Teach history warts and all

By Christopher Caldwell

Published: March 25 2011 23:10 | Last updated: March 25 2011 23:10

“Time to head off!” wisecracks the hooded executioner on the cover of Even More Terrible Tudors, one of the popular titles in the Horrible Histories series. “I’ve got a mammoth brain!” grunts a caveman on the cover of The Savage Stone Age, holding up the dripping organ in question, while his family, sitting in the background, cooks the rest of the mammoth. History-minded schoolboys buy these books – written or co-written by the Englishman Terry Deary and aimed at presenting “history with the nasty bits left in” – by the dozens.

The idea that the history of one’s own country should be as exhilarating to young readers as, say, cars exploding or ladies in bathing suits is a peculiarly British one. When Michael Gove, education secretary, told Conservatives at their party conference last October that the narrative of children’s history courses could stand to be a bit snappier, he started an argument that has riled British historians ever since. If people are uninspired by the country’s past, Mr Gove says, “we will not properly value the liberties of the present”. Mr Gove is nationalistic to say so, but he is right. If defending one’s rights requires knowing where they came from, then learning one’s own history is indispensable.

The argument is over how best to breathe life into a mass of facts and dates. For Mr Gove, the missing element is a strong narrative, built of real protagonists facing big challenges. The government enlisted as its history adviser Simon Schama of Columbia University (and the Financial Times), who has found a way to make European and British history enthralling, both in books and on screen. Mr Gove and Mr Schama have their detractors, however. The University of California historian of Britain, James Vernon, believes teaching works best “not by turning schoolchildren into Britons but by enabling them to analyse the present and to think critically”. Richard Evans, the Cambridge historian of Germany, is not hostile to the narrative lines dear to Mr Gove and Mr Schama, but warns us against getting swept up in them. In a recent London Review of Books essay, he urges scepticism towards sources and warns students “not to accept passively every fact and argument they are presented with”.

This is the point on which Mr Schama and Mr Evans are most likely to agree. Mr Schama, too, has described history as a force for challenging orthodoxies, as the “greatest, least sentimental, least politically correct tutor of tolerance”. And yet, this may be the point on which classroom teachers have their deepest doubts. The intellectual independence that Messrs Schama and Evans extol characterises only a minority of published historians – why should we expect it from A-level students? Should we even want it? There are, after all, problems with teaching scepticism. The questioning of authority is indispensable and often heroic, but one needs a certain “feel” for a subject matter before one can carry it out. Until that point, scepticism is little more than a truculent contrarianism and a waste of other students’ time. It is most tellingly applied to the things one knows best. Where ignorance and scepticism meet, a course on British history becomes a course on running Britain down.

One wonders whether this is not Mr Gove and Mr Schama’s real gripe. Mr Evans accuses them of “confusing history with memory”. But maybe memory is what young people need to be taught before they can be taught actual history. An example of this memory/ history distinction comes from Black History Month, as it is taught in US grade schools. Children spend every February either learning or rehashing the achievements of African-Americans – always in a morale-boosting way. As history, such courses have little to recommend them. To treat the deeds of the 19th-century abolitionist Sojourner Truth in greater detail than those of George Washington, which is the inevitable end-result of a dedicated month, is to perpetrate a distortion.

But as memory, Black History Month has been a striking success. Children, and not just black children, quite like it. The reasons are paradoxical. Probably no pedagogical innovation was ever carried out for reasons more political, but Black History Month is the least politically correct corner of the grade-school history curriculum. You always know who the good guys are in Black History Month and their struggles are taught with an old-fashioned, un-nuanced moralism that makes Our Island Story look like Hamlet. The results are plain to see. In 2008, education professors from Stanford and the University of Maryland released a survey of 2,000 11th- and 12th-graders (high-school leavers) who had been asked to name the 10 most significant Americans, excepting presidents. Three mainstays of Black History Month – Martin Luther King, the anti-segregationist protester Rosa Parks and the escaped slave Harriet Tubman – ranked one, two and three, well ahead of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.

By about the age of eight or 10, children should have a simple, logical and non-cynical narrative of their country to carry around for the rest of their lives as a net to catch knowledge in. Non-cynical, because children cannot build such a net if teachers are running down the credibility of what they impart. That is the problem with teaching young people: there is a line on one side of which a teacher’s duty is to promote credulity and on the other side of which it is to promote scepticism. Errors are inevitable. But they will be self-correcting, to some extent. By age 16, students will have as much cynicism and “distance” as any educator could wish.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard