| ISSN 1357-4442 | Editor: Simon Denison |
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| COMMENT |
Many people's grasp of history is a bit vague. Simon Denison wonders about the consequences
About 15 years ago, I heard something on the radio which has stayed with me. It was a Radio 1 phone-in in which listeners were asked none-too-taxing questions in order to win a prize.
`What was the date of the French Revolution?' the presenter asked one caller. `Was it 1089, 1489, 1789, or 1889?' The caller responded with confidence: `1089.'
I was reminded of this delightful howler by a pair of letters published this summer in The Times. They tell a similar story. Tony Ashton of Woking, Surrey, wrote of a recent visit to Sainsbury's in which his bill came to £10.66. When this figure came up on the check-out screen the assistant remarked: `There you go - the Battle of Waterloo.'
Peter Hambleton, a London solicitor, wrote to the newspaper a few days later. He had shown Mr Ashton's letter to a Sussex University history graduate - a history graduate, please note - and asked her what was funny about it. She replied: `Is it something to do with Oliver Cromwell?'
Come to think of it, The Times has been full of this sort of thing recently. To avoid boring you, I'll share just one more tale. American volunteers have been excavating this summer in Winchester, looking for the burial place of King Alfred. They have each paid over £1,000 to spend their short annual holiday on their hands and knees digging up a Winchester carpark.
According to a report by Ann Treneman, groups of bystanders could not believe these crazy folk would do such a thing. `You mean they've paid to do this,' asked one, mocking Americans in general for their love of all the `old' things in this country that we (she implied) take in our stride. So, taking King Alfred in their stride, how much do the good townsfolk of Winchester actually know about the man? Ms Treneman asked around. `He was a king,' said one. `He's a statue in town,' said another. A third thought he was something to do with pies.
Now I realise that anecdotes like this wouldn't have impressed Mr Gallup, but it seems pretty clear to me that many people's knowledge of history in this country is a little on the vague side. I don't mean to criticise. I'm sure you can get along very nicely in life with no imaginative concept of the difference between, say, 200 and 900 years ago. Other things are more important. I, for my part, know vanishingly little about, for example, chemistry or the way my computer works. Knowledge isn't everything.
But I still find it all rather strange. Everybody goes to school. Everybody, more or less, is supposed to learn a bit of history there. The Battle of Hastings, Oliver Cromwell and the French Revolution (with all it entailed) are, on any reckoning, fairly gigantic milestones. Yet it appears that some people can't even put them in the right order. Prehistory must be a complete blur.
On a personal level, as I have said, it probably doesn't much matter. On a political level, it surely does. It cannot help national conservation policy for large numbers of people to have no intellectual or emotional sense of the value of, say, a 16th century barn; or no concept of the difference between a medieval earthwork and a Victorian field drain.
It has been written on these pages before, but a large part of the solution must be education. In some respects, history teaching in schools is improving. The content of England's history curriculum will once again be mandatory next year in primary schools (see BA, May), after a period in which aspects of the subject had been all but squeezed out of some schools' timetables.
The periods of study on offer, however, seem to be growing more limited by the year. Prehistory, for English schools at least, has practically never existed. Medieval history was withdrawn from the GCSE syllabuses some years ago. Now it is proposed that Anglo-Saxon history should be dropped from the syllabuses at A-level. Farewell, King Alfred, as you recede still further into the mists.
At the risk of turning this entire piece into a report on the recent contents of The Times, these proposals too sparked a number of lamenting letters to that newspaper this summer. One came from the historian Alexander Murray of University College Oxford.
Interviews with school-leavers hoping to study history, he wrote, often start with an invitation to discuss a subject of their choice. Ten years ago, choices ranged evenly between the 16th and 20th centuries, with many from the medieval period or earlier. Now, most relate to the 20th century, especially to Hitler and Stalin. `Important as these recent subjects are,' Mr Murray wrote, `one consequence of their substitution for history as a whole is that the shorter timescales involved fail to stretch a pupil's imagination into the historical dimension.'
He added that, in the view of the great social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, one peculiarity of `the savage mind' is to have no coherent sense of the past before one's grandfather's time. A civilised society, by contrast, requires the cultivation of substantial historical understanding.
The issue, of course, goes way beyond reinstating the Anglo-Saxons at A-level, or tinkering with the other syllabuses. It requires a new way of thinking. So, education ministers, what is it to be? What kind of society do you wish us to have? The choice is yours.
Simon Denison is Editor of British Archaeology
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© Council for British Archaeology, 1999