Telling Tales in School

Set beside the intense public appetite for history, school history appears a decidedly poor relation. Millions lap up Simon Schama or David Starkey on television, yet GCSE or A-level students are subjected to a dry diet of endless Nazis and finicky source exercises that bear little relation to actual historical practice. I was recently asked to go into a school to talk with a bright GCSE group about how ‘real’ historians use ‘real’ sources, because the exercises they were doing for the exam were rapidly turning them off the subject itself.