Reform’s Suggestion That More British History Needs to Be Taught Should Be Embraced by All Parties

It was supposed to be a slam dunk argument that finally sorted out the Middle Eastern conflict and whether God exists. The student, 17, said to me confidently: “Obviously the Bible’s bullshit: it’s written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. All English names.” I must have frowned. “If the Bible was true and Jesus lived in Palestine, it would have been written by people called Mohammed, Malik, Yusuf and Omar.” I’m no Bible scholar nor Middle Eastern expert, but I realised I had a bit of historical unpicking to do here. Disappointingly, I was coaching the student for university interviews. His chosen subject: History.

I actually sympathise with him. He was demonstrating those ‘critical thinking’ skills that have recently been so lauded in educational circles: ‘teach children how to think, not what to think’, the mantra goes. But if there is no basic knowledge there, it’s naturally impossible to think critically at all.

Where had he got this Matthew, Mark, Luke and John insight from, I asked. TikTok, came the inevitable response: “You can learn everything from there and YouTube.” Students now talk openly of ‘whipping ChatGPT’ to help them with their essays, coursework and revision. With this avalanche of information/dross now turning whole generations into complete ignoramuses, Reform is right, it is imperative that history is taught properly. I wish other parties would embrace the cry – all school children deserve to know the basic trellis of British history rather than being at the mercy of TikTok nonsense.

Anyone who has had children go through the British state education system will have an understanding of how slapdash the history curriculum is. Primary schools spend a term on the Romans, Saxons and Vikings, and then suddenly there’s huge jump to the Titanic(?) and Walter Tull’s World War One service. There is compulsory teaching of global history, with terms spent on Western African or South American history.

The difficulty of course is that there’s just so much history to teach. In Years 7 and 8, children are supposed to be taught: Medieval, Tudor, the Early Modern World, the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, the British Empire and Slavery, Social Change, WWI and the developments of the civil rights movements in America. Added to this is the dreary ‘what is history’ element, how to trust and distrust sources, how to weigh up evidence and how to recognise bias. With many schools now teaching GCSEs over three years, if children don’t select history, their historical training, such as it is, will stop at age 13 in Year 8.

Reform must avoid commissioning a long-winded academic review of how to teach history but instead follow the teaching as was experienced by the peerless comedian, novelist and historian Charlie Higson. In his latest book Willie, Willie, Harry, Stee: an epically short history of our Kings and Queens, Higson describes his history classroom.

Mr Cooper’s history room had a timeline running around the walls that told the story of Great Britain, with key dates and brightly painted pictures of important events, battles, great men and women, the birth of steam, the Second World War… you know the sort of thing.

You started at one as an eight year-old and worked your way around the room over the years until you were 13. From Stonehenge you went on to Roman Britain, the Anglo-Saxons, King Alfred the Great, the Battle of Hastings, Agincourt, the Wars of the Roses, Henry VIII, Oliver Cromwell, the Great Fire of London, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Queen Victoria, the First World War… until you arrived at the present day, sometimes in the mid-1960s.

It was an old-fashioned, top down and very Anglo-centric view of history. Ordinary men and women didn’t get a look in, but it gave me a solid grasp of when things happened and in what order.

Such a useful resource must be immediately rolled across the land. Add to this classroom frieze I would recommend the Royal School Series (published 1896) is updated and republished. I still rely on my great-uncle’s school copy to fill in all the gaps in history that crater my meagre if enthusiastic knowledge. Again, it’s a straight forward account of what happened, by whom and why it was important. The introduction reads:

This is a ‘simple’ History in respect at once of the matter, the style and the language. Only the most important events and the most striking incidents are recorded; but these have been selected with great care, and as much picturesqueness has been thrown into the narrative as the limited space would allow.

This is an example of the beginning of the entry for Edward II:

Young Edward took little notice of his father’s dying wish. He buried his body in Westminster and gave up the war with Scotland. Like Henry the Third, he lost the favour of his people by his fondness for worthless foreigners.

Such a book is so much more exciting and straightforward than the dreary science-like history textbooks now produced that have complicated classification tables for primary and secondary sources. We need stories, dramatic events, gorgeous costumes and a tremendous sense of the adventure of it all.

Children must enjoy many more trips to visit castles, cathedrals, fortresses and battlefields – even if empty fields. Bad Education-like, they can recreate the battles in the playground. It is lunacy that my Year 6 son has had a Mayan Day where he ate tortillas but has not visited the nearby ruins of a Roman villa, the site of the Battle of Cheriton or learned anything at all about Alfred the Great, our local hero.

Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.