Archive for the ‘Comment’ Category
Boris Johnson, Ken Livingstone and Malcolm Tucker, aka is it ever okay for serious politicians to bellow swearwords at each other?
What history should we teach in schools - to those few school-children who can still be bothered to take it, I mean?
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.
The London Riots of 2011 and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381
I suppose this was inevitable. Here is my op-ed piece from today’s Evening Standard, in which I consider the events of the London riots of August 2011 with those of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
I suppose it would also have made sense to mention Richard II’s words to the vanquished Essex rebels in 1381. “Villeins ye are, and villeins ye shall remain, not in bondage as before, but incomparably harsher”. It seems to reflect the hang ‘em high attitude which will likely prevail upon those identified as looters and rioters this week.
Exactly 630 summers ago, London burned at the hands of violent mobs. Angry men and women, drawn from the lower orders of society, rampaged the streets for nights on end - looting, setting fire to property, attacking other Londoners and paralysing the limited policing resources of an unpopular government.
Clouds of thick smoke filled the air as buildings were sacked and burned. Rioters communicated with messages composed in cryptic language and sent by covert means. Soon after the London riots began, copycat attacks followed in other English cities.
The upheaval scarred the city and the psyche of the well-meaning majority, who watched with horror as an underclass ran amok, seemingly delighted by the meaningless violence in which they indulged.
Two years ago I wrote a book: Summer of Blood: the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (Harper Press), which charts the events of that rising. This week, during what has been dubbed the Chavs’ Revolt, it feels a bit like a warning from history.
Our city is no longer much like medieval London. And yet, when the capital riots, it does so in familiar fashion. The causes may be different but the methods and composition of the crowds don’t change much.
Mass riots do not happen solely because cities contain bad people. There is always a catalyst, and usually a set of acute underlying grievances. In 1381 a poll tax sparked violence against a political class who were seen as corrupt and self-interested. This week, the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan caused tensions between the police and disenfranchised young people who have never known discipline to spill over into violence.
But now, as then, the character of the riots has morphed quickly from principled protest to mindless destruction. The composition of a riot transcends history. It goes through stages. Shortly after a riot begins, those people who have a specific cause are joined by others who have a panoply of other grievances. Anger becomes general, directed at a whole government, system or way of life.
Then comes a dull thud of boots, heralding the arrival of the rent-a-mob: the herds of rough-necked scrotes who like trouble for its own sake. This is when a riot really hits its straps. In 1381, Londoners with scant connection to the original causes of the revolt massacred Flemish merchants and piled their bodies in the streets. This year, their dullard descendants burned furniture stores and nicked tellies out of betting shops.
Rioters have always found ways to organise in such a way that they will elude the authorities, too. BBM and Twitter are new mediums for a very old message. In the Middle Ages, strange letters were circulated by organisers, calling on rioters to “chastise well Hob the Robber and take with you John Trueman”. A very loose modern translation: “let’s fuk up da feds, bruv!”
And there are two more historical notes to add. First: it was the Mayor of London, William Walworth, who saved the day in 1381, when he stabbed to death the rebel leader Wat Tyler during negotiations with the king. Second: another rioter was tried and executed in East Anglia for the crime of saying “he was a messenger of the great society”.
There’s a message there for Boris - and for Dave, too, I fancy.
The face of protest
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.
Recent work
I’ve been busy - albeit not busy updating this blog. Here, at a glance, is some of my recent writing for the newspapers. (Click the links to read.) Otherwise, I have been hard at work on my new book, a history of the Wars of the Roses, due for publication by Faber & Faber in 2014. And I have made a film for BBC4, which will appear later this year. For more regular updates, you can find me on Twitter, username @dgjones
Pull-out guide Two million years of British history in 15 minutes, from The Times (£)
Feature How to have a medieval Christmas, from The Telegraph
Reporting on the ‘Richard III’ skeleton beneath the Leicester car park, from The Sunday Times (£)
Book review Blood Sisters by Sarah Gristwood, from The Sunday Times (£)
Podcast What the Plantagenets Did For Us, hosted by BBC History Magazine. (Scroll down to 1 November)
Review The best History Books of 2012, from The Telegraph
Interview with Mark Gatiss, from The Sunday Times
Archive of my Evening Standard column is here