One of the problems with the state take-over of education is that a single way of doing things is prescribed. This happened with the learning of reading. Teachers were told to use the 'whole word' method of teaching. It plainly did not work well at all. It has resulted in millions of children now being 'functionally illiterate'. It has been a disaster.

Another, less serious, example of government prescribing one way of doing things is the current way in which children are taught history. This, from yesterday's Times, gives a good explanation and critique of it:

David Starkey, the television historian and a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, said that A levels were too often taught as if they were miniature degrees, with so much analysis crammed in that the periods they covered had to be cut short into “tiny gobbets of chewed-up material”.

He said: “There is no point in doing merely a fragment in time with no sense of what might have led up to events and what consequences flowed from them. At the moment, pupils study a bit of American history and a bit of Hitler. That’s almost useless.” Dr Starkey said that it was absurd that the main history syllabus covering Hitler stopped in 1939. “There is no Second World War and no Holocaust. This approach does a lot of damage. It glamorises Hitler. You have to ask yourself, what is the point of studying it at all?”

He was equally critical of how syllabuses tackled Henry VIII and the Reformation, his own specialist period. “With Henry VIII, the syllabus covers 1502 to 1529. It stops when things get interesting. The other part of the syllabus covers 1529 to 1547 — the interesting bit. This is an absurd fragmentation. It leaves no space to take a step back and discuss what came before or after.

“History, if properly taught, should give people a sense of time and a map of time. You should be able to place yourself in time,” he said.

Dr Starkey said that teaching also placed far too much emphasis on the science of gathering evidence for historical events, an approach known as the discovery method.

“Teachers use the discovery method to teach when the Norman Conquest was. We know when it was. What’s the point in having a teacher if not to tell the students what the facts are?” He added that the study of original documents and the search for evidence should not come until university level.

Dr Starkey also despaired of the way his own works and those of other historians were used in schools, with teachers focusing increasingly on historiography — the study of the way history is written — rather than history itself.

“A-level students would not be able to tell you what happened at the beginning of the Civil War, but they would be able to tell you what (the historian) Conrad Russell thought about the Civil War,” he said.

I agree with Starkey that it is worth studying some history before going on to historiography. Not that there is anything wrong with historiography. It is an interesting and worthwhile thing to study. But the government has simply gone too far with the idea of teaching it.

The troubles that arise when the government decides what should be taught (and how) keep on mounting up. The government makes mistakes. There is a kind of totalitarianism about it which is repellent in itself. Education and intellectual activity should be open and involve debate and different ideas. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Don't let us have a government deciding what is good education and what is bad.

It is worrying that people should have so much confidence in governments as to think they are bound to be right. Firstly the evidence is against governments. Second, what happened to the spirit of freedom and independence that used to be so strong in western civilisation? Third, it is through experiment, variety and opportunity for independent action that new ideas and methods come through.

Reverting to the particular point about the teaching of history, I have noticed in bookshops that there are quite a few histories of the world for sale. Publishers are responding to a desire among people to know the narrative of the history of the world as a whole. It is natural for people to want know where they stand in time and space.

I should add that there are some perfectly good things about the teaching of history today. I think it is quite reasonable to learn about how the Romans and Egyptians lived. That is something that did not exist when I was a child. History-teaching in the 1950s and 1960s also tended to concentrate too much on small periods of time. It was mimicking the activities of academics. It was failing to give students an understanding of 'the big picture'. So I do not look back to a 'golden period' of history teaching. But I do think that modern history teaching has chucked out too much of the narrative and too many of the facts.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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