The Guardian this week features a column written by British historian Simon Schama in which he offers his insights into the relevance of teaching history. Some excerpts:
(H)istory is, by definition, a bone of contention (the Greek word historia meant, and was used from the very beginning by Herodotus as, "inquiry") that the arguments it generates resist national self-congratulation. So that inquiry is not the uncritical genealogy of the Wonderfulness of Us, but it is, indispensably, an understanding of the identity of us. The endurance of British history's rich and rowdy discord is, in fact, the antidote to civic complacency, the condition of the irreverent freedom that's our special boast...
So it is exactly at a time when we are being asked to make painful, even invidious, distinctions between the inessential and the indispensable in our public institutions: that we need history's long look at our national makeup...
Who is it that needs history the most? Our children, of course: the generations who will either pass on the memory of our disputatious liberty or be not much bovvered about the doings of obscure ancestors, and go back to Facebook for an hour or four. Unless they can be won to history, their imagination will be held hostage in the cage of eternal Now: the flickering instant that's gone as soon as it has arrived. They will thus remain, as Cicero warned, permanent children, for ever innocent of whence they have come and correspondingly unconcerned or, worse, fatalistic about where they might end up...
My own anecdotal evidence suggests that right across the secondary school system our children are being short-changed of the patrimony of their story, which is to say the lineaments of the whole story, for there can be no true history that refuses to span the arc, no coherence without chronology...
He concludes with six topics he considers essential in a history curriculum:
Murder in the cathedral: The whole showdown between religious and royal/secular ideas of law and sovereignty embodied in the persons of Thomas Becket and Henry II. This could hardly be more relevant in our contemporary world, where secular law and authority are asked to submit to religious law...
The black death, and the peasants revolt in the reign of Richard II: How did society deal with the arrival of a terrifying pandemic? (Are we any more prepared?)...
The execution of King Charles I: How did Britain get from a country that revered its monarch to one that cut off his head? How could a total British war – fought in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, as well as England – happen over religion?!... The really big question is why this most thrilling, terrifying epic moment in British history, seldom gets classroom time.
The Indian moment: How was it that a country throwing its weight around the world's oceans got kicked out of most of America but in two generations came to rule an immense part of the subcontinent?... not to mention stories of Brits who defied the race and culture barrier by wearing Indian dress, speaking Indian languages; illicitly marrying Indian princesses.
The Irish wars: William Gladstone, Charles Parnell and the Irish wars – the subject that never goes away!...
The opium wars and China: Victorian Britain using the royal navy to protect hard drug trafficking? True!
I've given an extended excerpt; if the subject matter interests you, please read
the original.
His History of Britain is a must-see. The books are a bit sloggy, but also worthwhile.
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