"One of the problems that we have at the moment is that in the history curriculum we only have two names [of historical figures]", Mr Gove announced on the "Today" programme this morning. The same article on the BBC website http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12227491 quotes earlier pronouncements: "At the Conservative Party Conference, Mr Gove said it was a "tragedy of our time" that children were growing up ignorant of the history of the United Kingdom.
"Children are given a mix of topics at primary, a cursory run through Henry VIII and Hitler at secondary and many give up the subject at 14, without knowing how the vivid episodes of our past became a connected narrative," he said. Mr Gove has already asked the historian Simon Schama to advise on how British history could be "put at the heart of a revised national curriculum" ".
Simon Schama is, of course, a brilliant historian, with a way of weaving fascinating narratives. But he probably wouldn't last five minutes in a Comeprehensive School classroom, and even in an Academy students would probably switch off after ten. History teaching is a very different art from being a historian, and I would be more confident that Mr Gove was on the right lines if he said he was consulting history teachers, history inspectors, and history publishers. (And if we must have a TV personality as a figurehead I would in any case recommend the more down-to-earth Michael Wood.)
Mr Gove is wrong about the History Curriculum in a number of respects. The most important respect is his misunderstanding of the place of narrative. Narrative involves many things. It may be the teacher telling a story like the Battle of Hastings. It may be that a kind of 'Big Story' is revealed when a class follows a theme, such as the development of technology over a couple of centuries, during the course of a whole term's teaching.
It may be simply presenting a series of dates, like the dates of English Monarchs that used to be found on pencils, rulers, and the back of exercise books. However, one thing it cannot be is a set of facts about our history that we can all agree on. There are, at any rate outside Conservative Party Conferences, competing narratives of British History, and indeed of all History. Making sense of competing narratives - for example the story of kings and the story of peasants - is something that history teachers are pretty good at, and they do a very good job of preparing young people to make sense of an increasingly confusing world.
In fact 'knowing how the vivid episodes of our past became a connected narrative' i.e. why some historians manage to put forward particular theories of the past such as the importance of individuals, the influence of Geography or Economics, or ideas such as 'The British Empire was a good thing' are precisely the kind of very sophisticated arguments that young people are introduced to by the study of History.
