Summer of Blood

There have been countless articles like this published in the last year, bemoaning the fact that fewer and fewer school-children now bother taking history past the age of 14.

A typical statistic:

Last year, less than 30 per cent of 16-year-olds in comprehensive schools were entered for GCSE History, compared with 55 per cent of pupils in grammar schools and 48 per cent in private schools.

Alarmingly, there were 159 comprehensives where not a single pupil was entered for GCSE History; and in a majority of state secondaries, less than a quarter of pupils now take the exam. (Daily Mail)

That is concerning. And as Tristram Hunt MP pointed out on the radio this morning, it is particularly concerning if it means that studying history becomes an educational privilege restricted to private schools. For history to become as marginalised in the British curriculum as, say, ancient languages or classics would be catastrophic. That, however, is the way we’re going.

On the surface, it feels like the problem is that no one can make their mind up about what history is for, or indeed whether it should be for anything at all. Do we teach history to develop skills or knowledge? Do we teach history in order to educate our children about the people, events and values that have made Britain great, or to broaden their minds to the alternative narratives of all people all over the world? Should we be teaching them about Lord Nelson, or Nelson Mandela? Winston Churchill or Mary Seacole? Cicero or Confucius? And so on.

The present government seems to have a preference for amending the historical curriculum to equip children to answer trivia questions about British political and constitutional history between the Roman invasion and the Falklands war. It thus fulfils the ‘citizenship’ function - a means by which to introduce kids from all backgrounds to a romantic, patriotic, conservative teleology of Britishness. This gets up lots of left-wing people’s noses, and understandably so.

But whatever. No one will ever settle that argument. For politicians - to bend an Orwell phrase - all history teaching is propaganda: a means of sowing their own political ideology on young minds in the hope that it may flourish in the future. (This may, of course, be one reason why state-school kids, who are not stupid, have no wish to study it.) In a way, it’s healthy that the argument should continue, for as soon as it stops, someone has won, and the propaganda has worked.

The most potent argument I can think for obliging children to continue learning history until the age of 16 (apart from the desire that there should be a forcibly expanded market for my own books, natch) is in fact one that has gone a bit out of fashion this year. History teaches essential, unique skills.

Yes, skills - but before you say ‘ugh, what a filthy, New Labouristic, dismal reason to learn about great events in the past’, think of this. My children - our children - will grow up during the business-end of the Information Revolution. As the internet continues to mature, these children will live their lives bombarded with more words, thoughts, arguments and voices than any generation before them. Wherever their lives take them, they will need to be consummate bullshit detectors.

Which is what history teaches you. Interrogate what you’re reading. Understand the partiality of everything. Think about what you’re being sold. Sniff out propaganda. Understand the myriad clever, and not-so-clever ways in which people have always tried to screw one another over. Spot the lie. Spot the spin. Spot the weasel. Appreciate real heroism. Don’t be gullible.

Well, if history doesn’t teach you that, what does?

In 1999 I took four A-levels: History, Economics, English Literature and Mathematics. If I were doing it all again now, I would do the same again, although perhaps I might swap Eng. Lit. for Computing. Those disciplines seem to me to give you both rigorous old-fashioned learning and valuable skills to make you a useful, engaged, agreeably suspicious person.

London, 26 March 2011: If you watch the news tonight, you’ll probably see images of ‘anarchists’ (read: a hotchpotch of criminals, vandals and thugs) smashing up the Ritz, throwing paint at Topman, smashing the window of a Porsche dealership, throwing paint-bombs at the police and generally doing a lot of other fairly disagreeable rampaging.

These are the images that will represent a day of demonstrations against the coalition government.

And yet. According to most reporters on the ground in London, the people causing criminal damage and wreaking havoc on the city constitute only a tiny minority of the 400,000 demonstrators who have come to the capital to protest government policy towards tax and public spending.

I suppose it was ever thus. Read the chronicle accounts of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, and you are struck immediately by very similar, if more extreme headlines: the sack of the Savoy (then a palace, not a hotel, but very arguably the Ritz of its day); attacks on super-wealthy London merchants suspected of corrupt political collusion; violent, murderous attacks on government officials and, yes, a lot of other fairly disagreeable rampaging.

In 1381 the worst violence was perpetrated by a similarly small, violent and criminal element of the rebels. They were the rebels that remained longest in London, committed the most barbaric acts and were eventually slaughtered with the greatest prejudice by the government.

What one hears very little about when the news gets made (and when history is written) is the vast herds of non-violent protesters, who have political grievances but wish to express them noisily, peacefully and within the law.

The thing about those protesters, be they public sector workers in 2011 or over-taxed rural landowners in 1381, is that what they do is interesting but essentially quite boring.

Or to put it another way: we would rather read about a nutter chucking a bin through the window of the Vodafone store and a mad priest chopping the archbishop of Canterbury’s head off, than a mildly cheesed-off ordinary Joe exercising his right to protest (as is now) and then going home.

I’m not saying that’s right. I’m saying that’s the news for you. And that’s history too, to an extent. We get our kicks from studying the exceptional and the extreme.

PS I should probably say at this point that if you want to know more about 1381, and thus learn a little more about where we stand in 2011, then you can buy my book, here.

Everyone should read this brilliant essay by Professor Richard J. Evans, analysing the current government’s approach to history teaching in schools. Super stuff.

According to this report at the Telegraph, another English university has directed cuts in Government funding towards parts of the History faculty.

Sussex University is reportedly considering a proposal to withdraw from research and specialist teaching “in English social history before 1700 and the history of continental Europe before 1900”. Not as drastic a cut as the Telegraph would spin it up to: their standfirst, referring to a letter published in today’s paper, is ‘Academics have attacked a decision by a top university to scrap research into English history before 1700′, which is technically accurate but implies a broader raft of cuts than actually seems to be proposed.

Nevertheless, it is part of the trend reported earlier in the week at King’s College, London, where the Paleography chair is to be made redundant. No doubt we will see a further trickle of these sorts of stories over the coming weeks, as academics dig in to protect their own specialist subjects and departmental funding by kicking up as big a stink as they can, knowing that the conservative press can use each case study as a political grenade to hurl at Labour.

Of course, the truth is that the Tories will have to cut at least as much from university budgets as Labour proposes to do. Will they be able to cope with the same sort of criticism, should more non-profitmaking, specialist courses and teachers go to the wall? Furthermore, how long will British universities allow themselves to be driven by the wind of political economics? Strikes me that Oxbridge and any number of the better redbricks have little to lose and everything to gain by cutting as loose as they can from government funding and looking towards an American model of private payment supported by a massively broadened scholarship system. It wouldn’t look pretty to the left, but the quality and depth of British higher education would stand a far better chance of maintaining its international prestige….

As has been reported today, King’s College, London, is directing some of the pain of its wider academic cutbacks towards the faculty of paleography, where the UK’s only specialist chair in the discipline is being abolished from August.

The protest has been rather noisy. There’s already a Facebook group with more than 4,000 members, and an online petition with more than 5,000 signatories. Mary Beard has written intelligently about the subject at the Times, calling King’s in particular on its preposterous use of academic sub-committee speak in justifying its wider cutbacks (They’re aiming “to create financially viable academic activity by disinvesting from areas that are at sub-critical level with no realistic prospect of extra investment” - got that?) And David Blackburn at the Spectator has implied that this is just another consequence of Labour’s economic incompetence, cultural vandalism, cackhandedly egalitarianist dumbing-down etc.

Now, all this foot-stamping is hardly on the scale of the NHS hashtag business, or that hullaballoo Jan Moir attracted for going overboard when the lad from Boyzone died. But for the abolition of a paleography seat to have caught national headlines and thrown up such sizable breakers on the web is still interesting in itself.

Paleography is a highly technical and difficult discipline. It is something that could and can only be done professionally when subsidised in a university - few and far between are the high-flying paleography jobs in the private sector. Its value is as a humanity per se - it advances our understanding of our common cultural heritage, decodes the past the better to elucidate the present, and so on. Hanging the paleographers out to dry because - essentially - thems don’t pays thems way really does misconstrue the whole business of paleography.

But then again, these are the times. The entire nation is busy opening a vast, hitherto unheeded pile of bank statements, final demands etc, and realising just how much we cannot afford. The financial pressure on universities has never been greater, and is unlikely to ease whoever wins the next election. In such an environment, faculties that can be seen as drains on a university’s balance sheet, rather than attractors either of private investment or heavy student demand, are going to be extremely vulnerable to the sort of expedient cutbacks that could see unglamorous but culturally valuable areas of expertise snuffed out for a generation or more.

I’m about as far from a Guardian-reading anti-capitalist crybaby as it gets. But this, I will concede, is the problem with unregulated market forces. They don’t suit paleography faculties one bit. Not in a recession, at any rate.