Civitas Blog

Hunt’s right that it’s a mistake to ‘stop teaching history at too young an age (14 rather than 16)’ but he then goes on to mention that ‘the 1980’s trend for multiculturalism downplayed many elements of British history that are only now being reversed.’ That multiculturalism downplays Britishness under aegis of the dictatorship of diversity is beyond doubt, and that it turns the study of the past into an identity politics contest is similarly certain, but why does he seek to mitigate the damage that has been done by those policies? One need not be a nationalist to understand that a shared sense of identity in a state is crucial for civic cohesion and stability. Even the most cursory of searches on the home office website immediately reveals extensive work on civil society and ways to bolster it, and the ippr has also done a good deal of work on this, recognising that there is in our society a very low level of identification with our formal institutions and operations of government, and that this is reflected in our voting patterns.

It would be absurd to argue that history teaching is the only contributing factor, but cultural lingua francas, irrespective of celebrated differences, can help to forge loose but nevertheless discernible bonds. Multiculturalism, as Trevor Phillips has admitted, has eroded cohesion and as David Goodhart, the editor of Prospect, has observed, undermined the ‘glue of values.’ It is still very much a live force, and by treating it as a mere passing fad of the 1980’s, Hunt shows that he is out of touch.

A word about relevance, since this is often an argument used for politically correct histories, along the lines that history must be contiguous with my life for me to want to study it. I see no reason why as a seven-year-old kid a bunch of sex crazed Scandinavians with horns on their heads were any more relevant to me than to a seven year old Aborigine, and the same applies for the ancient Egyptians, the Han Dynasty, or even plump old Queen Victoria. But that misses the point, for history becomes relevant as we learn about it and interiorise its various vicarious experiences. I came to find longitudinal themes like the fight for freedom (from the Peasant’s Revolt, through Cavaliers and Roundheads, to the Glorious Revolution, the American War of Independence, political reform and the Suffragettes) interesting and engaging, and to see that by the accidents of my birth what had happened remains relevant to the land in which I was born and grew up. Good narrative history excites us and enlarges our perception.

Like Hunt, I don’t want us to ‘lose sight of the virtues of our critical, pluralist approach’, which he says is admired throughout Europe. Nor need he worry about narrative history with a sense of chronology being uncritical. The study of empire does not have to be unthinkingly patriotic – of course it can take in the Mau Mau and the Chinese Opium Wars, as well as the Indian Civil Service – but at least let’s teach it! What must be remembered, as we debate such issues, is that we’re talking about teaching a range of ages, and that younger children need different treatment to older students. When you’re young, what matters most is passionate, energised history. This needn’t be skewed or fantastical, but the truth is that children respond well to stories, to narratives that bring people and events alive in their imaginations. Even Marxist historians recognise that narrative history is the most effective foundation for communicating a particular configuration of the past at a later stage, since knowledge precedes understanding, as facts do argument. When children are older, what’s been learned can be modified, contended and even refuted.

This, finally, is partly why we’re so interested in Our Island Story by Henrietta Marshall, a history of Britain to which Antonia Fraser and the Guardian’s David McKee have both expressed their ‘lifelong gratitude’. In today’s Daily Telegraph, John Clare plugs our campaign to raise money so that we can do a reprint of this children’s classic. We are grateful to him for this, because we believe that one useful way to combat the lamentable situation is to publish high quality teaching materials and circulate them. When they're older, people will naturally turn to questions of propriety and historiography that Hunt and so many other professional historians engage in, but we've got to get them interested and informed in the first place...