The historian Lisa Hilton is dismayed by the government’s latest proposals for the teaching of history in which the understanding of complex narrative will be marginalised
Like any self-respecting adolescent, I spent most of my teenage years referring to my parents as fascists. What exactly that meant I had little idea, thanks to a state education in which world history consisted of Romans, mediaeval monasteries, the Industrial Revolution and the first world war, in a repetitious carousel of unrelated events.
Presumably today’s stroppy brats can malign their parents with impunity, as practically all they learn about is Hitler, yet what of those other much used critical terms — ‘imperialist’, ‘colonialist’, or the ever more reified ‘democracy’? This matters. It’s not just pedantic peevishness. These are the terms around which political judgments are based, and they are hurled right and left with little concern for the historical implication of their use.
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