Abingdon News No.55

www.abingdon.org.uk 15 Abingdon News Interestingly, at the time of writing this piece, the Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has pushed back on calls to decolonise the curriculum stating that “we should be incredibly proud of our history because time and time and time again, this country has made a difference and changed things for the better, right around the world”. This strikes right at the core of what school history is for and this statement is one that sits uncomfortably for many. Politicians have often failed to distinguish between history and memory. In 2013, then Education Secretary Michael Gove was forced to backtrack on his initial proposals for a new history curriculum with the draft stating its purpose was to investigate ‘how the British people shaped this nation and how Britain influenced the world’. Simon Schama, his curriculum adviser, criticised this for intellectual, less moral, reasons, arguing Britain was also shaped by the wider world. Gove did argue for some inclusiveness, but he was not helped by PM Cameron’s statement that history should tell ‘our island story in all its glory’. The draft was ultimately redrafted. Yet history is not simply an alternative parade of heroes of the left, from the Levellers to the Tolpuddle Martyrs, to Keir Hardie and Aneurin Bevan. As Professor Richard Evans of Wolfson College, Cambridge, puts it, ‘this kind of approach shows a crass failure to understand what history is about’. He continues that ‘nor is history a matter of awarding ticks and crosses to the people of the past, canonising some as heroes and damning others as villains. Arguing about whether the British empire was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing is puerile and has nothing to do with the serious study of the past. Of course, we need critical and enquiring study of the British empire in our schools. But the aim should be to understand it – why it came into being, how it sustained itself for so long, and how it came to an end (and yes, what role slavery played, and why it was abolished) – not to praise empire on the one hand or damn it on the other.’ History is an academic discipline and teaching it means that we help our students to read historical documents in a critical fashion, assess interpretations and processes. That means a breadth of history, warts and all. A narrow curriculum means we are not teaching history, but rather a tapered view of the past that obfuscates the wonderful complexities of the very discipline of history. Thus teaching black history properly means we are delivering an intellectually rigorous curriculum that is true to the historian’s craft. That, in my view, is the very best reason for moving beyond a Eurocentric history curriculum. Run the world update Eight weeks ago the Abingdon community set themselves the challenge to run the circumference of the world (40075km) in the hope it would inspire people to keep moving during the lockdown period. The Strava club started with just 20 runners but has now grown to over 200 members. It has been fascinating to learn about places along the route, both of the natural world as well as the history behind some of the oldest trade routes known to man. Having run 19,626km at the time of writing, we now find ourselves island hopping through the Philippines.