I can’t quite believe the number of professional historians who have denounced Michael Gove’s new history curriculum. Richard Evans, for instance, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Scarcely a day passes without him launching an attack on the Education Secretary. He has denounced the new curriculum as ‘a mindless regression to the patriotic myths of the Edwardian era’.
What he objects to is not just the facts that children will be expected to learn, but the manner in which they’ll be taught. He believes that children should spend their time learning ‘analytical skills’ rather than mere facts. Asking them to memorise facts is ‘rote learning’ and only suitable for creating Mastermind contestants.
This is presumably why he thinks it of little importance that more children associate the name ‘Churchill’ with the animated dog in the car insurance adverts than Britain’s wartime prime minister. Or that according to a BBC poll, half of Britain’s 16- to 24-year-olds cannot identify Sir Francis Drake as the naval commander who helped defeat the Spanish Armada, instead naming Christopher Columbus, Horatio Hornblower and Gandalf. Facts such as these are dismissed by Evans as ‘patriotic stocking-fillers’.
So what sort of ‘analytical skills’ are children learning in history lessons instead? According to the present curriculum, the job of historians is not to teach children about the past, but to furnish them with the skills of a professional historian. Such an approach may strike anyone who studied the subject more than 25 years ago as bizarre, but ask any child studying GCSE history. It’s not history so much as historiography.
In a typical lesson the teacher presents pupils with a primary source — a letter written by Cecil Rhodes, for instance — and invites them to ‘detect bias’, i.e.
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