Civitas Blog

Good news about Civitas’ project to republish H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story. The Daily Telegraph’s fabulous campaign has been overwhelmingly successful. Within a week, as John Clare points out in today’s ‘Any questions?’, £13,345 has been raised, and the money keeps coming in. One of the lovely things about this article is the sheer enthusiasm of the readers and donors, and the newspaper’s leader, ‘Our story is worth telling’, adds further welcome endorsement.

What the Telegraph appeal shows (as did George Courtauld’s unexpected bestseller, the Pocket Book of Patriotism) is the simple fact that there are many people with a passion for a more unified civic identity in Britain and a desire to place history at the centre of that drive. Numerous research documents have recently recognised the value of history for citizenship, but few are clear about how to deliver the most important (albeit unfashionable) elements in teaching history – the chronology, which makes it intelligible, and the stories, which make it memorable.

Our Island Story is the best example we have been able to find, and that is why we are putting into the arena. It might be old, arid academics might think it is out of date, but they are the ones who are out of date, for children love it, and many parents cherish the excuse to read it to their children, as the Daily Telegraph’s readers’ comments make clear. This is not about hegemony - we are not suggesting it becomes the only resource, we merely wish to offer it as an alternative to the materials currently in schools.

In addition to the Daily Telegraph coverage, Civitas’ Our Island Story appeal was featured on this morning’s Today programme. Among other things there was a revealing report which provided the juxtaposition between a handful of Bangladeshi children who were expressing their profound interest in H.E. Marshall’s story of the murder of the Princes in the Tower, and, staggeringly, their headmistress, not having read it, saying, irrelevantly, that she could not possibly endorse a book that ‘detracted from their self-esteem.’ What?!

In interview, Civitas’ Deputy Director Robert Whelan fielded the questions with his usual panache, and managed to draw from Sean Lang of the Historical Association the concession that it is a ‘very important book’. Mr Lang’s opposition to the book was that ‘it’s of its time, but its time is not now’, which led to him agreeing on the need for a return to narrative history but not wanting to commit to anything other than the need for children to grapple with a plurality of narratives and construct their own narratives – undisputable for older children, but precisely what confuses children of seven or eight years old.

In other fields people are realising that unstructured child-centred learning is failing, but in the subject of history, too many young children still suffer at the hands of people who cling to the mantras of relevance and no-such-thing-as-one-truth. As Robert said this morning, we need to bring back into primary school classrooms a sense of events following other events, and of characters and stories, because ‘you simply cannot understand your country and its institutions if you just do a series of modules about women in ancient Egypt or the condition of the medieval serf.’