Curriculum Mortis

The Muslim Council of Britain’s recent decision to attack Michael Gove’s proposed draft for a new history curriculum is not a surprising one. In isolation, it wouldn’t even be very worrying. As it is, though, it’s the latest in a series of disavowals, some more serious than others. Simon Schama, who had previously worked on the proposals, at once ostentatiously disowned the published form – the draft, he said, bore ‘no resemblance’ to the one he had helped to develop a month earlier. Then, on 13th March, came an extended criticism in the TLS from David Cannadine. Cannadine is both a serious historian, and untainted by association with the Richard J. Evans types who are determined to block any emphasis on narrative history. At first his criticisms seemed sensible enough, but pessimistic and unexciting; even small-c conservative. Without extra time in schools, he argued, history cannot gain ground significantly; the curriculum is neither here nor there. It was when he began to specify the problems with the draft that my disagreement turned inexorably into disbelief.

Surely Cannadine had somehow got the wrong end of the ruler? How could it be that six year olds were to be introduced to the subject of history in the form of abstract, worthy-sounding but in fact debatable concepts – ‘civilisation, monarchy, parliament, democracy’ – rather than simple and effective stories? And surely Gove – that William Wilberforce, that Olaudah Equiano of the Academies – believed in letting teachers determine which stories to tell, and pupils decide which to hear, and when? How could it be right – how could it be practicable – that, as Cannadine claimed, the draft’s slavish adherence to the dreaded Key Stages allowed children only to learn once, fleetingly, at some particular and arbitrary age, about ancient Greece, or the Crusades? Had Cannadine been assimilated by the opposing lobby the Education Secretary refers to without compromise as ‘The Blob’? But when I dug out the draft to check all was well, it proved all that Cannadine had warned, and worse.

The ‘narrative’ versus ‘themes’ history curriculum debate is probably as much about entertainment as politics – which is why I still think Gove’s policy, imaginatively implemented, has potential to be transformative, vote-winning as well as genuinely beneficial to the vital cause of interesting schoolchildren in history. The consistent success of stories, from the Bible to Rowling to Mantel, by way of any number of boxed set DVDs, indicates to me that there is a solid majority, otherwise without political allegiance, in favour of narrative history. Nevertheless, its opponents’ favourite line of attack is to slam it as ‘boring’, ‘rote-learning’. Gove’s most important task was to show them why they were wrong, and, on the basis of the deadly draft, he has failed in that task.

Hugh Trevor-Roper – inarguably one of the least boring of historians – once, like Disraeli and C.P. Snow before him, described this country as one made up of two worlds –

...on the one hand, the solemn, pompous, dreary, respectable Times-reading world, which hates elections (indeed, hates life) and thinks that everything should be left to the experts, the professionals, themselves; and, on the other hand, the gay, irreverent, genial, unpompous world which holds exactly opposite views, the world of the educated laity who do not see why they should be excluded from political matters because they are not politicians, nor from intellectual matters because they are not scholars…

The Coalition – that unexpected offspring of a loveless Establishment marriage – has always risked looking as if it belonged to the first camp. It is to Gove’s advantage and credit that he generally sounds like he comes from the second; the changeling child of Aberdonian fisherfolk, now turned journalistic swashbuckler. So why has he approved a plan so bereft of narrative excitement, a draft that struggles to placate and fails to persuade?

Let us take it stage by dreary Key Stage. KS 1 (for ages 5-7) is a peculiar cocktail of the patronising, the overweening and the inexact. A bullet point earnestly presses the importance of teaching what ‘before’ and ‘after’ mean. There follows the forbidding clutch of abstract ideas excoriated by Cannadine, the most totalitarian of which is probably ‘the concept of a nation’. Then there’s the SISA section – ‘Significant Individuals Such As.’ Various pairs of famous and virtuous beings follow, but nothing defines why precisely they qualify as famous or virtuous enough for the under-7s – and not once is their entertainment value considered of importance. The only good idea here is that places, events and worthies local to the school should be prioritised – though it does get one wondering about catchment areas for the glorious dead.

KS 2 (for ages 7-11) is, by contrast, exhaustingly full. It has evoked a universal cry of ‘How’ – how to teach and how to learn so much so fast. Some emphasis is a little odd – the Stone Age to the Celtic settlement is almost all pre-history. Isn’t the lesson that history, that stories, begin with and rely on written accounts important in itself? Neither are those, such as the Muslim Council of Britain, who complain of insularity and Anglocentrism mistaken; even France only staggers in once or twice, let alone Saladin or Averroes. But the main problem is that this incalculably rich and exciting saga – Roman Britain to Queen Anne – is under the current scheme snatched away, like Narnia or Philip Pullman’s shape-shifting daemons, with the onset of puberty.

KS 3 (11-14) is where the Goveite rigour really stiffens into rigor mortis. It reads in fact as if written during some unsteady collusion between Gove’s loyal henchmen and his sworn foes, veering about between Clive of India and the Tolpuddle Martyrs. This conveys not so much political neutrality as narrative incoherence. Again, there’s too much too fast, but with two centuries rather than two millennia under discussion, much of it is unlikely to be very gripping (‘the impact of mass literacy and the Elementary Education Act’, dully post-modern; ‘Lloyd-George’s coalition’, worthy of Hansard.) A sense that Gove is for some reason banking on Scottish independence permeates these hurried plans; how otherwise would he expect to get away with blandly ascribing Adam Smith to ‘the Enlightenment in England’? The draft adds insult to its self-inflicted injuries by fetishizing 1989 as a stop-date, precisely as 1066 and All That – in jest – mummified 1918 as the End of History.

But I still believe in Gove – in what he is doing, and that it can be done. He must start by pulling a repeat trick – consigning this draft to educational history rather than historical education. When the curriculum emerges, poor Simon Schama must again be startled. The transformation will be entire. For early history will now be taught somewhat like early science. First will come long years of stories, lovingly and luxuriously told. It hardly matters what they are; the Trojan War and King Arthur will do very nicely, as long as they are well told. Then, fewer, swifter and still more exciting, will be the years of revelation – that all these stories, that all stories, are lies, though they contain truths. That despite and because of being lies, they are all-important. And that historians, teachers, pupils, and politicians are all entitled to engage in the humanising habit of confecting their own stories.