Abdal Hakim Murad |
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The Department of Education has just received a rap on the knuckles from a group of teachers. A campaign group called Better History has, in its words, "serious concerns about the steady decline" of history in schools. Fewer than a third of our state school children take History at GCSE, and schools tend to focus on a few disconnected themes, rather than giving kids a Grand Narrative and therefore a sense of the national story.
This was brought home to me recently when I took my 15 year old son, for whom history is the best subject ever, to visit a sixth-form college. It offers history at A-level, but the focus is entirely on the 20th century, with Hitler and Stalin taking centre stage.
The reasons are multiple. Some teachers believe that pupils best relate to recent history, and can learn contemporary lessons by studying the rise of totalitarian ideologies. Part of the problem, too, may be the way history faculties have changed. Academics are pressured to deliver highly-specialised research papers, but are not rewarded for popular works. Their students, who may become history teachers, may know a good deal of the jargon of cultural history, but may struggle to name the wife of Edward the Third.
So I wasn't surprised when a survey recently discovered that ten percent of us think that Stonehenge was built by Queen Victoria, and that half of us are convinced that Hadrian's Wall was built to separate the English from the Scots. We're heritage hypocrites, queuing to see stately homes, and flocking to films such as The King's Speech; but we don't really think about who or what we are.
A lot of nonsense is talked about this. Some teachers claim that pupils can't relate to what they call 'kings and queens' - medieval history. They seem to have missed the passion of teenagers for fantasies about the past - the TV series Merlin, for instance, or even The Lord of the Rings. Real history is even more fascinating - properly taught. And then there's the politically-correct line that ethnic minorities are excluded by teaching the whole British story. Tell that to the young people at the Muslim College here in Cambridge, who study British history in depth.
Perhaps the real reason is that having a national story requires us to think about large issues of meaning, truth, ethics, and collective destiny, all uncomfortable ideas in our postmodern age. This is where religion can help. Not only do we need to understand religion to understand past events. Faith urges us to study them.
The Bible and the Koran, in particular, speak of God's action in history, and chart the lives of ancient prophets and patriarchs to confront us with timeless principles. History is filled with clues to the sacred. God is the creator of time, but is also active in time. By seeing meaning, good and evil, in the long human story, we find an indispensably richer meaning in ourselves.
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