Should History be a compulsory subject up to the age of 16 in England?
Please note that I come at this as an admittedly fairly bog-standard History teacher — these are my views as they currently stand but as I learn more about areas of the past I haven’t studied widely before, whether that’s in terms of History content or wider educational issues, I like to think I’m happy to change those views accordingly and I’m certainly open to fair-minded and generous critique on anything below.
The recent protests in the USA, the UK and around the world, sparked by the vicious murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis has led once again to the spotlight falling on the History curriculum pupils experience in school and whether it adequately provides pupils with enough knowledge of Britain’s colonial past. I have seen, from a number of quarters, calls for History to be made compulsory up to the age of 16. In the past, these calls have come from the political right — decrying the fact that young people were unaware of the national story. Michael Gove said the following at the Conservative Party conference in the Autumn of 2010:
“Children are growing up ignorant of one of the most inspiring stories I know — the history of our United Kingdom. Our history has moments of pride, and shame, but unless we fully understand the struggles of the past we will not properly value the liberties of the present. The current approach we have to history denies children the opportunity to hear our island story. Children are given a mix of topics at primary, a cursory run through Henry VIII and Hitler at secondary and many give up the subject at 14, without knowing how the vivid episodes of our past become a connected narrative. Well, this trashing of our past has to stop.”
In light of recent events, I’ve certainly seen on twitter people of different political persuasions making the case again that History ought to be part of the compulsory curriculum up to the age of 16 (education policy expert Sam Freedman, for example, stated in the wake of the tearing down of the Colston statue in Bristol that “Days like today are why I think history should be a compulsory subject to 16. You can’t participate in the present if you don’t understand the past.” . In addition, there have obviously been, in my view highly reasonable arguments that the teaching of the British Empire and the legacy of colonialism should feature much more prominently within the national curriculum and GCSE specifications. Indeed, Jeremy Corbyn was making those very same arguments in the run up to the December 2019 General Election.
I have some concerns around this (that is, to be clear, making History compulsory to the age of 16, not that the British Empire should feature prominently in the curriculum which is a different argument) for a number of practical and philosophical reasons, which I’ll outline here.
Firstly, we only need to look at the experience of RE to see what can happen to a subject when the study of it is imposed on reluctant learners. I, and many colleagues I have worked with over the years, have had the delightful experience of taking a Short Course Core RE class in the past. It was a dismal experience, marked by hugely disaffected learners, poor behaviour, unenthusiastic teaching when relentlessly confronted with such behaviour, and kids not really actually learning anything and getting abysmal results at the end of it. In one school (and this is a while ago now), core RE involved students watching The Simpsons for their one fortnightly lesson. This happened because RE was seen as a burden. The school felt forced to deliver it but didn’t sell it to students properly, the subject was seen as low status by students and parents, and (usually non-specialist) teachers didn’t have the time or energy to prepare lessons properly when faced with the expectations of getting good results in the subject they were actually employed to teach. I fear much the same happening with History if that was the case.
This links on to my second problem. History itself is simply not seen as important as English, Maths and Science by the overwhelming majority of parents, students, employers and politicians. This explains the massive emphasis on literacy and numeracy in the primary curriculum and the significant amount of curriculum time apportioned to the above subjects in Secondary Schools. These subjects are seen as key to students getting a job. Helping students to get a job is seen as a core objective of schools and History, in this context, is not seen as valuable, despite the attempts of History teachers to sell the subject in terms of ‘analytical skills’ and ‘it’s really good for Law’ and so on. The reduction of most students’ A-level diet from 4 to 3 subjects in one of the worst aspects of the Gove-era reforms to secondary school qualifications has been a particular problem. Of course there’s always been a massive hypocrisy in the government pushing the STEM subjects to state school pupils as being the ticket to a good job while so many of the Cabinet have History or related degrees from their public school backgrounds but that’s another issue entirely.
I used to write on application letters for jobs about how History was actually important in helping students to get jobs in the future. I’ve now stopped doing that as I’m increasingly persuaded that we need to have a much bigger conversation about the purpose of schools and the fact that, in my view, their role is actually about developing well-rounded human beings that know about the world around them and how it works. This goes far beyond qualifications that help you get a job. However, I am all too aware that parents and students (and society more broadly) would need a lot of persuading on this and certainly doesn’t see it like this at the moment.
Thirdly, I think we need to beware of unintended consequences particularly with the desire to increase the teaching of colonialism or black history in the curriculum. That is not to say we shouldn’t do it — quite the opposite, I am strongly in favour of a History curriculum that far better reflects the diversity of the nation in terms of concepts such as race, class and gender than is generally the case at the moment (although some schools are doing outstanding work on this, often forgotten by our many critics on both ends of the political spectrum).
However, the fact is that many people in Britain have very different views on lots of issues to us History teachers (many of whom, myself included, could be described at least as either ‘soft-left’ or ‘left’ or potentially more left than that!). I think if I was to put it out there to History teachers that ‘the Transatlantic Slave Trade is a crime of equal severity to that of the Holocaust’ I think many of us would at worst only disagree very slightly and many would no doubt agree (clearly it’s highly problematic to compare the two events in lots of ways but put that aside for now). No one from across mainstream politics, Conservative or Labour, would argue that we should say that, “yes the Holocaust was bad but the Nazis did build some good roads.” However, there are many people who feel that the legacy of Empire is a bit more complex than that. Even prominent historians like Neil Ferguson (and yes I know his work on Empire has been strongly and justifiably criticised by many other historians in the field, however I don’t think — and I’m happy to be proven wrong here — that Ferguson represents a David Irving-type figure here who’s views should necessarily be completely ignored) have argued for, if we’re being charitable, a ‘balanced’ consideration of the legacy of the British Empire. I think if you asked supporters of the Conservative Party about the British Empire, they would probably have more positive views than the average History teacher (again, please note I think they are completely and indisputably wrong here!)
The point here is not to say that their viewpoint is unproblematic or that there’s ‘two sides to every debate’ (again, as with the Holocaust, that’s clearly not the case). The point is that as a society we have not yet got to grips with the legacy of Empire. This goes far beyond the History classroom, where the capacity for impact is probably somewhat overstated for political convenience, to the highest levels of political debate in the country. We’ve never had spectacles like the Denazification trials in Germany (or the Eichmann trial), or the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission around Apartheid where countries really had to get to grips with their past in order to find a way ahead for the future. As a result, as a society we have never properly got to grips with the legacy of slavery and colonialism (not forgetting either the other British ‘original sin’ of it’s involvement in Ireland, another area most people are woefully ignorant about that currently gets short shrift in the English curriculum). Therefore, while this is the case, as History teachers we need to think very carefully about how we tackle the legacy of colonialism while facing classes of children, especially in communities that are not racially diverse, who have strong feelings of patriotism and national pride that have been engendered for many by their parents at home, who’s own views are shaped by non-school forces. If we don’t tread carefully we may risk alienating communities and children where it’s most crucial to have this conversation. The History curriculum should not be allowed to be seen as a plaything of ‘the Left’ to impose what might be uncharitably be dubbed ‘cultural Marxism’ any more than it should be a plaything of ‘the Right’ to impose a jingostic ‘Great Man’ approach that marginalises historically discriminated against individuals and communities. A big criticism of Corbynism was that there was a failure to persuade Conservative voters to change their minds — that essentially he was happiest speaking to the converted (similar criticism were justifiably levelled at the Tories in the early-2000s by the way). We cannot afford for the History curriculum to do that as well.
Please note: I completely understand that people think that the curriculum has essentially propagated a right-wing view of British history for a long time. That’s a fair criticism to which I’d suggest that the answer is not just to use the same tactics of the right to promote a more left-wing view of the past, but to make sure school history stays true to the nature of the discipline which facilitates robust debate and competing interpretations of the past.
Furthermore, I think it’s a cop-out to say that the reason why these views persist is because of failures in the History curriculum, such as that even when slavery is taught it’s in the context of abolition and promotion of Britain’s role in that. I would suggest that the reason why people’s historical knowledge of Empire is so poor is because it is airbrushed in the popular media such as television and newspapers. Krishnan Guru-Murphy earlier tweeted his frustration about his child’s History work, stating that the curriculum had not advanced very far beyond what he learned at school, while being a prominent face of Channel 4 who’s only History content on this evening is ‘Nazi Megastructures’ on More4!
Again, I’m not saying Guru-Murphy is wrong about the History work his child is doing. The curriculum, certainly at GCSE level, has not advanced very far in the last few decades. European dictatorships, Medicine through Time, the American West, the Tudors — these have been long-standing features of English GCSE history courses and it is long overdue that we are required to freshen this up properly. There are lots of reasons why that hasn’t happened yet, not least the culture of school accountability and workload which is a huge deterrent for teachers wanting to change their curricula while trying to juggle actually seeing their own children at some point, as well as Teaching and Learning policies in schools that consistently prioritises generic pedagogy and marginalises subject-specific CPD. I’ve no doubt that one of the reasons Edexcel’s highly flawed GCSE course is so popular was because it represented a major continuity for teachers while we were grappling with concurrent A-level changes at the same time.
So, to conclude, if we’re going to make History compulsory we need to have a much bigger conversation about what we want for our education system more broadly. Secondly, we need to think carefully about what history we want children to learn and how we present that to all the children and parents in the country, even those who hold views we strongly disagree with, to make sure the core messages hit home — we don’t want to be guilty of the sins of Gove. Thirdly, we need to understand that making History compulsory won’t necessarily solve the problems of white British society’s failure to understand colonialism — much bigger societal shifts and institutional reform needs to happen to really bring that about (of which the History curriculum is one small part).
One final note is to say that, as I will point out in a future blog on the curriculum at my school, is that I am as cognisant as anyone that my History teaching in my own school is not yet sufficiently representative or diverse and we’re working hard to address that. We’ve started moving in the right direction but we have a long way to go and a lot of subject knowledge to develop to do that effectively and it’s a huge priority for me to get right in my current school. I do not yet know enough about Black British history or the history of colonialism beyond the basics and that’s something I’m keen to improve upon.
