history is an integral - oh wait, that was tolstoy

Daniel Hemmens of FerretBrain on teaching history in British schools:

Simon Schama observed recently that British school students were missing out on “vast tracts” of our nation's past. Now this is the kind of thing that the mail loves. Nothing suits a British tabloid better than a WE ARE FAILING OUR CHILDREN story, particularly if it can be coupled with a LEFTIES DON'T LOVE OUR COUNTRY ENOUGH story.

What's ironic about this whole thing (and I confess here that I'm overgeneralising for comic effect) is that Schama's proposed changes to the syllabus – replacing an obsession with “Hitler and the Henries” with a syllabus that looks at less iconic, more significant elements of British History – are exactly the kind of thing which I would expect to get Mail readers up in arms.

History teaching in this country is by all accounts a mess, but how could it not be? Ask the average passer-by or Have-Your-Say commenter about History teaching, and you'll get a thousand different variants on the same answer: “I Am Outraged That Children Today Do Not Learn The Exact Same Subset Of History I Learned When I Was At School.”

History – and I confess I may be showing my science-student bias here – is not like mathematics or physics where the subject has a natural structure (it is, for example, clearly impossible to study calculus before one studies algebra, or to learn about accelerated motion before one learns about motion with a constant velocity). History is a vast interconnected mass and to some extent every part of it illuminates every other part. Obviously studying the First World War helps with the study of the Second World War, and studying the Age of Empire would help with the study of both, but unless you just study the whole of history in chronological order starting from the birth of Abraham you've got to just – well – pick stuff.

The problem with history teaching – indeed with our whole understanding of history – is that we take particular dates, events, and facts to be talismanic. Little Shibboleths of Britishness we can use to distinguish ourselves from dirty foreigners or poor people. Even I, though I fancy myself immune to these kinds of lazy thought-pattern, would be a little shocked if I met somebody who had been educated in this country and did not know what happened in 1066, although if pressed I would be hard put to explain why the Battle of Hastings (October 14th 1066) was more significant than the Battle of the Bulge (December 1944-January 1945), the Battle of Watling Street (AD 60 or 61), or the Battle of Thermopylae (480BC).

In fact thinking about it, the most damning thing about this attitude to history is that if you ask somebody “what happened in 1066?” the answer you expect is “the Battle of Hastings” and not, for example, “the Battle of Stamford Bridge” which happened the same year, was part of the same sequence of events, and is as much a part of understanding the fall of Harold Godwinson and the Norman Conquest as its more famous counterpart. But nobody cares about the Battle of Stamford Bridge, because it's not one of the tickboxes for “knowing about history”.

For reference, here are Schama's recommendations for the elements of British History that any fule should no:

• The Murder of Thomas Beckett (1170)


• The Black Death (1348-1350) and the Peasants' Revolt (1381)


• The Execution of King Charles the First (1649)


• The British in India (1700s to 1900s)


• The Irish Wars (1850 to 1909)


• The Opium Wars (1839-1860)

Now I have two things to say about this list of events. Check that, three things. Firstly, I don't remember learning about any of them at school (especially not the icky colonial ones) although I think the “History of the Troubles” might have been one of the options that nobody did for GCSE. Secondly, I'm still pretty woefully ignorant about most of these – my understanding of the murder of Thomas Beckett comes almost exclusively from that one episode of Blackadder, and my knowledge of the execution of King Charles the First comes entirely from the Monty Python Oliver Cromwell Song. Thirdly, this is clearly a history syllabus designed by an actual historian.

Looking at Schama's list, what you see is a mixture of topics, some very specific (like the Murder In The Cathedral) and some very extended (like our presence in India) all of which combine to show the history of Britain as it really was – vast and complicated and with quite a lot of parts we should be rather ashamed of. It's a History syllabus that focuses not on dates and names and endless lists of bloody monarchs but on what history is really all about: the causes and consequences of events in the real world.

Schama's proposed History syllabus tells a profoundly complex and subtle story, the story of Britain's evolution from absolutist monarchy to the modern day via revolution and Empire. It deals with the interaction of Church and State, popular revolts both successful and unsuccessful, and the role of the country in the wider context of global history. It also confronts some of the darkest moments in our history, instead of just teaching schoolchildren how Winston Churchill beat the Nazis more or less single handed. It's an excellent syllabus, there's no two ways about it.

But if we taught it, we'd have to stop teaching something else. We'd have to cut back on the more superficial, more iconic elements of History and if we did that, then I have a sneaking suspicion that ten years from now the Daily Mail would be expressing outrage at how few of our schoolchildren could name the six wives of Henry the Eighth.