Heritage Denied: the non-teaching of our history to our children
April 28th, 1988
An article published in an edited version by the Daily Mail around 28th April 1988.
It was written in response to a succession of articles in the Daily Mail from December 1987 to February 1988 by David Thomas and Stephen Bates
“The history of England is one of Mankind’s outstanding successes. It is instructive to prove the secret of a destiny as fortunate and impressive as that of ancient Rome”. So opens the concluding chapter of André Maurois’s Histoire d l’Angleterre [published in translation by Bodley Head in 1956].
Such a tremendous compliment paid by a distinguished writer from one great culture to the people of another would cut no ice however with our schools’ educational establishment, even if they knew of it, to judge from the way our history has been taught – or rather not taught – in our State schools in the last ten to fifteen years. And under the new GCSE it will get worse, because far from it being deemed instructive to probe the secrets of our own history, the examining boards deem it hardly worth studying at all.
Thus for example in World History 1870-1986, out of 38 examination syllabuses, Britain specifically appears only once under British Empire 1919-1939, ranking along with Italy, Spain 1919-1939 and Turkey as subjects for our children to study. Russia on the other hand may be studied in four syllabuses and even Germany is allotted three. It has to be remembered also that in an absurd welter of options, which differ from Board to Board, candidates study only a tiny minority of the syllabuses on offer, so most will emerge knowing no specifically British History at all, though they may be well up on Russia.
I believe the philosophy of the GCSE examination to be educationally wrong, and indeed impractical, for all the key subjects, but in history this is made worse by its conjunction with another perhaps even more pernicious tendency – that of ileanation – the tendency deeply embedded in our largest educational authority, whence the name is derived, to “praise in enthusiastic terms” as W S Gilbert has it in the Mikado, “all countries but their own”. In world History 1870-1986 it is more than simply perverse not to allot Britain and its Empire a syllabus for any but a 20 year span, when in the early part of the period at least it was the greatest power in the world. It is in fact a crime to deny our children a knowledge of their own history and to keep from them as far as possible any reference to Britain’s and specifically England’s tremendous achievements in shaping the modern world.
What history should our children be taught in school? History teaching should as its first duty provide our children with a framework of facts about our long history as a nation, now longer than any other, starting with Bede’s great work – the greatest work of history in any language in the first millenium – and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, initiated by Alfred the Great himself.
In the latter we have a unique, readymade framework, covering the very formation of our country through and beyond the Norman conquest, some six hundred years, with original manuscripts in Old English which all of our children may see for themselves. They can identify where the very word English to describe the Anglo-Saxon peoples is used for the first time and where England, the land of the English, is derived from it.
They can find described in matter of fact tones some of the most inspiring tales which echo throughout our history – the soldiers fighting on at the Battle of Maldon in the words of that great English poem of a thousand years ago “the spirit shall be bolder, the heart the firmer, courage the greater, the more our strength declines”.
As a nation of course in the six centuries of vigorous consolidation following the Norman conquest, our strength did not decline, but grew through ups and downs to reach its tremendous climax in the industrial revolution and the British Empire. Both were made by the industry and energy of countless individuals, but for all the vast changes they wrought, basic themes – above all the spirit of fortitude, captured in the lines above, by which the Empire’s soldiers withstood the terrible losses before their final triumphs in 1918 – remained unchanged.
From this Empire, one third of the countries of the United Nations owe their very existence as English-speaking or English-using nations. For a nation of five and a half million people on the edge of Europe at the beginnings in 1600, this is an unparalleled achievement and should be known by every British child.
Our children need also to know for instance that the slave trade, immemorial custom in Africa and Asia, and in Europe before Christianity, hideously extended to the New World for a period, was put down by the Royal Navy which maintained anti-slavery patrols in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans for most of the nineteenth century. History knows no other example of such immeasurable reduction in suffering by the action of one country on behalf of all.
Our children need to know for instance of the Punjab, where over a period of about 40 years under the Raj, a desert of around 18 million acres (the size of Scotland) was turned into the granary of modern India by the largest irrigation project in history. Well might the Spanish-American philosopher, George Santayana, comment, “Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master”.
Our children need to know these things not to boast of them – after all they were done by our forefathers not by us – but to take heart from them, to have standards as British children to live up to.
Instead of the truth about our history, however, the media, principally TV and films, feed our children an unending diet of unbalanced scorn and denigration. Recent feature films, including some by foreign directors who abuse our country’s hospitality, portray a sick England with decay, riots, police brutality and evil capitalists. Now most normal children will not see themselves and their country in such an abject light, but will react by behaving badly amongst themselves and especially in the presence of foreigners. The appalling hooliganism of football fans on ferries and all too shamefully in Belgium, undoubtedly owes itself to excessive drink, but also to a debased and ignorant football “nationalism”. Belgium, a country established by Britain, in whose defence hundreds of thousands of those fans’ great-grandfathers fought and died, which commemorates that sacrifice in Ypres every night at 8 pm, still, has thus seen the best and worst of our people. But how many of those fans knew anything about Belgium and its place in our history?
In my view the first and most important objective of history teaching in schools is not to teach the pseudo skills and puffed up “concepts” prescribed by the GCSE Examining Boards, which will leave most of our children bored stiff and knowing virtually nothing at all, nor is it to concern itself with other cultures and other parts of the world, except as they interweave with our own, but is to teach the history of our country as the foundation of patriotism and national self-respect. This is something that children of all abilities can learn and enjoy; it is something this country will never be happy without. It should be the coping stone in the National Curriculum – more important than any of the sciences taken individually and I write as a professional engineer. It is now up to all parents who agree, to act together to wrest the history curriculum away from the educationalists and give it back to our children.