It’s always a welcome distraction from politics when Members of Parliament decide to write about their particular hobby horse – in this instance, the teaching of medieval history in our schools.
The MP, Alexander Stafford, who studied medieval history at Oxford, was to lead an adjournment debate yesterday (Mon July 4) to promote the teaching of medieval history. Which is all very admirable.
Of course, he is right. We don’t teach enough medieval history – or history of empire; or women’s history; or that of the indigenous peoples who populate much of the Commonwealth. When I took my degree in New Zealand in the 1970s, the first year consisted of two mandatory papers, on Medieval England and Medieval Europe.
“The National Curriculum has always been under pressure for what to include or exclude.”
They might just as well have been on the Roman Empire or Greek civilization, but the argument then was that they provided a basis to what followed. It is not an argument I would countenance today.
The National Curriculum has always been under pressure for what to include or exclude. In 2018 Mike Burke and Mark Lehain wrote a paper on the jostle for curriculum content, that found a total of 213 suggestions of topics that “should” be included.
In history, we have a curriculum that prescribes what should be taught in sections with non-statutory recommendations. Hence, any move to promote medieval history comes down to the choices examination boards and teachers make and, at best, it would be offered for the few.
“Students should first learn that history is about power and the need to decolonize methodologies.”
What is important is to ask some salient questions before venturing on any course of study. Edward Said, author of the hugely influential book “Orientalism” asked: “Who writes the history? For whom is the writing being done?” and “In what circumstances?”
I sense in the argument of Alexander Stafford, the answers would be that academics write, within the orthodox western scholarship to provide a strong national narrative to be taught to our children.
While I agree that Henry VIII and Hitler have dominated the stage for too long, what content we teach is not what historians should be debating. What we should be teaching students is that history is contested knowledge and that while we might have one view of history, based on our own history, legal system, language, research and imperial experience, there are others, equally valid.
Students should first learn that history is about power and the need to decolonize methodologies and learn other ways of seeing time, space, power, gender, the land and race.
“The history we teach is often highly selective, subjective and open to different interpretations.”
We need to teach students to see history from all sides and not measure it by our own bias; to teach them that such words and phrases as “post-colonial”, “noble savage”, “discoveries”, “primitive” and “heathen” are not appropriate.
We should start our history teaching with EH Carr’s question, “What is History“. That way we might realise the history we teach is often highly selective, subjective and open to different interpretations and methodologies than the ones we give.
Even with medieval history, social classes, genders, races, regions had different histories to tell, even if only one was properly articulated. With other cultures it is likely that our whole research methodology is so full of bias as to be oppressive. Learning that we don’t own history, only our version of it is an important place to start.
Which sounds off the point – except it’s not. We do need to open up our curriculum and should be encouraging debate about what history we teach although this is of less importance than how we teach it.
“History isn’t meant to garner joy or despair. It just is.”
Rather than medieval history, I feel it would be more helpful for children to be taught about the breakup of the old empire and why we have large immigrant communities in our country with their own faiths, cultures, language and social mores. That way, history builds an understanding not just of how we got here historically, but who we are now.
When Alexander Stafford mentions the joy of history and just how wide and alien so much of it is, it is of a rose-coloured view. History isn’t meant to garner joy or despair. It just is. What is alien is our failure to give students the tools to make it comprehensible.