The Importance of Studying the Past

'It can't be important because we don't spend much time on it.'

(Year 8 student)¹

My history education began in dramatic fashion.

In a rather deep hole, in a curve of the Medlock and surrounded on all four sides by tall factories and high embankments, covered with buildings, stand two groups of about 200 cottages, built chiefly back to back, in which live about 4,000 human beings, most of them Irish. The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions . . .

This was Friedrich Engels's depiction of industrializing Manchester in his 1844 classic, The Condition of the Working Class in England. And it was the text which my inspirational history teacher, Mr Mackintosh, decided it would be fun for a class of eleven-year-olds to study. So, week by week, we travelled through the mills, workhouses and lodging rooms of urbanizing England; the accounts of broken limbs, effluent-bubbling streams, smog-laden skies and overcrowded tenements. We met typhus-ridden Irish immigrants and boorish, philistine factory owners.

And, of course, it was wonderful: a beguiling mixture of gore and grime along with a sense of the visceral, foreign, unknowable past which we all wanted to get our hands on.

There was, it has to be said, little narrative arc to Mr Mackintosh's teaching. He was a Scottish patriot, so we studied the battle of Bannockburn in quite some detail. But he knew how to play to our English prejudices, so Agincourt received the attention it deserved. There wasn't much search for bias, role-playing or empathy. But there was a highly idiosyncratic, dramatic, and engaging teaching style which inspired me to study the subject further. At secondary school, I was equally favoured with gifted - if perhaps more structured - teachers who taught me a chronological framework, the fundamentals of source analysis, how to write an essay and a great sense of the importance of studying the past.

My fear today is that too many schoolchildren are being denied similar opportunities for engaging in the intellectual excitement and civic virtue of history - as well as the skills and personal fulfilment that come with it.

This is particularly germane with the teaching of history back in the news, thanks to repeated initiatives from the Conservative Education Secretary Michael Gove. 'One of the under-appreciated tragedies of our time has been the sundering of our society from its past', Gove told the Conservative Party conference last October. 'Children are growing up ignorant of one of the most inspiring stories I know - the history of our United Kingdom. Our history has moments of pride, and shame, but unless we fully understand the struggles of the past we will not properly value the liberties of the present.' He went on to announce a review of the National Curriculum - advised by the Atlanticist Simon Schama - placing British history at its heart. 'Our children', Schama suggested, 'are being short-changed of the patrimony of their story . . . for there can be no true history that refuses to span the arc, no coherence without chronology.²

But the attention of government ministers and academic commentators has been for the most part in entirely the wrong direction. Faux-patriotic concerns about a lack of British history in the syllabus and a wilful failure to distinguish between various stages of the curriculum has diverted energy away both from the fundamental issues of time allocation for history in the school day and from the differing roles the study of history can play over time during a child's schooling.

Why Study History?

A respect for the past - a sense of excitement about new ideas, peoples and places; as well as a rather normative belief in its powers to inform the present - must begin at school. As the National Curriculum rightly puts it, the study of history 'fires pupils' curiosity about the past in Britain and the wider world. Pupils consider how the past influences the present...