I suppose Niall Ferguson’s highly personal attack on me (On history, Gove is ideal, 15 February) as regards to deserves a response. Intellectual consistency hasn’t ever been his specialty, so I wasn’t surprised when he backed Michael Gove’s narrowly Anglocentric proposals for a brand new school history curriculum, despite the fact that Gove rejected the worldwide sweep of Ferguson’s own proposals. Ferguson doesn’t object to the curriculum’s obsession with teaching “facts” in preference to analytical skills, even though his own books are stuffed with arguments that schoolchildren surely find it stimulating, though not really too hard, to analyse and disprove.
Ferguson portrays me as an ivory-tower academic with out a knowledge of college education but, as he knows perfectly well, i’ve two school-age children, both studying history. I even have talked to many teachers and pupils. I’m well briefed at the current history curriculum and the government’s plans to scrap it by the numerous supportive messages I’ve had from history teachers.
Ferguson boasts that he is “written and presented popular history”, but being a telly don doesn’t equip you for the realities of the school room, as David Starkey found to his cost in Jamie’s Dream School. i’ve got, as Ferguson says, written works on Nazi Germany but, “dry” or not, they’ve sold greater than 1 / 4 of one million copies in English and been published in lots of other languages. After all, I’d rather have a “dry” style than follow Ferguson in writing articles that ape the sneering populism of a regular Mail leader.
Richard Evans
Regius professor of history, University of Cambridge
• Professor Ferguson’s application of the term “partisan prejudice” to Richard Evans and David Priestland is ironic. His cliched jibes about “dreaming Oxonian spires” to melt public opinion for the replacement of a rigorous academic discipline with a lifeless, hackneyed, unimaginative and triumphalist national narrative are inexcusable.
My own 14-18 students are virtually unanimous of their horror on the considered an all-British history curriculum, and passionate of their defence of the present objective, balanced and evidence-based approach as an encouragement to free thought. Should the proposals go ahead, secondary school pupils will see through this thinly veiled try and indoctrinate them and abandon history on the earliest possible opportunity. It’s Professor Ferguson who must “set foot inside a college classroom” or have “a talk with a history teacher or a pupil”. He can be welcome to come back to my school.
Katherine Edwards
History teacher, City of London Freemen’s School, Ashtead, Surrey
• My experience of nineteen years teaching in secondary state schools and now as a teacher educator at Oxford University has given me a variety of access to teachers, parents and pupils. Lots of my pupils, taught under the present curriculum, would recognise that says should be supported by evidence.
My pupils would tell me to not base my arguments on anecdotal subjective selections. Ofsted’s History for All (2011) relies on visits to 166 state schools. It concludes that “the national curriculum orders and programmes of research in key stage 3 have ended in much high-quality teaching and learning in history”.
My pupils would advise that having checked out the problem extensive I should talk about an summary. David Cannadine’s The proper of History reviews 100 years of educating history, and means that no golden age existed when all children left school knowing key events and individuals.
Finally, they might tell me to observe other interpretations. Ferguson chooses to not consider the Royal Historical Society’s conclusion that the draft is just too narrowly concentrated on British and political history, and its regret about its “strictly chronological sequence”.
The draft takes little account of the contingent nature of history and of the complex ways that learners progress in history. The evidence of teachers and their experience of learners should be central to any reforms.
Jason Todd
History curriculum tutor, department of education, Oxford University
• As a first-rate teacher, I question if it is possible to do justice to a few of the subjects we’re being asked to hide inside the hour per week we will be able to realistically expect to allocate to history. Equally, key elements in history should study by a non-specialist in limited time just so that the stern chronology could be preserved.
Also, with school budgets being squeezed increasingly more, some primary schools might want to form mixed-year classes. This works because we will be able to differentiate work by the talents each child has and people they should acquire next. However, to fulfil this programme, with its emphasis on knowledge other than skills, different years might want to study different periods in history.
We ought to consider if it is possible to deliver this content effectively inside the time available. Without this, its merits or otherwise are irrelevant.
Sue Parkes
Buxton, Derbyshire
• Rebecca Grant (Letters, 16 February) is ideal – history teaching should point to the uncomfortable legacy of slavery and colonialism on current events, but not only on Britain’s horrific treatment of asylum seekers but on foreign policy too – as Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrates. The racist rationalisation that conquering other people’s countries is somehow for his or her good is an identical one utilized by the British after they claimed to be “civilising the savage” in India and Africa.
Dr Gavin Lewis
Manchester
• Niall Ferguson says that every one his children left school knowing “nothing whatever” in regards to the Norman conquest, the English civil war and the wonderful Revolution, and “a section” in regards to the Third Reich, the hot Deal and the civil rights movement. I blame the parent.
Aiden Lambert
Dublin
