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.
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