Don't let the zealots ‘decolonise' British history in our schools
The idea that history needs to be 'relevant' is total nonsense. But many teachers seem to disagree.
This week, it transpired that a book used by many English primary schools claims that Stonehenge was built by black Britons 7,000 years ago. That assertion is not only inaccurate, but betrays the problem with cack-handed attempts to 'decolonise' the subject. By turning the study of the past into a moral Top 40 in which identity and relevance trump all else, what you are left with is a reflection of 'here today, gone tomorrow' prejudices. It's less history, more a platform for activism.
Educational theories trickling down from universities to schools increasingly prioritise relevance – which in today's terms means that history must reflect diversity and be inclusive, whatever that actually means. This is an imposition of values as biased as the imposition of Victorian jingoism 150 years earlier. Decolonisation – the programme to dismantle 'colonial' structures of knowledge – puts cultural orthodoxy above learning.
'The essential tool for studying history is to inhabit the minds of people who think differently to us and understand why they think differently,' says Paul Lay, the author and former editor of History Today. 'The idea of relevance is incredibly anachronistic, because what obsesses us will not obsess future generations and didn't obsess those from the past.'
I recall my daughter telling me three years ago how a Year 6 teacher explained that artefacts found at Hadrian's Wall suggested that people from north Africa had made it to Cumbria. All very interesting, except it transpired that her reason for divulging this was to make learning about the Romans 'relevant' to her non-white pupils, since she considered Romans and Britons had a whiteness that did not reflect her classroom. The teacher, who was white herself, explained this to me in these exact terms during a parents' evening. This facile approach was a missed opportunity to show the children something useful: namely that empires are always diverse, that the north Africans travelled as part of a brutal conquering army alongside a system of Roman slavery that existed 2,000 years ago. Instead it was taught as if the pots and pans appeared as the result of a short break for some holidaying Moroccans. All this potential learning was lost in the cause of 'relevancy'.
This may explain why the teaching of themes such as the Napoleonic Wars and the Middle Ages is declining in secondary schools. The World Wars and the Norman Conquest, on the other hand, are still popular topics, and there's no shame in that given their formative importance. The teaching of English history is not something to shy away from as if it were an expression of nationalism. The Normans are hardly a celebratory subject (spoiler alert, the English lost). And the suggestion that English children should not learn a majority of English history would be laughed at in other countries.
The Policy Exchange report that unearthed the Stonehenge example in the book Brilliant Black British History shows the most popular historical theme taught to 11- to 14-year-olds is the transatlantic slave trade, with 99 per cent of secondary schools covering it, while 96 per cent include the abolition of slavery in their offering. There's great value in teaching the narrative and legacy of Empire, but only if it equips pupils with the ability to put their learning in context, rather than an exercise in a specifically anti-British and anti-West agenda. It's hard to have any trust in the good intentions of the educational elite on that score.
While the Policy Exchange report is optimistic about the popularity of the subject, it also cautions that three quarters of training courses for specialist teachers include a module on decolonising the curriculum, suggesting an almost coercive conformity. When you couple that with the priorities of the National Education Union (NEU), which this week announced a workshop to train members how to 'advocate for Palestine in our schools', which will provide 'foundational knowledge on key issues like the Nakba [the Arabic term used to refer to the displacement of Palestinians], settler colonialism, imperialism, and apartheid', the risks of a high degree of politicisation are obvious, not to say worrying. Nothing says 'our priority is the schoolchildren' like holding a day of action at work to highlight the Palestinian struggle for freedom.
The NEU website's 'decolonisation' page contains many sweeping and unprovable statements that illustrate the extent to which learning has been subsumed by fuzzy logic, such as: 'Domestic debates about migration would be completely different if they were informed by a shared understanding of Empire.' How could it possibly know the truth of this statement and what exactly is a 'shared understanding of Empire'? The enquiring mind must acknowledge there can be no such thing. It is mere indoctrination.
'Part of the success of podcasts such as The Rest Is History is that they tell these stories in a really exciting way and do not concentrate on relevance and identity,' says Lay. 'The best history is great storytelling and then you leave it to the reader or the listener to decide what is important about them. History is already relevant.'
Studying history is the best way of equipping a young person for a lifetime of enlightenment. It is not neutral – it is a succession of choices – which is why it is so important to be conscious of those choices and to step back from ideology wherever possible, especially ideology that is so overtly of the 'now'. If you tell people what to think, you make them unthinking. You tell them what to think, but not how.
If you approach history as a way to apply the moral judgments of today as if this were some kind of long-overdue reckoning, you end up doing exactly the thing you profess to oppose: equating your values with 'progress' as if they were set in stone and everything that preceded it was a mistake.
History should be the tool of a skilled worker, not a blunt instrument. And even Neolithic people managed to build Stonehenge.
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