Time to fill gap in our children's knowledge of history

2:09pm Thursday 15th May 2008

Comments (1)   Have your say »

Brighton College headteacher Richard Cairns has developed a reputation for shaking up the education world. He introduced lessons in manners and Mandarin Chinese into his school's syllabus and last week announced his latest change - lessons in Britishness.

Here he outlines why something had to be done to change a society where some young people think Winston Churchill is a fictional character.

Last week Brighton College announced plans for a new course that would provide pupils with a proper understanding of Britain's past and the role it has played in the development of the world.

From September 2009 all 11-yearolds will attend the Story Of Our Land course, which will form a significant part of the curriculum.

Subtitled From Nero To Ground Zero, the course will enable pupils to develop a comprehensive understanding of the past from the Roman Empire to the Iraq War and will be taught over three years with six lessons a week.

This is the latest in a series of innovations at Brighton College, seeking to break out of the educational straitjacket.

We are hitting back at a culture that believes more exams is better, that 12 GCSEs are better than 11 and ten are better than nine.

Promising In 2006 we introduced Mandarin Chinese as a compulsory subject to provide pupils with an education that would better equip them for the global realities of the 21st century. In 2007 lessons in manners were added to the Year 9 curriculum in response to a report criticising the etiquette of new graduate employees.

The new course at Brighton College will incorporate geography, religious studies and citizenship into a single overarching course.

The first year will focus on British history, the second on Britain and its relations with Europe, and the final year on Britain in a world context.

At 14, pupils will begin GCSEs in religious education, geography and history as normal. Of course some will point out that promising to tell the Story Of Our Land threatens to sweep pupils from Romans one week to Saxons the next and Normans the week after on a whistle-stop tour of British history and may do little to improve our pupils' understanding of the past.

Such concerns seem unfounded.

The course, which will be given equal weight to English and maths, will give pupils ample time to develop their knowledge and understanding of the past.

While studying Roman Britain they will have the opportunity to learn about volcanoes and Pompeii.

King Arthur will allow pupils to consider the close interaction between myth and history and how such iconic figures create our national identity, and the Renaissance and Enlightenment will be brought to life by learning about such key figures as Thomas More and Mary Wollstonecraft.

My decision to overhaul the national curriculum in history, geography and religious education and replace it with this custombuilt curriculum is a reaction to a growing realisation that a significant majority of our youngsters have no sense of their history, their past or the historical landscape that surrounds them every day.

It is deeply worrying that in a country that rightly prides itself on the achievements of its ancestors one quarter of children believed Winston Churchill was a fictional character; that for a country which has one of the most advanced forms of parliamentary government so few children know how democracy and the British parliamentary system developed; and for a country that champions itself as one of the world's foremost defenders of liberty and freedom almost threequarters do not understand the significance of D-Day and the importance of the Allied liberation of Occupied Europe.

Along with Iceland, Britain is one of the only countries in Europe that allows children to drop history at 14. Although the National Union of Teachers supported a call in 2002 to make history compulsory up to 16 it seems unlikely the subject will ever stand on a par with maths, English and science in the national curriculum.

Hitler-isation So the glaring inadequacies in our children's knowledge of our shared past remain unchecked.

Even for those who continue to study history, it is often not until university such glaring gaps in their knowledge of British history begin to be filled in.

Based on a trend, often dubbed the "Hitler-isation of A-level history" it has become feasible for pupils to gain the highest grades despite focusing almost exclusively on Nazi Germany and certainly without ever even knowing what happened before 1750 or who Napoleon, Gladstone or Disraeli were.

Many universities, it seems, are aware of this and have adapted accordingly. Sheffield, York, University College London and the University of Sussex all require first-year students take a compulsory module designed to improve their basic knowledge of the past.

It seems it is not until university that students gain the opportunity to place the collection of bite-sized topics and skills they have studied at school into a meaningful whole.

Brighton College's decision to overhaul the national curriculum strikes at the heart of the debate raging about the best ways to educate children. It epitomises the growing criticism of the education system that is seen to undervalue knowledge and overemphasise the importance of skills and competences.

Speaking at last week's conference, hosted by Brighton College and attended by more than 200 figures from the country's top independent schools, I warned the education system had become so obsessed with testing skills it had forgotten to provide a proper context, a proper historical and geographical framework in which to understand the world today.

Derided At the conference, Shadow Education Secretary Michael Gove went further, arguing this so-called progressive approach actually denied children the knowledge they should have in order to make the most of their talents.

The official curriculum's emphasis on teaching pupils in small bite-sized chunks is seen by many to have dismantled the value of traditional subjects like history.

It is a view shared by Professor Simon Schama, whose BBC series A History Of Britain gained record audiences. He has long derided school history syllabuses for teaching "Hitler and the Henrys with nothing in between" and for preventing students from "making the connections in between these gobbets of knowledge".

Like many he will no doubt welcome Brighton College's bold decision to move away from the educational theories which have been dominant since the 1960s and 1970s.

Brighton College's willingness to place Britain at the forefront of its new course marks a further significant, and perhaps more subtle, move away from current dogma.

It reflects a desire not only to do away with the damaging bite-size approach to history but also a determination to cut a swath through the masses of politically correct social history and return the emphasis to providing a meaningful narrative of British political history.

I see it as a chance to redress the balance. We have perhaps devoted a disproportionate amount of our time and energy to understanding more about the cultural heritage of minority groups in our society at the expense of a proper understanding of the wider nation's past.