Gove’s paradox

By any standards, the Education Secretary is good news for history. He knows the subject, he likes the subject, and his ‘English Baccalaureate’ is already producing a marked upturn in pupils studying the past.

Sadly, Michael Gove is also a Conservative — and a deeply ideological one at that. He has a certain vision of history and, with it, a ‘drum and trumpet’ view of what should be taught in our schools. I would be happy for pupils to learn this aspect of our past. But the problem the Education Secretary faces is how to marry that passion for Whiggish British history with an equally strong determination to liberalise the education system.

In Gove’s ‘school reforms’ is a microcosm of that historic Tory tension between British parochialism and free-market fundamentalism. It is a fissure only exacerbated by the fact that the Department for Education has now confirmed that more than half of England’s secondary schools are, or are about to become, academies.