and the Scottish Question, which explored the deep history of British unionism and Scottish nationalism.

Contents I School History – Knowledge of the Past or Ideology for the Present? Sheila Lawlor 1 II The State, Society and School History: Decline and Fall D. H. Robinson 23 III Do We Actually Need a Model History Curriculum? David Abulafia 36

Sheila Lawlor School History 1 In early 2022 the UK government intervened in the debate prompted by the Black Lives Matter protest. The equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, contended that the events of the summer 2020 ‘showed’ many believed ‘certain systems are flawed or actively rigged against them – be it in the workplace, in education, or the criminal justice system’. A ‘more systemic approach’ was needed on the government’s part ‘informed by a coherent overall analysis and philosophy’. A new commission on ‘Race and Ethnic Disparities’ (the Commission) had been appointed ‘to scrutinise these issues thoroughly and objectively’. The government, in response to its recommendations and report, announced its plan, which in some cases goes further than the report itself envisaged.1 On the whole, the Commission produced a thoughtful report with a number of potentially useful recommendations, with the exception of those for an inclusive history curriculum. If implemented, the history proposals will counter the Commission’s own aim of knowledge-based teaching. Not only will they achieve nothing positive. But they could do harm. They will undermine the teaching of history as established under the present, politically neutral, National Curriculum, which not only requires pupils to be taught about the long history of this country since pre-Roman times, plus some European and, or, global history, but also involves shorter focussed teaching on local history, specific periods and subject themes, and gives the opportunity for a significant amount of teaching along the lines proposed by the Commission. These points are considered below in sections 2- 3. 1 Inclusive Britain, Command paper number: CP 625, Presented to Parliament by the Minister of State for Equalities by Command of Her Majesty, March 2022. (Inclusive Britain). The ministerial foreword by Kemi Badenoch, stated there was ‘clearly a need for a more systemic approach on the part of government which is informed by a coherent overall analysis and philosophy’ despite initiatives and advances led by people themselves. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/inclusive-britain-action-plan-government-responseto-the-commission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities/inclusive-britain-government-response-to-thecommission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities) I School History: Knowledge of the Past or Ideology for the Present? Sheila Lawlor - 1 -

History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum 2 The government has wisely stepped back from proposing statutory change as the Commission wanted. It does intend, however, to accommodate the sense of the Commission’s curriculum recommendations through other means and short of a change in law. But such a compromise will undermine the teaching of history as an academic subject at school and distort the history teaching established by the 2014 curriculum. This respects the unfolding of developments as they happened at the time since pre-Roman times, in so far as historians have established them painstakingly from the evidence – written source material over two millennia (or, for very early periods with no written sources, archaeological). The danger now is that instead of the history of these years as it emerged over 2000 years, there will be an invention. History will be replaced in the schoolroom by misleading propaganda in the name of ‘inclusion’ with the past subverted to fit the politics of the present. These points are considered in sections 3, 4 and 5 below. 2. The Commission and its Conclusions The Commission, chaired by Dr Tony Sewell was set up ‘as a response to the upsurge of concern about race issues instigated by the BLM movement’.2 Having considered ‘various disparities’ across society and ‘how they [had] evolved over time’, it found that ‘racism does still exist in some areas and … action to overcome it [is needed]’, but far from ‘our society and institutions constituting a bar to success, they [are] more often than not an enabler of opportunity’ and different minority groups had achieved significant successes. Racist behaviour, it explained, can be prevalent on social media, and can be seen in the graffiti in some areas – both sorts of activity, being anonymous, were often difficult to trace. Nonetheless racially motivated crime is on the decline. In between 2010 and 2018 racially-motivated hate crimes fell by almost a third, from 149,000 to 104,000.3 2 Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities: The Report, March 2021. (The Report) https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ 974507/20210331_-_CRED_Report_-_FINAL_-_Web_Accessible.pdf 3 ibid, The Report. Based on the figures between the two year period end-March 2010-012, to end March 2018- 202, according to the Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW), p.30, .https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ 974507/20210331_-_CRED_Report_-_FINAL_-_Web_Accessible.pdf - 2 -

Sheila Lawlor School History 3 The Commission found it difficult to judge how far racism was a key factor in low educational achievement. Where persistent disparities between groups existed ‘they were more likely to be caused by factors other than racism and discrimination’ and there were often greater differences between and within different ‘umbrella’ ethnic groups such as black or Asian, than when compared to the white majority. 4 At GCSE, Indian, Bangladeshi and Black African pupils performed better than White British pupils when accounting for socio-economic status. Average GCSE scores for these groups of pupils (Indian, Bangladeshi and Black African) were above the White British average, whereas those of Black Caribbean and Mixed White and Black Caribbean pupils were five points (or more) lower than the average for White British pupils.5 The Commission, the membership of which was itself mostly drawn from minority groups, produced a considered report that identified different aspects of the wider questions posed by its remit and avoided the tendency to confuse racism with disadvantage and its causes. All in all the report’s approach was to seek the bigger picture, treating society as a whole, to understand why disparities, whether within the same groups or between different groups, existed, and to address their causes, into which it proposed further investigation. It also made a number of practical recommendations for government and official authorities to tackle problems through, for instance, improvements in operating the healthcare, policing and education systems, e.g. proposing for schools longer days with 4 The Commission drew on Professor Steve Strand’s analysis of the Second Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE2) which gave insights into attainment in relation to ethnicity, socio economic status and sex. The Report, explains on p. 69: ‘It is very difficult to judge on a national level the extent to which racism could be a determining factor in educational outcomes amongst ethnic minority groups. However, the fact that ethnic groups within the same system can have quite divergent educational outcomes, and that even within the major ethnic groups there are quite distinct trends, suggests that other factors may be more influential. Indeed, if there is racial bias within schools or the teaching profession, it has limited effect and other factors such as family structure, cultural aspirations and geography may offset this disadvantage.’ 5 The Report, p. 62, 2019 figures drawing on a 2020 DFE report and the Strand study (LSYPE, note 4). In 2019, the average GCSE Attainment 8 score for Black Caribbean (39.4) and Mixed White and Black Caribbean (41.0) pupils was over 5 points lower than the average for White British pupils (46.2), or over half a grade lower in each of the 8 subjects included. At the same time, the average scores for Indian, Bangladeshi and Black African pupils were above the White British average. - 3 -

History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum 4 breakfast clubs, homework sessions and cultural and sporting activities. These are sensible and, where already tried, bring educational benefit. Yet, at the same time its proposals for the curriculum will damage the teaching of history and be regressive. 3. The Commission, the Curriculum, History, and the Government’s Response The Commission, despite finding that a number of ethnic minority groups perform better than White British pupils of similar socio-economic status, believes nonetheless that the school curriculum should be adapted, the approach tailored to today’s political preoccupations with inclusivity and diversity. Though it explains that where disparities between groups existed ‘they were more likely to be caused by factors other than racism and discrimination’ and there were often greater differences between and within, different ‘umbrella’ groups, it nonetheless proposes ‘an inclusive curriculum’. The DfE should work with a panel of representatives from certain official bodies and education and ethnic minority groups ‘to produce a well-sequenced set of teaching resources to tell the multiple, nuanced stories that have shaped the country we live in today. The resources should be embedded within subjects in the statutory curriculum … [and] should include lesson plans, teaching methods and reading materials to complement a knowledge-rich curriculum’. It also proposes an ‘online national library… continually updated … [which would] complement and enhance the content and quality of lessons … so … all children … learn about the UK and the evolution of our society’.6 The Commission, which wants to ‘develop a sense of citizenship and to support integration and aspiration amongst all ethnic communities’, intends that history teaching in schools serve this aim. Moreover, pupils, it claims, ‘need to be exposed to the rich variety of British culture and the influences that have 6 ibid, Report, pp 89-93 and recommendation 20, which is: ‘Achieve inclusivity – Making of modern Britain: teaching an inclusive curriculum’. It proposes that the DfE work with a panel of experts which should include experienced headteachers, representatives from subject associations and examining bodies, directors of national museums, and representatives from relevant ethnic minority stakeholder groups such as the government’s Windrush Cross- Government Working Group. - 4 -

Sheila Lawlor School History 5 shaped it, ranging from the influence of classical civilisations … to the stream of new arrivals in the post-war period to the present day’.7 The expansive, yet vague approach to a ‘variety of British culture’ the Commission wants taught seems to be marked by today’s preoccupations: the past is at best to be a world invented to reflect the multiple ‘stories’ of today’s society, brought to the classroom with the wave of a magic wand. The approach is at odds with good, disciplined and precise teaching which aims to impart an independently established body of the knowledge of a subject so that pupils know and understand it and teachers can build on it and help develop its implications. Besides, the curriculum already gives teachers the chance to offer the option of studying in a historical, politically neutral context themes such as these in addition to the core of British history. (see below 5). The Commission’s recommendation will, if implemented, destroy the character of the current curriculum which covers chronologically and proportionately Britain’s long history, and already leaves room for teachers to develop related themes within period study. (see below pp 16-18 ). It will put undue weight on the vague and tangential at the expense of the precise core of knowledge of Britain’s political and constitutional developments and the economic social history which marked this country out over two millennia, and undermine the rigorous, academic basis. Its highly selective resource based approach tailored to contemporary political priorities, will distort the teaching of history. Besides, it will go against the professional freedom, which the 2014 curriculum did much to restore, by balancing the obligation to teach British, European and world history, with the professional freedom for teachers to design their lessons and teach according to their professional judgement. What does the government say in response, and what, if anything, does it intend to do? 7 ibid, Report, p. 90: It believes that ‘In order to develop a sense of citizenship and to support integration and aspiration amongst all ethnic communities … pupils need to be exposed to the rich variety of British culture and the influences that have shaped it, ranging from the influence of classical civilisations, the European Enlightenment, the inflows and outflows of the British Empire, and the stream of new arrivals in the post-war period to the present day.’ - 5 -

History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum 6 The government’s overall approach set out in Inclusive Britain is that ‘a more holistic view of economic and social factors would allow a better, more sophisticated understanding of the disparities that exist between and within ethnic groups’.8 It generally proposes to tackle ‘discriminatory behaviour … adopting policies that build trust and promote fairness’, promote ‘equality of opportunity and encourage aspiration by nurturing agency’ and ‘actively foster a sense of inclusion and belonging to the UK and our country’s rich and complex history, in an era of rapidly changing demographics, social media, increasing ethnic diversity …’ . ( Intro, 2) Beyond this general approach, though, the government is ready, all too ready (in the case of history) to ‘translate the findings from the … report into concrete action’ with a comprehensive plan that ‘details 74 actions right across government, which together will put us on a course towards a more inclusive and integrated society’. These, it explains go ‘in some cases … even further than the report envisaged’. The action plan, developed under such headings as ‘Levelling Up’(2.2), ‘Trust and Fairness’(3), ‘Opportunity and Agency’(4),‘Inclusion’ (5), ranges across different areas of policy under different departments, e.g. health, the home office, work and pensions, culture, media and sport and education. Under ‘Inclusion’, it stresses the importance of the common identity people share today as British citizens (characteristics such as ‘being part of the UK’ are the ‘most important’). It contends that while ‘promoting and celebrating diversity is … important, it is meaningless …[without] a sense of belonging or inclusion. It goes on to anticipate its proposals for school history with a woolly optimism – that people are defined by what they have in common, not their differences – the vision of a better, ‘more inclusive’ world ‘… requires thinking the best of our fellow citizens … not looking for the worst … interpretation of their actions without good reason.’ Echoing the Commission’s political aim of developing ‘a sense of citizenship and to support integration and aspiration amongst all ethnic communities … [for which] pupils need to be exposed to the rich variety of British culture and the influences that have shaped it’, Inclusive Britain has its action plan. Children, it 8 Inclusive Britain, 2:1 ‘Inclusive Britain: An Action Plan’. - 6 -

Sheila Lawlor School History 7 says, ‘need to see themselves as integral parts of the rich, diverse mosaic of traditions, faiths and ethnicities which make up the UK today’ and to know they will play a part in ‘writing the next chapter of the UK’s future.’ Such an aim is to be realised through the history curriculum and what is taught – apparently to reshape what is taught at school to reflect a picture of today’s society ‘that how our past is taught in schools encourages all pupils, whatever their ethnicity, to feel … a sense of belonging to a multi-racial UK’, something the government intends to ‘ensure’.9 The DfE proposes a ‘model’ curriculum to provide an example of what it and its chosen advisers consider to be ‘a coherent approach to the teaching of history’ in order to help pupils ‘understand’ the ‘intertwined nature of British and global history, and their own place within it’. It also announced its plan to highlight 9 Inclusive Britain explains (5 ‘Inclusion’) there are: … many characteristics which we will all share; some are legally protected to safeguard us all from discrimination. However, the most important characteristic we have in common is that of being part of the UK. The diversity and multiple identities that make up the UK are a clear strength and one that we celebrate. We understand and recognise differences where they exist. However, we do not define ourselves by our differences but instead on what we have in common. This is why our vision of a better, more inclusive world is based on hope and rejects fear. It requires thinking the best of our fellow citizens and not looking for the worst possible interpretation of their actions without good reason. This will need a focused and continual communication on the positives of our society as well as its history and values and an honest examination where there are deficiencies. The risk is that an imbalanced emphasis on the negatives can distort the true picture, often to the detriment of young ethnic minorities who are led to believe, incorrectly, that their society is against them and they will never belong.’ It contends (5.1 ‘Create a more inclusive history curriculum’) that: All children should grow up feeling a strong sense of belonging to this country. They need to see themselves as integral parts of the rich, diverse mosaic of traditions, faiths and ethnicities which make up the UK today. Children need to know that the UK is their home and that they will play a part in writing the next chapter of the UK’s future. While promoting and celebrating diversity is hugely important, it is meaningless if children do not feel a sense of belonging or inclusion. We will ensure that how our past is taught in schools encourages all pupils, whatever their ethnicity, to feel an authentic sense of belonging to a multi-racial UK’. (ibid) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/inclusive-britain-action-plan-government-responseto-the-commission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities/inclusive-britain-government-response-to-thecommission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities - 7 -

History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum 8 certain resources to support all-year round teaching for this year’s Black History Month. Two specific ‘Actions’ are proposed: 10 For the first action (Action 57) the DfE will ‘work with’ others to develop its own curriculum by 2024: To help pupils understand the intertwined nature of British and global history, and their own place within it… a model history curriculum [will be developed] … as an exemplar for a … coherent approach to the teaching of history. … to support … teaching and help teachers and schools to develop their own school curriculum fully using the flexibility and freedom of the history national curriculum and the breadth and depth of content it includes. For the second action (Action 58) the DfE would: … seek out and signpost to schools suggested high-quality resources to support teaching all-year round on black history in readiness for Black History Month October 2022 … [to]support schools to share the multiple, nuanced stories of the contributions made by different groups that have made this country the one it is today. (Action 58) By accepting the central but wrong premise of the Commission’s recommendation for the history curriculum, the government intends that the past should be taught as a projection from the present, a creation to reflect today’s society. Under such an approach today’s preoccupations are to be transposed to what is taught as school history and they are to give the history taught its shape, with the history curriculum moulded to serve the social and political aim of inclusion. Despite aspiring to a ‘knowledge rich’ curriculum, these action plans given their multifaceted nature, beg the question ‘whose history’, or ‘whose truth’ is to be promoted by the DfE. 4. The Effects of the Proposed ‘Inclusive’ History Curriculum The government stopped short of committing, as the Commission wanted, to a statutory requirement for lesson plans, teaching methods and reading material – 10 ibid., 5.1, Action 57 and 58. - 8 -

Sheila Lawlor School History 9 the model curriculum and proposed resources will not, at least so far as matters now go, be prescribed under statute. But it has accepted the assumptions that history needs a more inclusive curriculum to reflect today’s society, one different to that of the past. For that it will provide both a model curriculum and selected signposted teaching resources for schools to share the ‘multiple … stories that … shaped the country we live in today’ and also proposed all year round teaching for Black History Month. Thus the model curriculum and the signposted resources are given a commanding place in the curriculum by contrast with the open outline which now exists. These moves will undermine the neutral teaching of history under the national curriculum on three fronts:- (i) The model curriculum and resources will disproportionately overshadow the statutory curriculum. At the moment there is no ‘model’, no prescribed state blueprint – just a list of the periods to be covered chronologically under well-chosen headings (see 5 below) along with local history and a range of themes and periods from which teachers are free to choose. But as a result of the proposed action, there will be a tendency to treat the new official model curriculum and resources as being on a par with the statutory requirement, as if they were prescribed. Indeed, there is little to stop greater prescription through external directive or ‘guidance’ or via internal school management teams, or indeed as a result of change in the law. (ii) This focus and method of teaching will distort the independent study of the past by attempting to invent a story to reflect a vignette of today’s controversies, but irrelevant to British political and constitutional history over two millennia, that which provides the skeleton for the chronological outlines taught from the time. (iii) History teaching will become an instrument for politicised propaganda, irrespective of what is now intended – nothing will stop ideological bias being introduced in principle or practice by the DfE’s advisory groups or by ideologically motivated teachers or management teams. The totalitarianism of Britain’s educational left is already well proven to have the power to destroy academic and intellectual values in the name of the ideology of the day. - 9 -

History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum 10 Instead of the broad remit for teaching about Britain’s past chronologically and as it emerged over time, a disproportionate and distorted version of the past is likely to emerge to mirror the political debates of the present, leaving children ignorant about the true history of their country and without the benefits and competencies associated with good history teaching. If the proposals are implemented, not only will the history taught in schools be distorted, but it will serve as a vehicle for the politically charged ideology under the apparently benign umbrella of ‘inclusion’, which tends to be translated by education officials and their advisers into practice in a manner anything but neutral. The 2014 Gove curriculum, which was driven through by a minister of the highest intellectual ability and singlemindedness, was a compromise: it reflected the imperative that children learn and are taught the history of this country as it was at the time and the landmark developments over two millennia, while acknowledging that in a free society the profession must have freedom to build on the curriculum as they judge, for better, for worse. It allows for thematic, period and subject specialisation within the statutory framework. The arrangements, discussed in section 5 below, are liberal and permissive in allowing good teachers to design their lessons, and the opportunity to develop the courses they judge, while ensuring the history of Britain is taught in chronological sweeps with options for teachers to build on the story of Britain’s past as they judge. With a reformed system of schools, including academies and free schools to give parents a say over their children’s schooling and a better cadre of head teachers and teachers, that should mean that no child is locked into ideological or radicalised politicised teaching. To propose now that the history curriculum be ‘inclusive’ and that an exemplar ‘model’ curriculum and teaching resources be developed under the proposed remit, will undermine the politically neutral teaching, which aims to impart chronologically the long history of Britain from the earliest times, along with some European and global history. Both the Commission and government can have what they want under the present arrangements. Rather than change, they should recognise the opportunities of the status quo by contrast with the likely consequences should their proposals come to pass. That can be seen by a cursory look at the battleground which history at school has become in the last five decades. - 10 -

Sheila Lawlor School History 11 5. Learning about the Past. The curriculum controversy, the solution and its proposed undoing In order fully to see why the government’s proposals, which at first sight do not seem extreme, will have such dire effects, we might consider the nature of history as a discipline, and look back to the roots of the controversy of the school curriculum, and the 2014 solution worked out by Michael Gove. In this light, the 2022 proposals seem to go full circle, once again imposing political bias on the curriculum, and failing to respect the professional integrity of teachers. Learning about the Past The past is a foreign country, with its own political, economic and social landscape, its own contours, changing over time. Different countries and their rulers have different priorities; different circumstances prompt different developments and make for a world different to our own, but intelligible once equipped with the necessary knowledge. History, like science, foreign languages or mathematics, has its own body of discrete knowledge for each period, for each country. People learn history by acquiring that specialist knowledge about the past as it was, as it happened and on its own terms. To do so, they must leave behind the judgements, priorities and preconceptions of the present. They must also avoid seeing history through the lens of present day preoccupations, for that would lead to distortion. There are good reasons for pupils to be taught about the history of country in which they live, for most the land of their birth, for some their adopted country. For those here it will be British history. Only through a knowledge of this country’s past and the developments which mattered will they gain the knowledge and understanding of the patterns and contours which have come to shape it. Not only will it serve, as good education ought, to induct people into a corpus of knowledge extraneous to themselves, equip them to master different sorts of knowledge which has nothing to do with everyday life, to marshal it into patterns, and reach judgements about its significance. But in the case of history, a knowledge of history should help people to understand and recognise the longer pattern of this country’s political and constitutional arrangements and economic - 11 -

History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum 12 and social developments: this will enable them more fully to belong to a historic parliamentary and liberal democracy such as Britain’s. Studying this country’s history involves also a study of neighbouring European countries with which Britain’s history has been linked since Roman times; it may also involve some consideration of Britain’s role in the wider world, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and a knowledge of Britain’s naval, maritime and economic reach in later centuries. None of this is to say the history of other countries or other groups history is of no interest. But for children in British schools with limited classroom teaching time no less than for pupils in French or German schools, history must focus on their own country.* Without a knowledge of their country’s past they will always be a stranger in their own land. The important point is that the history studied is and should be about the past on its own terms, wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, as the father of modern archival based history, Leopold von Ranke, put it. History as it really happened, in so far as it can be discovered from the sources of the time, cannot be something to be shaped like plasticine to a political mould or by the ideological battles of today. Its subject matter is exclusive. It does not ‘belong’ to us, to our children or to their teachers. Nor do we belong to it. There cannot be an ‘inclusive’ history or curriculum, as the word is taken today, for it subordinates the long, complex political, constitutional, economic and social developments of this country’s past to a perspective shaped by the distorting mirrors of the present. Like the foreign country which the visitor cannot understand without knowing it on its own terms, the past becomes a mere projection of a version of the present, an anticipation, and probably one to be abhorred. For why this can happen, we should consider the longer ideological battle fought in our classrooms over what was taught and how. __________________________ *A sample of schools surveyed after the Gove curriculum indicated the time given to history lessons for 11-14 year olds varied, with between c. half [48 per cent] and three fifths of schools [62 per cent] having no more than 75 minutes per week. - 12 -

Sheila Lawlor School History 13 The Curriculum Controversy What constituted the curriculum taught in English schools became a matter of controversy in the decades after the 1960s: progressive educationalists, government officials and their advisers, the school inspectorate, HMI, education bodies, boards, committees and quangos, imposed on English schools educational theories reflecting the movements that swept the Anglophone world, its universities and official institutions, reflecting the politics of the day. Prompted by the ideological debates of the period over egalitarianism, race and multiculturalism, feminism, neo-and soft- Marxism and class war, they were to leave their mark on different areas of policy, including education and the curriculum. In education they aimed to topple from their place in the curriculum traditional intellectual and academic values which emphasised the mastery of knowledge of the subject, tested by a rigorous public examination system. Reflected in the blueprints and guidance laid down by Department of Education civil servants, their advisers and other officials, inspectors, local councils, teacher training institutions, they left their mark on the school curriculum, exams teacher training, and the restructuring of schooling. One common thread was the assumption that in education, as in the political world of ruling elites, the ‘ruling system’ of a traditional knowledge-based education, left out different groups each seen as its ‘victim’. Instead, the idea was that what schools taught must actively counter the educational status quo, for example, in the case of the curriculum, by teaching purportedly anti-racist, multicultural, child- or girl-friendly, knowledge-light subjects. In English lessons, this meant avoiding the rules of grammar, spelling or punctuation, encouraging ‘oracy’ over literacy, or believing that by giving the younger children ‘real’ books they would somehow be able to read without being taught using proven methods, such as phonics. Instead of discrete subject teaching, with the knowledge of each subject defined and to be taught, there would be ‘engagement’ with cross curricular ‘themes’ in which teachers were seen as education ‘facilitators’ not subject specialists with a duty to teach the knowledge of a subject and induct pupils into the subject’s parameters. Pupils were to be given free rein to show what they could do, rather than what they knew. Public examinations at 16 would be replaced in large part - 13 -

History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum 14 by teacher assessment, in what was supposed to be a ‘win win’ for teacher and pupil, with no external system effectively in place to measure what was either taught or learned on a like for like basis. Meanwhile structural changes sought to impose a narrow egalitarian system of schooling, with an end to the tripartite schools system – grammar, secondary modern and vocational. Councils were obliged to go comprehensive; direct grant funding of former grammar schools was abolished. The consequences for many pupils were dire. The curriculum, in central subjects, including English, maths, the sciences and history, by comparison with that of similar European countries such as France and Germany, was less ambitious in terms of the breadth and depth of knowledge of the subject to be taught, mastered and examined. By 18, for instance, the standard for A level mathematics (which in this country tends to be taken by the most able pupils), was pitched to a standard lower than that of a German lower ability stream of pupils. And, by comparison with high performing Asian countries such as Singapore and Hong Kong, achievement was lower on like-for-like measures right through schooling. We also had a far bigger ‘tail’ of low achievers, a higher proportion of poor readers at the end of the primary years, higher levels of innumeracy, with unfortunate children cast adrift into secondary schools to sink or swim. England’s knowledgelight, happy-clappy classrooms, mocked by one headmaster as ‘Dr Spock and 1968’, not only left a legacy of disadvantage, illiteracy and innumeracy, but poorer life chances for millions hoping to find a job at 16= . Few governments, even fewer education secretaries, have had the will or the ability to challenge the failing system. The interests of the governing party were to be served by managing the system, to play along with the education establishment, to deflect attention from the system’s failings through new initiatives, and to keep the lid on the ever-present danger of teachers’ strikes in a powerful, unionised and leftist profession. Education secretaries tended to get on by defending and enshrining status quo, not challenging it. The more ambitious wanted to get ‘big bills’ passed, a trend that had begun decades earlier with R.A. Butler’s 1944 Education Act. Such measures, though depicted as designed to raise standards and extend opportunity, tended to make for more state intervention in the classroom, as officials and their advisers reinforced the ideological nostra of the day and entrenched a failing status quo. Apart from the problematic - 14 -

Sheila Lawlor School History 15 predilection of some education secretaries for passing big bills, the job for most entailed playing the role of departmental head to reflect the civil servants’ and departmental interests in the Whitehall battles for power and budget. Ministers tended to act on their officials’ behalf by rubber stamping their blueprints and by seeking to return from the spending rounds with the spoils of victory. Few ministers resisted their department’s demands, backed as these were by the powerful interest groups mainly, but not exclusively, of a leftist disposition. The Thatcher reforms of the 1980s aimed to tackle the failing system by driving reform through from the top, politically with the education secretary to lead change. The initial national curriculum (1988) introduced after the 1987 general election was supposed to ensure pupils were taught and tested in essential subjects with a core curriculum of English, maths and science plus other foundation subjects. But those controlling the system saw to it that real reform was avoided, with layers of obfuscatory bureaucracy. Later structural changes aimed to circumvent the status quo under both John Major (1990-1997) – by giving parents vouchers for the nursery school of their choice or by replacing the school inspectorate, the discredited HMI – and Tony Blair (1997-2007|) – by establishing academies to take over problem schools in failing local authorities. Indeed the Blair regime proved that an education secretary of determination, intellectual ability and academic aspiration for the pupils, if backed by a powerful prime minister, can also fight successfully on the content of what was taught. For example, Tony Blair’s education secretary, Ruth Kelly, refused to rubber stamp a plan to replace ‘A’ levels which would dumb down teaching and the exam. That had been proposed by the chief inspector of schools, Mike Tomlinson, (who with the then education secretary had presided over the scandal of unfair A level coursework marking), but was successfully opposed by his predecessor, Chris Woodhead, the bête noir of the education left. Indeed Mr Blair’s overall determination to push the academies programme to move schools and their funding away from local councils proved to be a lasting success – most (80 per cent) of secondary schools are now academies including a number of free schools. It was, though, the Gove curriculum and exam reform, together with other major changes in the 2010s which were driven through tooth and nail by the most, - 15 -

History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum 16 determined, academically aspirational, able and politically accomplished education secretary, that put a stop to the politicisation of schooling. The Gove Curriculum Today’s statutory curriculum developed under Michael Gove when education secretary in the 2010 Coalition, was mostly finalised in 2013 and introduced in 2014, though English and maths followed in 2016 along with year-10 science (year 11 science in 2017). For history in primary and early secondary years British history is to be taught chronologically from pre-Roman times to the 21stth century, along with local, European and global history. In their earliest school years, the youngest children are introduced to big events or important historical figures. Older primary and early secondary years pupils are to be taught British history chronologically from neolithic and Roman times to the present day as well as local and European history, global themes and topics outside this framework.11 Primary years (7-11) pupils are therefore taught about British history chronologically up to 1066 under a list of headings which bring them from the Stone Age through to the time of Edward the Confessor. Local History is taught as are a range of other subjects giving ample scope for variety.12 11 For primary and early secondary years, the relevant documents are: National Curriculum in England: history programmes of stud, statutory guidance, DfE, 11September 2013, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-englandhistory-programmes-of-study/national-curriculum-in-england-history-programmes-of-study History programmes of study: key stages 1 and 2, National curriculum in England, DfE 2013 Reference: DFE-00173-2013, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ 239035/PRIMARY_national_curriculum_-_History.pdf History programmes of study: key stage 3, National curriculum in England, DfE 2013 Reference: DFE-00194-2013 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ 239075/SECONDARY_national_curriculum_-_History.pdf 12 For 7-11 year olds (key stage 2), the British history headings (summarised) are: From the Stone Age to the Iron Age, the Roman Empire and its impact on Britain, the Anglo-Saxons, Britain’s settlement by the Anglo-Saxons and Scots, the Viking and Anglo-Saxon struggle for the Kingdom of England to the time of Edward the Confessor. Other obligatory study stipulates a local history subject, a theme in British history that extends pupils’ chronological knowledge beyond 1066, the achievements of the earliest civilizations, Ancient Greece – and its influence on the western world, and a non-European society that contrasts with British history. History programmes of study: key stages 1 and 2, National curriculum in England, September 2013. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ 239035/PRIMARY_national_curriculum_-_History.pdf - 16 -

Sheila Lawlor School History 17 During the early secondary school years (12-14 years) the period from 1066 to the present day is taught, again under headings chronologically arranged with additional local history study and an in-depth study of a theme which consolidates and extends pupils chronological knowledge of the period before 1066.13 GCSE years are given further and more in-depth teaching on British history since 500 AD, as well as local and European and wider world themes and subjects. For GCSE the curriculum is chronologically organised into three periods, medieval (500-1500), early modern (1450-1750), Modern (1700-present day), with an obligation that British history forms a a minimum of 40 per cent of the assessed content over the full course. Three timescales allow for different degrees of concentration on a period or theme – short (depth study), medium (period study) and long (thematic study) and three geographical contexts, local, British, European and/or wider world settings, with British history to count for at least 40 per cent of assessed contents.14 Gove intended that the new curriculum would: … provide a rigorous basis for teaching, a benchmark for all schools to improve their performance … [and give] a better guarantee that every student will acquire the knowledge and skills to succeed in the modern world. It has been significantly slimmed down and will free up teachers to use their professional judgment to design curricula that meet the needs of their pupils … [and ensure] that all children have the 13These are set out in, History programmes of study: key stage 3, National curriculum in England, DfE 2013 as follows: The development of Church, state and society in Medieval Britain 1066-1509; the development of Church, state and society in Britain 1509-1745; ideas, political power, industry and empire: Britain, 1745-1901; challenges for Britain, Europe and the wider world 1901 to the present day; a local history study; the study of an aspect or theme in British history that consolidates and extends pupils’ chronological knowledge from before 1066. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ 239075/SECONDARY_national_curriculum_-_History.pdf 14History, GCSE subject content, April 2014, The three fold stipulation is for: • from three eras: Medieval (500-1500), Early Modern (1450-1750), Modern (1700-present day) • on three time scales: short (depth study), medium (period study) and long (thematic study) • on three geographical contexts: a locality (the historic environment); British; and European and / or wider world settings - 17 -

History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum 18 opportunity to acquire a core of essential knowledge in key subjects. It embodies rigour, high standards and will create coherence in what is taught in schools. It sets out expectations for children that match the curricula used in the world’s most successful school systems.15 6. Conclusion The Government’s Proposals – the Consequences The academic and intellectual aims for teaching history under the current curriculum will be undermined should the proposals in Inclusive Britain go ahead with a model curriculum, approved teaching resources and disproportionate emphasis mirroring today’s ideological politics. They would bring distortion, politicise what is taught, and undermine the good teaching achieved under often difficult circumstances by dedicated teachers, history graduates, who love and know their subjects. Instead of furthering the general aim of both Commission and government of a ‘knowledge based’ curriculum, the consequences will be the reverse. For school history the proposals will mean: (i) A disproportionate emphasis on the official model curriculum and teaching resources developed to reflect the ideological preoccupations of today, overshadowing the statutory curriculum. (ii) Distortion of the past and the neutral, independent study of it in favour of a segmented vignette giving an a story tailored to, and coloured by, today’s political preoccupations. One illustration can already be seen in Inclusive Britain, Action 58’s emphasis on all-year round teaching to prepare for Black History month. (iii)Pressure on teachers to use the official model and resources, thereby opening the way for more prescription to undermine the freedom given 15 Written Statements, House of Commons,12 September 2013, statement on education reform by the education secretary, Michael Gove, https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmhansrd/cm130912/wmstext/130912m0001.htm #130912m0001.htm_spmin4 - 18 -

Sheila Lawlor School History 19 by the Gove curriculum which allows teachers to build on the statutory minimum. (iv) A move away from neutrality to politicised history teaching will allow ideological bias to be introduced, in principle or practice by the DfE’s advisory groups or by the ideologically motivated in school management teams or teachers themselves. As the current climate shows, such pressure leads to the victimisation of those teachers who believe in rounded, impartial and academically rigorous teaching. If the focus is switched away from teaching about the past as it evolved on its own terms, to a grievance version of the past which projects today’s ideologies onto a canvas, the broad political, economic and social developments of Britain’s history as they emerged on their own terms will be undermined. So too will be the scope for local, European and global history. Indeed the statutory obligation to ensure chronological cover of Britain’s whole history complemented by in depth or thematic study is likely to disappear. All children will be worse off and ours will be a society that leaves young adults historically ignorant of the world in which they are to take their place, ill-equipped to assess critically today’s political ideologies against their historical background. What Should the Policy Be? History is a long story. We have had a history curriculum in place since 2014 which covers the unfolding of that story since Roman times, combining that with opportunities to consider shorter periods and themes. But the Commission’s recommendation to focus the lens selectively on the multi-racial politics of today and apply it retrospectively, has led the government to propose a ‘more inclusive curriculum’. It intends to ‘ensure that how our past is taught in schools encourages all pupils … to feel an authentic sense of belonging to a multi-racial UK’ with a ‘model’ curriculum so all pupils ‘see themselves as integral parts of a rich, diverse mosaic of traditions, faiths and ethnicities which make up the UK today’. Moreover it was also announced in March 2022 that the DfE intended to ‘signpost to schools suggested … resources’ to support ‘teaching all-year round on black history in readiness for Black History Month October 2022’. (Action 58, discussed above.) - 19 -

History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum 20 These plans mean the essence of the history curriculum will be lost. The point of history is to teach about the unfolding of the past and its developments, proportionately, and detached from the present on its own terms. Recommendations: The government should therefore abandon its proposals for the history curriculum in ‘Inclusive Britain’. It should also:-- 1. Concentrate reform on helping to close the attainment gap amongst the groups identified by the Commission. The Commission found that under the present curriculum most groups of ethnic minority pupils do better than the white pupils from the same social and economic background. The government therefore has no reason to change course but should stick to the arrangements for the academic curriculum and public exams that have brought such singular success, and the structures which freed schools and teachers from the ideologues in local and central government. This freedom allows all teachers to do what the best teachers want to do: induct their pupils into a body of knowledge of a subject detached from themselves and the political concerns of the present. If two groups, white working class boys or pupils of Afro-Caribbean descent, are failing to achieve success, the causes, which the Commission is clear are ‘more likely to be caused by factors other than racism and discrimination’, should be identified and addressed (as is intended), not used as an occasion to distort history teaching with a ‘model’ curriculum and ‘resources’ for all year round teaching for Black History Month to go further and catapult the politics of race into the schoolroom. 2. Recognise that Britain’s history is long, and its political culture unitary, accommodating regional and other differences. In proposing the change to school history, it is telling – and indeed problematic – that the Commission takes its lead from the US and that its - 20 -

Sheila Lawlor School History 21 report quotes from a US writer expressing what it describes as a ‘universal … widely accepted’ sentiment to set the context for its curriculum proposals. But the US is entirely different to Britain. The country we know today as the US is a recent creation: it followed European colonisation in the 17th and 18th centuries, the seizure of land by force or otherwise from its original native owners, a hegemony exercised by Britain after France ceded much of its American territory in 1763, and the subsequent rebellion by colonists against British rule and taxation, with Britain’s recognition in 1783 of the independent colonies: they had declared independence in 1776 and formulated a constitution in 1778. It is hardly surprising that the creation of a US identity then involved a desire to accommodate the different groups and strands of immigration. That trend continues today with the focus on the inclusion of descendants of enslaved Africans. The case of Britain is different. It has a long history; the mixing and settling of groups in the first millennium AD led to a fairly unified population by the 12th century, and a unitary state emerged, politically and culturally, after the Norman conquest in 1066 – France being the only other western G7 power historically to have been a long established unitary state. But perhaps more so than France, Britain accommodated regional differences which remained even after the political union with Scotland or that later with Ireland (and its rupture) and later still with Northern Ireland. The 20th century mass or sporadic immigration from other groups is a very recent phenomenon in historical terms, some coming from countries linked by more recent history, others from countries with no links. But what mattered and what was recognised by all to matter, was that people who came to this country and settled here, understood and were inducted into the culture and history of Britain. For them, as for others, this begins at school. The tradition and culture is liberal and tolerant; it allows someone to be entirely British but have strong links with elsewhere, if they wish; it allows different cultural and religious practices, but it does not seek to propagate these through teaching or subject to statute – it would be impossible to cater for the many differences (and indeed some coming into the country wish to break with their past which is also tolerated). - 21 -

History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum 22 3. Accept that in Britain, a liberal, parliamentary democracy, the state has no business subverting historical truth through an ‘official’ curriculum, pitched to today’s political ideology. What should not be an option is for people who make their home here to be without sufficient grounding in the history of Britain to act properly and respect the country in which they have made their home. Indeed, if they are to play their full part in this country with its distinct political, economic and cultural identity, they must be taught its history, its true history, not a pastiche invented in line with the political pressures of the day. That is too often shaped by a leftist intelligentsia for whom the past is at best an embarrassment or at worst treated with contempt by the ideologues of the left who hate this country’s past. In education these also include many from the unions and the bureaucracies of state who wish to re-invent it, and in so doing destroy true knowledge of it. For an example of where this approach leads, we need look no further than the Russian version of Second World War history, depicting that war as the Great Patriotic War, beginning on 21 June 1941 – the date of the German invasion of the Soviet Union – not September 1939 when Germany, bolstered by its August pact with the Soviet Union, invaded Poland and France and Britain went to war. We should be wary of the politicisation of the past to fit the propaganda of the present. - 22 -

D. H. Robinson The State, Society and School History 23 The government’s promise of a model history curriculum – made in its response to the Race and Ethnic Disparities Commission – comes in circumstances radically changed since the Gove education reforms early last decade. Robert Tombs, writing for Politeia in 2012: ‘The intellectual and pedagogical arguments in favour of greater emphasis on British history are essentially those accepted for example by Cambridge University, where history students spend two-thirds of their first year on British history: this emphasis is regarded as appropriate for a British university, and also because study of one country is the only way for students to attain sufficient breadth and depth of knowledge and understanding. This, after all, is standard practice for school history in many similar western countries, such as France, Germany, and Switzerland’. Tombs – who is an academic historian of nineteenth-century France – was not pleading for the transformation of school history into the peddling of a national mythos. The university curriculum in which he found inspiration was built around deep and textured engagement with particular places over defined periods of time. It was not designed to instil a Whiggish or otherwise cultic view of national history, but to cultivate a dextrous and supple understanding of ideas, events, and processes. It was not always perfectly taught; its subject matter was not always cutting edge. But these were by-products of its strengths. History at Cambridge was a serious subject. 1. God and Man at Cambridge What a terrible difference a decade makes. In Cambridge, that undergraduate history curriculum has just been destroyed. Beginning a few weeks ago, students were served-up with a ‘significantly enhanced curriculum’, which ‘aims to enhance students’ knowledge, skills, and employability’ – qualities supposedly II The State, Society and School History Decline and Fall Daniel Robinson - - 23 -

History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum 24 absent from Cambridge history degrees until now. What does that sinister word ‘enhancement’ mean in this case? How is this particular wheel to be reinvented? First of all, the amount of knowledge has been shrunk. There was an old adage that a student taking the Part 1 History exams in Cambridge knew more detail about more things than they would at any point again during their lives. More detail about more things than at any point in later life. The old survey papers have been replaced with ‘outlines’, so broad of brush that they might just as well be examined with multiple choice questions. In the absence of manageable subject matter, greater reliance on the applying accepted historiographical doctrines and focussing on favoured themes. That is, necessarily a much more heavily prescribed and curated history than was available before. So proud are the enhancers of their work that full course guides and reading lists for the new course have not been made available at time of writing. But we can get some idea of what is in store from brief synopses on the Faculty website, presumably written by leading intellectuals. Europe and the World, 1450-1780 – the closest students can now get to the history of early modern Europe – ‘seeks to understand Europe as one of several world regions contributing to the politics, economy, and culture of the early modern world’; ‘it aims to decentre traditional Eurocentric narratives, for example “the Renaissance” or “the Enlightenment”’. To put this into plain English, Cambridge will now teach a history of early modern Europe in which the Renaissance and the Enlightenment make only peripheral appearances. Instead, it will attempt a potted history of the globe across three centuries. Presumably the paper will be examined with multiple choice questions. And then there is a paper on The Twentieth Century World, introduced to potential students as ‘the century of genocide, eugenics, and the nuclear bomb, but also of feminism, social security, international governance, and rising health standards’. The juxtaposition of social policies with the Holocaust does not exactly gesture towards a critical study of the welfare state. Neither does the juxtaposing of international governance with nuclear war bode well for the dispassionate study of organisations like the European Union or the United Nations. Nor does it take the mind of a Cambridge history professor to work out what is meant by the - 24 -

D. H. Robinson The State, Society and School History 25 convenors of The Global South from 1750, whose ‘use of the category of the Global South foregrounds especially a shared history of colonialism and, relatedly, contemporary global capitalism’. What they mean by their pledge to ‘avoid essentialising historical experience’ is, of course, anybody’s guess. That the essence of their project is to peddle a politicised history is, however, painfully clear. The purpose of these new papers is to extract validation from the past for certain ideas about social and international morality – ideas which happen to have taken the fancy of a handful of university lectures living cosily in cloistered buildings and ivory towers. Details about the rest of their degree seem to be a closely guarded secret, but the synopses of the outline courses do not bode well. What we do know is that students will have to take a number of ‘skills’ and ‘historical thinking’ papers, through which they will have the opportunity to dwell at extraordinary length and in minute detail on the particular obsessions of their teachers, lest any should have escaped the drive for conformity in the first year. The sort of knowledgeable, skilful, and employable young people that this is all meant to produce is amply demonstrated by the student testimonies selected to appear on the Faculty’s website. ‘History at Cambridge has taught me to consolidate my own voice and stretch beyond my comfort zone. This stems from the versatility of the course, denying borders and accepted historical chronologies’ – by replacing them with others. We will come back to this later. Suffice it to say for now, if such an odyssey of self-discovery was on offer at Cambridge, we might expect to find it in the company of real academic rigour. But again, the signs are hardly propitious. Some of the new ‘skills’ courses are insidiously fatuous: How to Read a Book (an assessed paper!) is perhaps not the kind of training for which we might have hoped in such a thoroughly ‘enhanced’ degree. But the attack runs into the very marrow of the course. Not very long ago, history students were expected to master upwards of ten book-length studies a week, write a thesis of between two and four thousand words, and defend it in a one-on-one debate with an expert in the field. Now this system is derided as an education in ‘blagging’. This would have come as news to Socrates, who gave us the method on which it is based. If that charge is at all to be commended, then it would say a lot more about the declining expectations of the degree and the faltering intellectual courage of university lecturers. In any case, something altogether more strenuous awaits students of our new friend Europe and the - 25 -

History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum 26 World, 1450-1780. They will write half as many essays. As for the rest of their time, they ‘may be asked to prepare a short book review, a learning diary [whatever that is], or a presentation on a primary source’ – surely worth the tuition fee. Insofar as is possible, what remains of a real Cambridge history degree will survive in some colleges and in the supervisions of some serious lecturers, perhaps far longer than might be expected. But the enhancers are organised, and they have a mission. Take Mary Laven, a prominent activist in the University and College Union and a leading member of Extinction Rebellion, who was arrested by police in London during the protests that took place in the midst of the Covid pandemic. Professor Laven is also the Chair of the History Faculty Board that implemented this travesty of a curriculum. On 3 September 2020, she wrote on Twitter – after a cloying note of thanks to the policemen who had to waste the afternoon hoisting her out of the road, and some obligatory affirmations of hatred for the bourgeoisie, the middle-aged, and ‘(very) white’ people – ‘another aspect of that privilege is that I’m a [sic] historian. And although I often feel like “I don’t know much about history”, I have just about grasped – from a few salient historical examples – that you have to break an egg to make an omelette… It is so obvious that this is the most urgent crisis in historical memory’. [my italics] Clearly, history at Cambridge could not be in safer hands. How this person got into such a position of power is an interesting question itself. That Professor Laven has seemingly encountered so little in the way of moderating forces inside her institution raises the uncomfortable question of whether she can possibly be the only one. These people did away with the old curriculum because of the freedom it offered. Under the old regime, students had the opportunity to study the political, economic, social, cultural, and intellectual history of almost the entire world during their first two years. It was said that those taking the old ‘Part One’ exams that knew more about a greater range of things than they were likely to again in their lives. The complaint was not that the old course was Eurocentric; the complaint was that students could choose to focus on Britain or Europe if they wished. That freedom has gone now, but it is only part of what has been lost. - 26 -

D. H. Robinson The State, Society and School History 27 For at the heart of these transformations is something inestimably worse: the utter collapse of a professional academic ethos. The new Cambridge curriculum – like the Oxford botch that preceded it some years earlier – is a symptom of what the historical profession is becoming: dumbed-down and diminished, canting and carping, lacking in rigour, making narcissists of teachers and students alike. It is a tribute to the dullest conventions and the newest fads, united in butchering its source material in the service of contemporary moralising – the pseudointellectual equivalent of sawing the head off a stone sprite at Nineveh. 2. Inclusive Britain The collapse of undergraduate history teaching at Cambridge – mirrored or preempted in so many other institutions of so-called higher learning – tells a bitter truth. The Gove reforms of the early-2010s were an extraordinary exception to an otherwise calamitous period, and even they stalled after 2014. The argument within the profession has been decisively lost. It was lost at the most rudimentary levels of university administrative politics – so completely that within a few years and with comic irony, collective memory of what came before will be all but gone. It was lost to the import of a political ideology, born in the United States, antithetical to nuance and the values of meaningful scholarship. It was lost, as much of the education system has been lost, to degrading notions and cascading aspirations, like those that informed the vogue for child-centred learning. The Gove history curriculum was almost the last hurrah of a better way, and its welcome less than a decade ago (strategically forgotten) shows how far the profession has fallen. Critics of the plan complained that it would be specimen of orthodox Whig history, imposing on students a myth of Anglo-Saxon liberty and British imperial supremacy. The final product was nothing of the kind; in fact, it reflected the kinds of papers that fierce (if ill-informed) critics like Richard Evans spent their entire working lives teaching in places like Cambridge. The Gove curriculum provided a liberal framework, structured not around a model course or a set of ideas to be imbibed, but around a spine of topics. It left scope to address a broad range of themes and questions, including those of pressing relevance, and often in accordance with personal interests and tastes. The spine of topics ensured that students would ultimately develop a coherent picture of a whole – in this instance, mediaeval and modern British history. Some more comparative studies - 27 -

History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum 28 might have been desirable (of course this was not the kind of non-British history that critics wanted), but time and space are necessarily limited in primary and secondary classrooms. There were other good reasons for focussing on British history: the sources, for a start, are largely in English; key concepts are more familiar to most students than, say, the basics of Confucianism; and it supports the teaching of other subjects, like English literature. The most important part of the present system was the restraint of its designers, who declined to impose a model curriculum. This decision alone made it difficult to impose a politicised course of study upon millions of school children. In point of fact, it was striking how little attention a course widely derided as Britannic jingoism gave to questions of identity. As the mission statement of the Key Stage 3 curriculum puts it, ‘a high-quality history education will help pupils gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. It should inspire pupils’ curiosity to know more about the past. Teaching should equip pupils to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement. History helps pupils to understand the complexity of people’s lives, the process of change, the diversity of societies and relationships between different groups, as well as their own identity and the challenges of their time’. Identity, however, makes no appearance in the curriculum’s list of ‘aims’, which are all devoted to the cultivation of conceptual understanding in one form or another. The retreat from identity-driven school history was a timely manoeuvre. For New Labour’s curriculum trod a dangerous path. To be sure, some of the thinking behind it was sophisticated. Bernard Crick’s report on citizenship education saw ‘the use of evidence and processes of enquiry’ integral to the study of history as skills that could ‘help pupils to discuss and reach informed judgements about topical and contemporary issues’ – skills ‘which are the lifeblood of citizenship’ and the basis of ‘informed action’. A handbook for secondary school teachers - 28 -

D. H. Robinson The State, Society and School History 29 from the time sang from the same hymnal. Through the study of history, it read, students ‘see the diversity of human experience, and understand more about themselves as individuals and members of society. What they learn can influence their decisions about personal choices, attitudes and values. In history, pupils find evidence, weigh it up and reach their own conclusions. To do this they need to be able to research, sift through evidence, and argue for their point of view – skills that are prized in adult life’. This was a rather skills-heavy summation, certainly, but the overall effect was not bad. Yet New Labour history contained another strain, which the Crick Report also captured, but which grew much stronger over the lifetime of that government. ‘In History, there is much teaching and learning about the development of societies and of political, social and economic systems, including the development of British democracy and of our pluralist society, which provides an essential conceptual and institutional foundation to many elements in our learning outcomes. For example, the history of Parliament is at the heart of British history and can readily lead into discussion of present day electoral arrangements. Meanwhile, British, European and world history topics can also lead into consideration of the international, sustainable development and the human rights aspects of our learning outcomes.’ This was decidedly Whiggish, only the subject was not British liberty but human rights and internationalism: here too was the idea of history as an explanation for present society. As the 2000s wore on, this line of thinking grew increasingly entwined with a debate over identity. The Ajegbo Report of 2007 was something of a watershed, introducing a historical element into citizenship education at Key Stage 4. By 2011, an Ofsted report was positively preaching the reduction of school history into a kind of ritual catharsis for multicultural society. The subject had to be made ‘relevant’, and relevance would only be achieved by teaching identity.* - 29 -

History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum 30 ‘History is well placed to enhance pupils’ sense of social responsibility. The history curriculum at Key Stage 2 says that pupils should be taught about “the social, cultural, religious and ethnic diversity of the societies studied in Britain and the wider world”. At Key Stage 3 the history curriculum explicitly requires pupils to study “the impact through time of the movement and settlement of diverse peoples to, from and within the British Isles”. Pupils are expected to explore “the wide cultural, social and ethnic diversity of Britain from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century and how this has helped shape Britain’s identity”. As a result, pupils should be able to “reach an informed understanding of, and respect for, their own and each other’s identities”. These are vital components of an education for young people today’. The Gove reforms spared half a generation of young British people from these vital components. Yet the danger has only mounted. The cultural politics of the contemporary left needs no further exegesis here, and we have already watched it wreaking havoc in Cambridge, but its aims, of course, go far beyond education. Not very long ago certain streets seemed to be choked with posters reading ‘Teach the Empire’. This was not to be mistaken for a call to open debate – it was a call for a mass public atonement for a sin of the past. The academic Kate Tunstall, astonishingly the head of Worcester College at the time, rather gave the game away when she organised a teaching boycott in response to Oriel College’s refusal to remove its hundred-year-old statue of Cecil Rhodes – supposedly racializing British society from its perch above Oxford High Street like some *Sir Keith Ajegbo, former headmaster Deptford Green School, government adviser 2006- 2009, lead author, the Curriculum Review ‘Diversity and Citizenship’. incorrigible, sedimentary succubus. Not much earlier she and a throng of vexed colleagues had denounced the theologian Nigel Biggar’s project on ethics and imperialism for ‘asking the wrong questions, using the wrong terms, and for the wrong purposes’. Protest movements have a fly-by-night relationship with historical fact; they seldom have any real interest in pedagogy. - 30 -

D. H. Robinson The State, Society and School History 31 Meanwhile, the Labour Party rediscovering the Blairite crypto-Napoleonic claim to be the ‘political wing of the British people as a whole’, which threatens the imposition of another past composed of moral lessons for the population to absorb. And it is altogether more disconcerting to see history teaching recast as an instruction in identity by Conservative MPs, including two recent Schools Ministers, Nick Gibb and Robin Walker. At an event organised to celebrate black history month, the latter has recently espoused the need for a ‘model curriculum, which will equip teachers to teach about migration, cultural change, and the contributions made by different communities’. It is a pity that the government’s response to the Race and Ethnic Disparities Commission, Inclusive Britain, has been sucked into this milieu. For the most part, this is a timely paper, and many of its recommendations are urgent. Yet it makes a series of prescriptions for a more ‘inclusive’ history teaching that are dangerously inchoate, reviving many of the dangers of identity-driven education that were escaped early last decade. The particular concept of ‘inclusivity’ at work here is particularly unfortunate: indeed, it acts like a singularly strained version of blood and soil nationalism: ‘all children should grow up feeling a strong sense of belonging to this country. They need to see themselves as integral parts of the rich, diverse mosaic of traditions, faiths, and ethnicities which make up the UK today’. In keeping with Walker’s comments, the paper promises resources for the yearround teaching of black history – an odd and partial pledge, given the document’s deconstruction of BAME as a category. The idea that an ethnic minority person’s sense of belonging to this country ought to beholden to the length of time that people with similar skin colours have been seen on these islands is, on the face of it, absurd. It is as irrelevant to modern British citizenship as the fact that Henry VIII had a black trumpeter – now a staple of contemporary history teaching at all levels, it seems. Trying to vindicate this absurd proposition by telling a deep history of the UK as a multi-racial society involves several acts of perjury. It calls upon history teachers to present either a deeply distorted view of British society before the middle of the twentieth century, which is clearly happening in many settings, or to contort the term ‘multi-racial’ into an anachronistic absurdity. The latter is clearly happening too, and it appears at least implicitly in Inclusive Britain with the promise to ‘place more emphasis - 31 -

History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum 32 on the national histories of Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales, telling the story of how the United Kingdom came to be’. This is all troublingly Whiggish. It is a projection on to the past of an image of a righteous society, the contours of which have been drawn for the social and political conveniences of the present. We have not yet considered the alarming possibility that structuring a curriculum around and ‘relevance’ to the genetic background of current students may not instil feelings of belonging in today’s society. The politicisation of Scottish national history teaching under the rule of the SNP – perverting an otherwise laudable effort to improve the teaching of the history of Scotland – has shown what harm can be done to unity, even in the teeth of considerable resistance. The First World War, for example, is positioned in the course as an experience of Scottish social history, not through the prism of European or British history. For its part, the Scottish Government produced an infamous ‘timeline’ in which all Scottish history is presented as striving for independence from the English and which culminates in the Scottish Parliament and the independence debate. Careless law costs minds. In England, the present curriculum provides a liberal framework for young people to develop a coherent picture of British history, with plenty of allowances for personal tastes and interests. Anyone dissatisfied with such an approach ought to put themselves under suspicion immediately, but the ranks of the historical profession and public commentary are dominated by precisely such people. In such circumstances, creating a model curriculum – as Inclusive Britain proposes – would be the crowning disaster in a train of disaster. Sooner or later, whether by force or fancy, the model would become a standard. Perhaps some people could write a model that would – as the paper vows – foster ‘flexibility and freedom’. But they would write as dissidents in a profession which has gone a long way towards establishing racial and gendered oppression as the dominant axis of historical interpretation. In the end, the odds of doing less harm than good are poor. 3. Serious History What does it mean to politicise a curriculum? All history is political somehow. The default assumption today holds that any history which does not foreground - 32 -

D. H. Robinson The State, Society and School History 33 race and migration is an endorsement of a mono-racial society, contrived to erase minority groups and phenomena like racism from the record. If the current system prohibited the study of these subjects – it does no such thing – they would have a point. But there is a larger issue at stake. Any ideologue can use history. And indeed there are situations when the old adage about statesmen giving their people good myths and repressing bad ones rings true. A Ukrainian soldier, peering out of a captured Russian tank at an incoming squadron of MiGs, is not well served by an academic treatise on the Kievan Rus’. Collective memory, with all of its mythic qualities, is a powerful thing, and its loss may be to our cost. The resilience of post-national societies is unproven; the legitimacy of all political communities rests to some extent on an image of the future and a perception of the past. The cultivation of new collective identities is now an imperative. But the duties of historians are not those of statesmen, much less of cultural leaders, and this is a job for the bards. Turned into a salve for the divisions of modern society and the vexations of personal identity, history becomes a truncated subject, mired in experience and empathy. This is not nothing: at least empathy takes us beyond the constraints of the contemporary fetish for ‘lived experience’, which is designed as if to make historical analysis itself an illegitimate and inappropriate activity. Nevertheless, viewing the past as little but a preamble of the present reduces history to chronicle – and those who study it become rote-learners: mere spectators, denied the opportunity to engage with historical and cultural traditions. For the traditions advertised in Inclusive Britain are beyond conversation, because they are not really traditions at all. Rather, Britain’s multicultural history is presented here as an ordering principle, carrying a concept of the good which cannot itself be questioned. Prefabricated lenses of interpretation – even those which claim to displace others – distort the highest purposes of education. As the philosopher Michael Oakeshott once argued, the real point of learning is not to prepare people for their place in society, but to emancipate their minds. He did not have in mind something frivolous like ‘finding your own voice’. Education lifts people out of ‘the ceaseless flow of trivialities’ and the fashionable modes of understanding that make up their immediate intellectual surroundings. In exchange, and in a spirit of humility rather than suspicion, it brings them into a great cultural tradition, - 33 -

History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum 34 weaving through generations, where ‘the din of local partialities is no more than a distant rumble’, and the diversity of human life can be witnessed. ‘Each of us is born in a corner of the Earth and at a particular moment in historic time, lapped round with locality, [but] school and university are places apart, where a declared learner is emancipated from the limitations of his local circumstances and from the wants he may happen to have acquired, and is moved by intimations of what he has never dreamed’. If the relevant part of Inclusive Britain had been inspired by this view of education, it might have produced a more credible idea of the contribution that history teaching might make to our social union. Instead, such views were elided – not really by the fault of the authors, for it is half-dead already in Cambridge, and Oxford; just as it has slowly died by thousand such cuts in the intellectual life of the West. It is hard to shake off the suspicion that these ideas are unpopular because they have no stated end. In other words, the conclusions that people might reach by taking part in this great conversation may not be those of the ideologues. For, as Chaucer wrote, ‘out of old fields, as men say, comes all this new corn from year to year; and out of old books, in good faith, comes all this new science that men hear’. The humility of these sentiments certainly seems to be the occasion of some measure of paranoia amongst the reformers. And their paranoia might be justified, were there grounds to believe that the primary and secondary school teaching profession had been infiltrated by a vast throng of xenophobic nationalists and neo-imperialists. Given the politics of the teaching profession, this seems a mite unlikely. Perhaps the prospect that a generation reared to associate virtue with a set of signals and performances might discover something more is troubling enough. No wonder we need university courses on how to read books correctly. The fact is, when we talk about politicising education, we are talking about two distinct things. The first, which has unfortunately intruded into the government’s - 34 -

D. H. Robinson The State, Society and School History 35 line of thinking, is a use of the past as a kind of social catharsis, or the vindication of a particular social order. But this crude pseudo-history blinds us to something altogether more fundamental. Even Oakeshott recognised – and defended – that inevitable human tendency of mining the past for exemplars of action. After all, history is the only true study of human judgement – collective as well as individual – made under the constraints of time, and chance, and circumstance, and (perhaps most importantly) without the pretence of having perfect information. Moreover, since human beings live in passing time, history also, inevitably, a primary means of gathering, analysing, and expressing all knowledge. Unfashionable as it is to say, lowering the quality of history teaching has major consequences for the teaching of other subjects too. Shorn of a historical sense, the human being is reduced to a kind of flatlander beetle, blind to the dimensions of his own existence. Sooner or later, the degeneration of history into a trivial subject will produce a trivial people – no matter how inclusive. - 35 -

David Abulafia A Model Curriculum? 36 These thoughts about the nature of the history curriculum are divided into two main parts. The first part will examine the serious crisis that exists in the study of history in and indeed beyond schools. The second part will look at the question whether proposals for a model curriculum are even required, what it might look at if it is required, and what dangers lie ahead in trying to go global when teaching children It will consider especially the direction that the study of history has been taking, as this, rather than the exact contents of a curriculum, has been the main focus of my thoughts in the last few years. 1. The Study of History – In Crisis The so-called culture wars have made it plain how important it is to maintain a responsible approach to the study of the past in both schools and universities. Historians are used to confronting myths about the past, whether they consist of anachronistic assumptions about the aims of Magna Carta or romantic beliefs about the voyage of the Mayflower. Now, though, these debates have reached a new and dangerous level, as the study of the past is turned into an exercise in moral disapproval, and judgment is passed on figures such as Francis Drake and Horatio Nelson according to ethical criteria espoused by some (but by no means all) citizens of our own society – a minority but a very loud one. Needless to say, these are not the criteria that would have been applied by Drake or Nelson, or by their contemporaries. Teaching not just children but adults that the ethical standards of past centuries differed in all sorts of ways from those our century adheres to is a fundamental aspect of teaching about the past, even if these principles have been abandoned as far up the scale as some of those teaching in my own university. Simplistic generalizations infused with radical ideology abound, concerning issues such as the economic impact of slavery on the Industrial Revolution, supposedly financed by the profits from sugar plantations in Barbados and Jamaica. The main ideological framework is derived from what calls itself ‘Critical Theory’, although it is neither critical nor a theory – for it is presented as absolute certainty rather than debatable theory, and so far from being critical it III Do We Actually Need a Model History Curriculum? David Abulafia - 36 -

History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum 37 permits no debate about its assumptions. This is most obvious in the area that impinges directly on the study of history, ‘Critical Race Theory’. If Brighton and Hove Council has its way children as young as seven are to be exposed to Critical Race Theory and taught about the ‘white privilege’ supposedly derived from 500 years of colonialism, a secular version of Original Sin with the complication that there is no process by which it can be washed away. This is not education; it is indoctrination. My fear is that new initiatives may well exacerbate this deeply worrying loss of direction in the study of the past that has been gathering pace during the last few years. In addition to the incorporation of ‘Critical Theory’, the teaching of history in schools has been subverted by an emphasis on so-called skills rather than knowledge, although there do seem to have been serious attempts to resist this shift. The assumption that one can learn method before one has any exact information with which to work has resulted in new and at times ridiculous ways of looking at the past. Empathy becomes a precious quality, introducing an element of highly personal and subjective judgment into the way the past is read: not ‘what was it like to be a medieval peasant?’ but ‘what would your feelings be if you were one?’ In some forms, influenced by frequently incomprehensible French philosophers from the Left Bank of the Seine, there is no real past; everyone has his or her own version of the past. As Sir Richard Evans has pointed out in his book In Defence of History, this approach opens the door to Holocaust denial and other mendacious ways of describing past events. The history of rewriting the past goes back to the ancient Sumerians in around 2500 BC, but in the last hundred years invented pasts have flourished all over the world. The example of the Soviet Union, with its suppression of anti-Marxist interpretations, and its glorification of Russian nationalism at the expense of countless ethnic minorities, is just one very disturbing example from the twentieth century. It is important to make these points before looking at future initiatives for the history curriculum, because the study of history is at risk not from lack of attention to it so much as excessive and distorted attention to it. The writer of The Crown has stated that his aim is not accuracy but truth, whatever he may mean by truth. But, as Tom Stoppard has so wisely remarked, nowadays there is ‘personal truth’ and ‘truth truth’. The study of the past has to be ‘truth truth’: it must be faithful to the evidence, while remaining open to a variety of interpretations where matters - 37 -

David Abulafia A Model Curriculum? 38 are in dispute, and it must remain uncontaminated by current political ideologies. Genuine objectivity is more than any individual historian can achieve, for we are all influenced by our upbringing and may find it hard to shed deep convictions about the nature of society. But this certainly does not mean that we should abandon our attempts to strive for objectivity – perhaps a better word than objective is dispassionate. The past is real: those things really happened. The past is sacred: it is not our task to tamper with it. This is not to deny that different people saw events differently at the time they occurred, and part of the fascination of studying the past is to see how these views diverged. But the criteria we adopt in selecting facts must be as impartial as possible, not just in the way we relate past events but in the way we refuse to cover the traces of things that might cause embarrassment. A good example arises from the history of the Atlantic slave trade, a topic that lies at the heart of Critical Race Theory. Of course the violent narrative of the ‘Middle Passage’, the sea route transporting slaves from Africa to Brazil, the Caribbean and North America, needs to be related; but so does the complicity of African rulers in selling captives to European slave-traders, often in return for copper bracelets which in some case were melted down and refashioned as the now notorious Benin Bronzes. We have to learn how to separate our moral revulsion at the slave trade from our ability to portray it wie es eigentlich gewesen ist – as it really was, to use the famous phrase of the German historian Ranke. 2. A Model Curriculum – Assumptions and Implications The assumption that the teaching of history to children has ignored Britain’s global role is not well-founded. In fact at the level of GCSE the requirement is that 40% of the course at least must concern British history. Recently I published an article in the Spectator in which I looked at several children’s history books from about a hundred years ago. I was particularly struck by A Nursery History of England, a heavily illustrated work written by Elizabeth O’Neill and frequently updated by her and her daughter. Her approach to children’s history was eminently sensible: ‘I have chosen the greatest men and women to tell you about, and in reading their stories I hope you will understand better something of what the times were like in which they lived, and what the other people too were like who were not so great and the kind of lives they led.’ O’Neill paid close attention - 38 -

History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum 39 to what would nowadays be called the history of gender and class. The Countess of Buchan is shown crowning Robert the Bruce; lower down the social scale Jane Geddes can be seen hurling her stool at the minister when he started reciting from the English Book of Common Prayer in St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh. O’Neill detested slavery. ‘Black men, from a country called Africa, were stolen away from their homes and taken over to America’, where they ‘were bought and sold as though they were animals’, and often very brutally treated. She condemned child labour during the Industrial Revolution, this time with an illustration of barefoot, ragged children on their way to the ‘big ugly workrooms’. Not surprisingly, some episodes in the foundation of the British Empire, such as the capture of Quebec and the siege of Lucknow, were given a heroic gloss; but Gandhi was given a very good press and she hinted that the British attempts to rule India had involved ‘unkind’ acts. Generally, though, rather than delivering a jingoistic account of English history, O’Neill was careful to maintain a balance. Overall, the Nursery History is a humane attempt to tell what she hoped would be a balanced version of England’s story to young children. Would that this were the case with modern narratives of history that evoke injustices of long ago in order to cast blame on the citizens of twenty-first century Britain. All this has considerable bearing on the teaching of history. A major aim of the current curriculum is to provide children with a connected account of the history of the country in which they live. It is an account that focusses on key individuals, recognising the role of human agency in history. It is also an account that places in context key events, considering their origins and impact – a case in point might be the Glorious Revolution of 1689 – and not just single events but gradual processes, such as that by which the franchise was gradually extended across all social classes and to women. The intention was to present this material in a dispassionate way, free of a political message, whether Whig, Marxist or anything else. Another central feature was the strong insistence that knowledge is required before methods (or ‘skills’) can be learned and applied. From that point of view, even learning a sheet of dates would be valuable, because it provides a chronological framework and a sense of the scale of the past. I have argued for an emphasis on British history that only gradually gives way to a global perspective by drawing an analogy with local geography. Is it more useful to learn the street plan of your own town or that of Vilnius (even if your parents - 39 -

David Abulafia A Model Curriculum? 40 are Lithuanian), or Kuala Lumpur (if they are Malaysian)? Nowadays the rudiments of grammar feature less than they used to do in the teaching of English, but no one would suggest that French or German grammar should be taught in schools before that of our national language. We may differ about how we define a nation and what the term ‘national identity’ may or may not mean, but the simple fact of attending a British school in Britain requires us to place the history and culture of this country ahead of that of other lands. Moreover, we have cultural traditions of truly global significance, notably in literature, and a political culture that has left its imprint across the world, in and beyond the Commonwealth. The question whether a history syllabus for quite young children should pay a great amount of attention to other parts of the world has been addressed by arguing that the time to broaden outwards in this way is later in a pupil’s career. The disadvantage with this argument is that so many children who do not continue their historical education beyond the age of 14 will not benefit from this opportunity; fewer than half the children taking GCSE study history. Against that there is the simple argument that history should be taught to all pupils for longer. This is in no way to deny that the history of what became the United Kingdom is incomprehensible if one omits this country’s engagement with both neighbouring countries and places right the other side of the world. Including those aspects has always been a feature of the way British history has been taught: Scandinavian Vikings, the Hundred Years’ War, conflicts with Spain, France and more recently Germany are an integral part of British history, as any visitor to the Portsmouth Dockyards is aware: there we have the Mary Rose, which fought the French in the sixteenth century, and the Victory, which fought the French at the start of the nineteenth century. Blenheim Palace records not just the wars of the Duke of Marlborough in continental Europe but Winston Churchill’s career as soldier, journalist and politician, ranging as far afield as South Africa. And, as has been seen, the creation of the British Empire is there in a good number of the stories that make up Mary O’Neill’s Nursery History. There are things to add: there is no reason to omit the history of black people and other ethnic minorities within Great Britain, but these matters have to be seen in proportion: valuable research has revealed the presence of ‘black Tudors’, even on the Mary Rose, but they were exceedingly small in number and lived at a time - 40 -

History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum 41 when skin colour was more a matter of curiosity than prejudice, though that was beginning to change. One of the interesting features of Black History Month, each October, is that it addresses these early phases when prejudice based on skin colour was pretty well non-existent. However, other groups – Flemish weavers, French Huguenots, Portuguese Jews (linked to the history of fish and chips), and so on – also deserve mention. Inevitably history at this level involves great over-simplification. I remember being taught when I was about 10 that the Renaissance began when Greek scholars fled from the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453. But of course the picture is much more complicated. Would a comparable simplification be to tell children that the Industrial Revolution was only rendered possible by profits from Caribbean slavery? This, after all, is the much cited thesis of Eric Williams in his book Capitalism and Slavery, recently reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic – but this is not a view leading economic historians accept nowadays. This is not to suggest that the history of the slave trade should be ignored in school history, nor that pupils should fail to discuss how it was possible to support slavery and at the same time be a generous benefactor to good causes in Great Britain. All this points to several dangers in trying to go global. One is simply that the study of the past will be stretched even more than it is now, and produce a superficial overview that contains little of substance and is easily forgotten. This becomes a much greater problem if the curriculum loses its British focus and spends as much time looking at Chinese dynasties as it does at the British one. More probable is a move towards the theme of Britain’s engagement with the rest of the world, particularly through empire. And that might open up the other danger: that the syllabus becomes a tool for activists keen to use it as a way of propagating their opinions, rather than facts – opinions which are all too often treated as indisputable. Hard evidence is sometimes ignored to the point where an activist will insist that even if the data he or she has cited are all wrong the argument is right: morally right, according to their lights, rather than scientifically accurate. There is a danger that the emphasis shifts towards approaches influenced by the arguments of radical activists. This is in no way to deny that the history of Barbados or Ghana or Singapore has a place in a history curriculum for children, and that children of all origins, not just those with one of those ancestries, should have the opportunity to learn about the historical background of other pupils in - 41 -

David Abulafia A Model Curriculum? 42 their class at school. But these are topics that need to be carefully woven into and made relevant to the history of Great Britain, in the same way as Irish history has been treated in recent years. European countries should also enter into these calculations. The large French community in London, not to mention a substantial eastern European population in parts of Great Britain (with Polish as the second most widely spoken language), and very many families of Italian descent also deserve a little attention. The best way forward, frankly, is to stay with the existing curriculum, taking the British Isles as the basic frame of reference, and looking outwards from here, rather than to teach an impossibly thin course in world history. This approach conforms to current requirements and practice. - 42 -