Labour must not leave our children ignorant about Britain’s past – that way division lies
The deadline for submitting evidence to the Government’s Curriculum and Assessment Review has just passed. Telegraph readers who might have wished to express an opinion are now too late – even if they managed to find and navigate the complicated 33-page online form provided by the Department for Education.
We must now wait and see whether the review lives up to its own extravagant aims: “to refresh the curriculum to ensure it is cutting edge ... fit for purpose and meeting the needs of children and young people to support their future life and work”, balancing “ambition, excellence, relevance, flexibility and inclusivity”, ensuring “meaningful, rigorous and high-value pathways” and contributing to “the Government’s missions to break down the barriers to opportunity for every child and young person, at every stage, as well as to the Government’s mission on growth.”
So many clichés in so few lines! But good luck to the review in working these miracles without (as it is more modestly put) “destabilising the system”.
In charge of the process is Professor Becky Francis, who has published on fashionable aspects of education (feminism, gender, ethnic minorities). She is a London-based insider (fellow of the British Academy, holder of the CBE) and long-time Labour supporter. During the Blair government she criticised British education as having an “obsession with academic achievement”.
More recently, and more encouragingly, she stated that the present national curriculum (finalised under Michael Gove) was “pretty good at the moment”. She is now reported to be primarily concerned with class inequalities, presumably good news for today’s only demonstrably disadvantaged minority: white working-class boys.
A more worrying sign of what might be in the offing is a report published by OCR, an examining body owned by Cambridge Assessment consisting of Oxford, Cambridge and the Royal Society of Arts (of which Prof Francis was once director of education), and explicitly aiming to influence the review.
Entitled Striking the balance, it was chaired by Charles Clarke, former Labour education secretary. He was reported in 2003 to have said that medieval history was a waste of time. This he denied, but did believe that the purpose of universities was to “enable the British economy and society to deal with the challenges posed by the increasingly rapid process of global change.”
This might mean that medieval history is indeed a waste of time, or it might mean that understanding the past helps us to navigate the future. Clarke’s preface to the OCR report suggests the former.
He wants the school curriculum to be “far more contemporary and forward-looking, including more content on digital skills and artificial intelligence and climate change … focused far more on the world as it now is and is going to be than on the past”. Focusing on the past, it appears, is merely “acquiring the canons of knowledge which have been built up over centuries.”
What remarkable self-assurance to assume an understanding of both the present and the future while demeaning knowledge built up over centuries – which is, of course, the only knowledge we have. Clarke’s vision of the future involves making climate change a central part of the curriculum. Education or indoctrination?
This utilitarian focus means cutting back on literature: “the literary canon should better reflect the range of cultures and experiences of all young people”. What about their common culture? Why not aim to widen their experiences by introducing them to imaginary worlds they cannot otherwise know?
Instead, the OCR wants “more media, non-fiction and multi-modal texts, including film, TV, drama and digital texts”.
Cultural discovery is not needed by the future proletariat, it seems. Yet there are excellent schools that show every day that children from “a range of cultures” can enjoy and take possession of our shared culture. This is their right, and it is what all our schools should aim at, not at the perpetuation of cultural differences, intellectual impoverishment and what has rightly been condemned as the tyranny of low expectations.
As a historian, I am worried by what may be in store for the History curriculum, which the OCR report casually describes as “overloaded with content”. To reduce its already slim provision would be disastrous.
Ever since the beginning of democracy and mass education – the two are closely linked – teaching history to schoolchildren has been seen as essential for two reasons. First, to help future citizens understand what it means to be a citizen.
Second, to create a sense of common belonging as sharers in what has been called “a rich heritage of memories”, both positive and negative. This is essential at a time of major change and instability such as that which we are now experiencing.
England is unusual by international standards in the little time it devotes to the study of history in schools. Perhaps knowing history seemed less urgent in a country that had experienced relatively few upheavals and disasters, and where in the past a broad consensus on national identity and national values could be assumed.
In countries where that was not the case, which includes most of our European neighbours, history is a core subject at all levels right up to the school leaving age.
Today in Britain, ignorance of history has become a danger. It makes children and adults vulnerable to activists whose aim seems to be to undermine both citizenship and common belonging.
Or if that is not their conscious intention, it is the inevitable consequence of their campaign to discredit the past – and certainly Britain’s particular past – and inculcate shame, cynicism and division.
This is done directly by distorting and even falsifying the historical record, and indirectly by ignoring large parts of it. The justifications given for such distortions are varied: that we must “face up to” negative parts of our past (usually well known already); that we can and should create new “narratives” to please certain lobbies or political movements; that we should undermine national identity and replace it by something else; and that we must please customers and consumers (including schoolchildren) by giving them a view of the past assumed to accord with their prejudices, expectations or cultural backgrounds.
Any national history curriculum in a truly democratic country should have very different aims to these. It must be accurate, balanced and coherent. It must explain how the past can be rationally explored by honest interpretation of evidence.
It must show how ideas, beliefs, social conditions and values change over time, and will continue to change. It must explain the origins and purposes of institutions. It must challenge complacent assumptions that our culture is the peak of human achievement, and that the future is knowable.
Living in England and for the most part being future citizens of the United Kingdom is the fundamental thing – perhaps the only thing – that all schoolchildren have in common. The present National Curriculum for England is intended to provide the essentials of English and British history over a long period, alongside a comparative introduction to other cultures and continents.
No revision of the National Curriculum should depart from this basic principle. It must value our history as the foundation of common citizenship in a multiethnic society. It is a shared heritage to which the younger generation have a right.