Michael Gove's appointment of Simon Schama to restructure history teaching in schools offers a little reassurance that it is now acknowledged there is some public value to the teaching of history, despite the removal of funding for it at university level. Nonetheless, it remains an announcement that tells us more about the contradictions of government thinking and its reductive view of the humanities and social sciences than it does about the state of history teaching in our schools.
How did we get here? In May 2009, Gove picked up on a report by the Historical Association that lamented the marginalisation of history at secondary level – with just over 31% of students now taking a GCSE in history. Their research found that 20% of schools offered no form of history teaching beyond age 14, with a further 10% folding the subject into general humanities classes. With 97% of private schools treating history as a subject area in its own right by comparison with just 60% of academies, disproportionate numbers of privately educated pupils take history GCSE – a trend also evident at A-level. History, it appears, is not just in retreat in our schools, it is fast becoming a privilege of the privileged.
The Historical Association, and the recently launched Better History group, blame this on structural problems in the system: schools favour subjects that deliver better test results, and pupils are forced to specialise from age 14. Gove, a strong advocate of market models and league tables, has instead blamed the discipline itself for its own demise. And he has found advisers who agree with him. History in schools, they argue, has lost the plot. It has focused on unrelated topics – such as Henry VIII, the Victorians or Hitler – without providing any connecting narrative thread that explains their relationship with each other. The solution is a return to narrative history, to a big story that will organise and make sense of historical experience. The only question is whose narrative and what story?
The first lesson the new schools secretary and his advisers need to learn is that the way history is taught at school is itself a product of history. Every generation shapes the teaching of history around its own preoccupations and sense of itself, but those are always changing.
Sellar and Yeatman's 1066 and All That wonderfully satirised the triumphalist, national and imperial history of the early 20th century. Monarchs and military history gave way to a postwar emphasis on an equally progressive history of legislation and constitutional evolution that culminated in the advent of democracy in 1928.
From the 1970s, the growth of social history democratised the national story by focusing on the experience of ordinary people. Teachers developed new methods, shifting away from chronology and narrative to topics and themes, where the emphasis was placed on "skills" of analysis over the regurgitation of facts.
The target of Gove's ire, the national curriculum in history, was established (by the Education Act of 1988) to reverse that trend. Then, as now, the education secretary, Kenneth Baker, bemoaned pupils' lack of knowledge of their nation's history and saw it as symptomatic of the national "decline". Then, as now, this was blamed on the subject's marginalisation in the curriculum and the new techniques of social historical teaching – the emphasis on skills, on local and family history – which they thought had undermined the story of how Britain became Great.
The Education Act re-established the centrality of history at schools by making it one of the 10 required "foundation subjects" of key stages 1-3. Yet it locked teachers in a curriculum straitjacket and held them no longer capable of determining how best to teach their pupils. And, finally, with the introduction of tests at age seven, 11 and 14 to measure children's knowledge and the effectiveness of schools, the era of the league table, designed to simulate competitive market pressures in education, was born. The Education Act then used the state to proscribe a version of history while insisting that parents and students as consumers are the best judge of schools' services. It enshrined a central contradiction of Thatcherism that Gove is still struggling with.
It is symptomatic of how dominant market models of education have become that the minister has chosen Schama as his adviser. Neither Schama, nor Niall Ferguson, also apparently considered by Gove, has any experience of teaching in schools, indeed, like me, both are fugitives from British higher education. Nor are they even scholarly experts in the British history Gove holds so dear: Schama is a cultural historian of early modern Europe and Ferguson an economic historian of modern Europe. It is the popularity of their TV shows that has commended them to Gove. Expertise is now a matter of television ratings.
As Gove does not want to make GCSE history compulsory (that would be too much government), his logic is beguiling and simple-minded. If history is popular on TV, it can be made popular at school. With a better product, made accessible and exciting by narrative, the customers, aka pupils, will follow. Never mind that to achieve this requires more government prescription about what and how history should be taught.
Like most Conservative MPs, Gove embraces free-market economic principles, until they erode the nation and the family, as the natural units of politics, culture and society. He is determined that children should not leave school "ignorant of one of the most inspiring stories I know – the history of our United Kingdom". And it was to Schama he turned.
Schama deserves credit for emphasising that "our common story" is "full of contention, not self-congratulation". There are, he suggests, key episodes that every child should know – ranging from conflicts between religious and secular authorities and plague in the middle ages, the civil war and revolution in England, the rise of the British North-American empire based on slavery and the subsequent shift to south Asia, followed by the 19th-century wars with Ireland and China.
Amid all this contention there are conspicuous absences of some of the central staging posts of modern European history – the Renaissance, the Reformation and the global missions of European religions, Enlightened challenges to the authority of church and monarchy across Europe, the emergence of industrial capitalism in Britain and its restructuring of the global economy, the struggle for democracy and the quest for colonial independence, the experience of total war and the turn to various forms of statist enterprises in the 20th century. Surely we would want our schoolchildren to understand that capitalism and democracy emerged relatively recently amid huge and continuing contention.
Ultimately the key feature for Schama is one of form, not content. It is a "return to coherent, gripping history" that he champions. How one teaches appears more important than what one teaches. His key episodes are based not around a grand organising narrative but a series of vignettes that make compelling stories.
So the second lesson for Gove and his adviser is that you do not need a TV show to have an organising narrative of the past; it might even be an impediment.
I agree with Schama that the real public value of history-teaching in schools (as in universities) lies in its capacity to re-animate our civil society and produce an engaged and capable citizenry. I disagree that good story-telling will get you there.
History provides us with a set of analytical skills that are indispensable for citizens who want to understand our present conditions. And those conditions are rarely made just in Britain. Historians are constantly grappling with local and national developments that are embedded in broader extra- and inter-national processes of historical change. As most historians can only realistically do research about a particular time and place, it is how these seemingly shared historical processes manifest themselves locally that often fascinates them. They do not just detail where and when change happens; they explain how and why it happens. This requires a point of view and organising narrative, but the coherence of the explanation is more important than the excitement of the story. We want students who aren't just entertained, but who can think critically and effectively about the world they live in.
It is by examining the historical processes that have bound us together in our diversity that we can understand what we hold in common and what we do not. History teaches us that nothing lasts for ever, that what appears natural and normal to us may have been strange or even abhorrent to preceding generations. It addresses our democratic deficit not by turning schoolchildren into Britons but by enabling them to analyse the present and to think critically when we hear ministers and advisers offering populist solutions to more complex structural problems. Our children deserve better than that and our history is too interesting and important.
James Vernon is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and author, most recently, of Hunger, A Modern History (2007)