History matters. Most intelligent adults, no matter how limited their education, understand that. Even if they have never formally studied the subject, they are likely to take an interest in historical topics. Historians on television – notably Simon Schama and David Starkey – draw big audiences (the book of Schama’s History of Britain sold more than a million copies). Military historians who have become household names in recent years include Richard Holmes and Anthony Beevor. And journalists such as Andrew Marr, Jeremy Paxman and David Dimbleby have also been highly successful in reaching a mass audience with historical material.
History, it might be said, has never been more popular. Yet there is a painful paradox at the very same time: that it has never been less popular in British schools.
History is not a compulsory part of the British secondary school curriculum after the age of 14, in marked contrast to nearly all other European countries. The most recent statistics for England and Wales indicate the scale of the problem. In 2009 a total of 219,809 candidates sat the GCSE in history – just 4 per cent of all GCSEs taken. More students sat the design and technology GCSE (305,809).
At A-level the story is worse. There were 49,071 A-level history candidates in 2009, 5.8 per cent of all A-levels taken (down from 6.4 per cent in 1992). More candidates took psychology (52,872) than history.
Why is this downgrading of history a bad thing? Well, for one thing, the current world population makes up only about 7 per cent of all the human beings who have ever lived. The dead outnumber the living, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril. Second, the Past is our only reliable guide to the Present and to the multiple futures that lie before us, only one of which will actually happen.
Now, nobody wants a return to the kind of mind-numbing history that used to be taught a generation ago – those strings of facts and dates, one damned thing after another, half-memorised by comatose pupils and famously lampooned in WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman’s 1930 classic, 1066 and All That.
It’s no coincidence that the most boring teacher at Hogwarts in JKRowling’s Harry Potter books is the history teacher, Mr Binns, whose lessons about the goblin wars are so tedious that he himself has died of boredom without noticing.
Yet when you find out what most of today’s teenagers are taught as history, you realise that decades of educational reform have made matters worse. Most strikingly, there is no meaningful connection between what is taught to students in the early years of secondary school (called Key Stage 3), at GCSE and at A-level. “Our island story” was far from ideal. But now there is simply no narrative arc at all.
This would be bad enough if the selection of subject matter were merely random. Unfortunately, it is absurdly skewed. According to 2006 exam data, 51 per cent of GCSE candidates and a staggering 80 per cent of A-level candidates study the history of the Third Reich. As someone who wrote his DPhil thesis on inter-war Germany, I yield to no one in my respect for the historiography of Adolf Hitler’s rise and fall. But there can be no justification for this excessive focus on the history of a single European country over a period of just a dozen years.
Those of us outside the school-teaching profession may not realise the extent to which history as an integral subject has been replaced with a kind of smorgasbord of unrelated “topics”. Consider the choices that British teachers and their pupils confront. At Key Stage 3, teachers have to select – from a possible 22 – a total of six topics, three of which must be British, two “world” and one European. So far, so good. But here is a typical selection from the Key Stage 3 handbook:
1. Elizabeth I
2. The British Empire
3. Black Peoples of America
4. Female Suffrage
5. The World Wars
6. The Holocaust
This explains why, when I asked them a year ago, all three of my children (aged 16, 14 and 11) had heard of the Rev Martin Luther King Jr, but none could tell me anything about Martin Luther.
When children begin studying for GCSE exams aged 15, there are a number of different syllabuses. Under one (OCR A), students choose a general topic showing the development of a theme over time. This can be either “Medicine through Time’, or “Crime and Punishment through Time”. Then they choose either a Modern World Study (which means relating current events to history), or pick one of the following to study in depth:
1. Elizabethan England, 1558-1603
2. Britain, 1815-51
3. The American West, 1840-95
4. Germany, c.1919-45
5. South Africa, 1948-c.1995.
In theory a student who has already learned about the Tudors and the rise of the Nazis wouldn’t want to repeat the same course for GCSE. Not so. A large proportion choose either the Tudor option or the Hitler option again.
A-level courses are somewhat more generous to the medieval and early modern periods. Students can opt for a “Document Study” covering the period 871-1099, English History 1042-1660, or European History 1046-1718. But, as exam data show, “Appeasement of the Dictators in the 1930s” or “Civil Rights in the US” still emerge as far more popular choices.
The excessive concentration of sixth-formers on learning about either Hitler or the Henrys – the Third Reich or the Tudors – was already a cause of concern when I was a college fellow and tutor in history at Oxford University in the 1990s. I shudder to think what it must be like to conduct Oxbridge admissions now.
What we urgently need in this country is a campaign for real history in schools, to match Jamie Oliver’s campaign for healthy school dinners. Like junk food, junk history is bad for kids. It encourages snacking and the mental equivalent of obesity – a chronic lack of mental shape. So here’s what I would propose to vary the historical diet in English education.
The first step is to make studying history to GCSE level compulsory. It cannot be wise for British schoolchildren to opt out of historical knowledge and understanding when their European contemporaries are still studying the subject.
I also believe there should be a compulsory chronological framework over the entire period from entering secondary school right through to sixth form. All students at GCSE and A-level should cover at least one medieval, one early modern and one modern paper. The crucial thing is to have an over-arching story – a meta-narrative, as academics pretentiously call it. The one I propose for my new-look history course is called “western ascendancy”.
Why do I use the word “western”? Aside from cowboy films, is it not completely passé? And why have I used the word “ascendancy”, implying as it does some politically incorrect superiority?
The answer is simple. Western predominance was a historical reality after around 1500, and certainly after 1800. In that year, Europe and its New World offshoots accounted for 12 per cent of the world’s population and (already) around 27 per cent of its total income. By 1913, however, it was 20 per cent of the world’s population and more than half – 51 per cent – of the income. Today the west’s share is back down to 12 per cent of the population, but still around 45 per cent of the income. Like it or not, the fact is that after 1500 the world became more Eurocentric. And understanding why that happened is the modern historian’s biggest challenge.
It was a surprising turn of events. Had you made a tour of the world in the early 1600s, you would have hesitated before betting a significant sum that western Europe would inherit the earth.
The Oriental challengers for world power were outwardly a great deal more impressive. Ottoman Turkey under Mehmed IV (1648-87) was able to send an army under Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa to besiege – and very nearly conquer – Vienna in 1683. Mughal India in the reign of Shah Jahan 1627-58) was able to conquer the Deccan and to build the Taj Mahal and the Diwan-i-Am in Delhi. Qing China saw its golden age under the Kangxi Emperor (1662-1722). China had already invented the magnetic compass, paper, gunpowder, the spinning wheel, and the clock. The Muslim world had for many centuries led the west in the crucial field of mathematics. Indian astronomers had been far ahead of their medieval European counterparts.
So why did the states of western Europe – Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands and Britain – end up trouncing these eastern competitors, not only economically but also militarily and in some respects also culturally, so that by 1900 the world was dominated by western empires?
Anthropologist Jared Diamond’s answer is essentially: geography, which determined two very different political orders. In the great plains of eastern Eurasia, monolithic Oriental empires evolved that had the fatal ability to stifle innovation. In mountainous, river-divided western Eurasia, by contrast, multiple monarchies and city-states engaged in competition and communication, and it was these processes that accelerated innovation sufficiently for an industrial revolution to take place.
His argument is almost irresistibly attractive, but for one difficulty. From the vantage point of the 1630s and 1640s, political fragmentation in Europe meant civil war and chaos.
Other hypotheses exist. One is that it was the acquisition of colonial “ghost acres” and the fortunate location of European coal deposits that gave the west the edge over the east. Or it may have been the cultural legacies of the Reformation.
If I were permitted to hazard some hypotheses they would go as follows. There were, in essence, six “killer applications” that allowed the west to establish dominance over the east: market capitalism, scientific method, representative government, modern medicine, the consumer society, and the Protestant work ethic.
The value of this approach to history at secondary level is threefold. First, it provides a narrative for around 500 years of world history. Second, it makes a comparative approach to history unavoidable, for clearly an interpretation of western success requires some complementary explanation of eastern stagnation. And, third, understanding western ascendancy encourages students to re-examine the present and the future, asking: are we approaching the end of western ascendancy? After all, most of these six elements have been more or less successfully replicated in some major non-western societies.
Let me not be misinterpreted. The point of studying western ascendancy is not to slip covert imperialist apologia into the curriculum. On the contrary, the great strength of this framework is that it allows students to study world history without falling into the trap of relativism, i.e. arguing as if the Ashanti Empire were in some way the equal of the British Empire.
Western ascendancy was not all good, any more than it was all bad. It was simply what happened and, of all the things that happened over the past five centuries, it was the thing that changed the world the most. That so few British schoolchildren are even aware of this is deplorable. Knowing the names of Henry VIII’s six wives or the date of the Reichstag fire is no substitute for having a real historical education.
We have recently witnessed a successful campaign to improve the quality of lunches served in British schools. It is time for an equivalent campaign against junk history.
This is an edited extract from ‘Liberating Learning: Widening Participation’, edited by Patrick Derham and Michael Worton, published by the University of Buckingham Press on April 21, £10
‘High Financier’, Niall Ferguson’s biography of banker Siegmund Warburg, will be published at the end of June
Niall Ferguson is Lawrence A Tisch professor of history at Harvard university and a contributing editor of the FT
..................................................
The horrible appeal of history
At the British Museum last weekend, a large crowd of children gathered excitedly in a stuffy lecture theatre to listen to a man talk about history, writes Isabel Berwick. Odd, perhaps. But this was no ordinary lecturer. Martin Brown, illustrator of the Horrible Histories non-fiction series, is, along with the books’ author Terry Deary, a star among the primary school set.
Since the series’ first title Terrible Tudors (1993), the franchise has generated 23 original books about specific periods of history, such as The Frightful First World War. There are also many more compilations, magazines, annuals, a first world war exhibition at the Imperial War Museum and now a CBBC television series, featuring sketches firmly skewed towards the scatological, and linked by a talking rat.
Sales of the series have topped 11m copies in the UK and 20m worldwide, with the books translated into 31 languages. The secret? This is, as the book jackets say “history with the nasty bits left in”.
Brown told his delighted British Museum audience how it took two swings to chop off Mary Queen of Scots’ head. She handed the executioner a bag of gold as a “tip”, then put her head on the block. The audience (both Tudor and in 2010) waited for what happened next. As Brown pretended to wield the axe, we all flinched. The first blow, it seems, missed her neck and Mary was just whacked very hard on the back of her head, screaming in agony. The second finished the job.
The squirming fans loved it , which is why Horrible Histories are such a hit. They stink (like most people in history), they show how people went to the lavatory or cleaned their teeth – and they don’t flinch from the gruesome details. And (crucial, this) they appeal to both boys and girls, in an age when so much children’s fodder is gender-defined.
The CBBC ‘Horrible Histories’ series is released on DVD next month, £12.99
Recent Comments