HISTORY IS FOR THE PEOPLE


History I discovered in my teens is everything: ‘He who controls the past controls the future,’ George Orwell wrote in 1984, something ruling elites have always known. Control of the narrative being the first requisite for power; “We rule” the elite declare, “because we are destined to rule.” Should any citizen question this they need only be directed to the history books.
The government is currently undertaking a concerted drive to take control over the way the historical narrative is currently being taught in our schools.[1] History is already the worst taught subject in the public education system. On a recent edition of the popular BBC quiz show ‘Pointless’ a contestant, who claimed to be a PhD student, was unable to answer any multiple choice questions about The English Civil War. She finally ventured that the struggle was between the Royalists and the Redcoats!
Ignorance on this scale is not only alarming but speaks of a populace who literally do not know who they are or where they live and is only possible when students see history as something remote, irrelevant to their lives.
Michael Gove
To teach history correctly framed as an ongoing struggle concerned with such issues as the right to vote, equality before the law and between the sexes, struggles in which we are still engaged, suddenly the penny would drop; we are living in history. This could not have been made clearer than by the recent debates over the Thatcher legacy.
Aside from being an extraordinarily arrogant, opinionated and conceited man the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, is an astute Tory; he knows the importance of history and the importance of how it is taught. Indeed Tories and nationalists have always grasped the importance of the historical narrative. They know how dangerous is a history that emphasises the struggles of the working class, that places British history in wider world-wide contexts, exposes the problems created by British imperialism and Empire.
No, what they require to produce good citizens is an historical chronology that emphasises a hierarchy of important ‘facts,’ that illustrate ‘our great island story.’ Kings and Queens, the great and good, these are the people who shaped our world; know their place in the historical story and you learn your own.
This struggle over the narrative is itself of course profoundly historical, it is a struggle over the very heart of whom and what we are; E P Thompson, Christopher Hill, Asa Briggs, all knew this and knew that it was essential for the left to join battle.
The past is like the present, a complex struggle of competing interests and this must be explained to our children if they are to be fully aware of the nature of the world in which they are to participate. I am not here making a case for all schoolchildren to be exposed solely to a Marxist interpretation of the past;[2] but a history that conceals, sanitises or misrepresents the nature of these struggles is only a little above the level of propaganda and it is even more likely to produce students who believe that the competing factions in the civil war are a matter of indifference, only useful to know in a TV quiz show.


[2] Though I do think Marxism an important strand of thought to which young minds ought to be exposed.




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