From the Editor - September 2010

In July the Historical Association organised a debate at the Institute of Education (IOE) in London entitled ‘History in Schools: What is the Future?’ Before a packed audience of schoolteachers and other interested parties, a distinguished panel of historians and educationists, ably and wittily chaired by Professor David Cannadine, discussed such worrying concerns as why some British students are abandoning history at the age of 13 and the fact that barely 30 per cent of schoolchildren now go on to study the subject at GCSE level.

It was all very illuminating, but one recurring motif left me feeling slightly unsettled: ‘relevance’, that dreaded word, repeated like a mantra throughout the afternoon. If history isn’t relevant, apparently, it’s not worth teaching. One speaker proposed that schoolchildren in Newcastle-upon-Tyne should not study the Great Fire of London, as it all took place too far away and, therefore, had no relevance to their lives. Such bizarre utilitarianism seemed to go down well with her fellow professionals. The teaching of history in the North East of England should, presumably, be restricted to the study of coal mining, shipbuilding and the brewing of brown ale.

Later, a member of the panel, Chris Husbands, Professor of Education at the IOE, expressed surprise that on a visit to a secondary school in Tottenham he witnessed students being taught about monastic life in the Middle Ages. Not relevant to their lives, apparently. Not for the likes of them. Tell that to William Chester Jordan, Princeton Professor and African-American author of the brilliant comparative study, A Tale of Two Monasteries: Westminster and Saint-Denis in the Thirteenth Century (Princeton, 2009). 

This proscriptive approach towards the teaching of history and its insulting pigeonholing demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of history’s appeal. For many children – for many adults, too – especially those who don’t come from the most privileged of backgrounds, the appeal of history is precisely its ‘otherness’. Not all of us wish history to be a mirror to our own often petty and pinched lives, but as a door to different, fascinating worlds: to that of 1066, or the Civil Wars; to Cortes’s Conquest of Mexico, or Lenin’s ruthless pursuit of revolution. Only by immersing ourselves in the study of these strange, wonderful, often terrifying worlds will students grasp the true nature of historical enquiry: the confrontations with contingency that make the subject so compelling.

It takes no mean effort to make history boring. But it seems that some educationists and teachers have taken up the challenge with gusto. E.P. Thompson urged historians to save the ‘ordinary’ actors of history ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’. It is now time for historians to save their students from the enormous condescension of the educational establishment.