Conservative Revisionism: Not Just a Texas Problem
Just in case you thought that altering high-school history curricula in the service of a conservative political agenda was a phenomenon unique to the crazy world of the great state of Texas, The Guardian reports this morning that British schools are now at risk of going down a similar path:
Analysing the options for history at GCSE and A-level, he noted the “near oblivion of ancient and medieval history”. He said: “There is no grand narrative that knits together what pupils learn over a year, leave alone over a school career.”His proposed solutions are to make history compulsory up to GCSE, to have two major sets of exams so that teachers have more freedom, and to “enforce a chronological range”.
Along with a Channel 4 television series, he plans to produce materials for use in schools: “a four-year history syllabus on the west and the world”.
The big question the course would attempt to answer, he said, was how in AD 1500 “the small warring kingdoms of Europe, which looked so feeble compared with the Ming or Ottoman empires, got to be so powerful”. He said the syllabus was “bound to be Eurocentric” because the world was Eurocentric.
Answering criticisms from the audience that the project sounded uninterested in the fates of the oppressed, Ferguson lashed out against “the militant tendency” in the audience and said: “Can we get away from this rightwing-historian, apologist-for-empire crap?”
Maybe Ferguson’s proposal isn’t quite of the same scale or indeed style as replacing Thomas Jefferson with Phyllis Schlafly in the narrative of American intellectual history, but it’s still cause for concern. Interpreting the phrase “world history” to mean “western history” is a mistake that the British national curriculum has made before—back when maps of the world were covered in large swathes of pink to signify British colonial possessions. Historical revisionism in accordance with a political ideology is dangerous business, and a particularly difficult issue when it comes to designing high-school history curricula. Teaching history to high-school students tends to involve oversimplification (and therefore a certain amount of picking and choosing); it also tends to involve crafting a coherent narrative that validates certain peoples’ and countries’ choices and not others’, and that can often take a missionary attitude to certain cultures’ ascendancy. And it’s hard to escape: my grade-school American history classes apologized for and attempted to validate Manifest Destiny in the same way which Ferguson’s seems to propose to apologize for and attempt to validate the British Empire, because it is a lot easier to swallow empire when you can give it some logical underpinning. What either Britain or America did to the non-western world in the 19th and 20th centuries seems less coldly calculating, more logical, if it seems as if it’s something that was developing from the 15th century onwards—but what does such a curriculum then say to non-white students in either America or Britain, whose own cultural histories were on quite a different side of that power distribution?
This story to me illustrates a number of things, but chief among them is the problems inherent in teaching high-school history. You don’t have the time or the disciplinary grounding to achieve complexity and specificity, so crafting a curriculum that includes the “why?” and that can remain coherent across broad swathes of time often results in resorting to ideologically-based explanations. Academic historians don’t usually face this problem in the same way: the problems which they (we?) think about are so much more specific that there is enough room for nuance and for admitting that there is no entirely accurate nor unbiased understanding of What Happened. In state or national high-school curricula, there’s no room for that nuance—and so bias and ideology can come to masquerade as objectivity.
But just as there can be no doubt that omitting Thomas Jefferson from an American history curriculum is a bizarre excision of one of the most central figures of early American politics, there can be no doubt that understanding the world through the lens of the British Empire went out of fashion several decades ago. If Ferguson’s is the worldview which David Cameron’s government plans to endorse, there are certainly deeply troubling implications for how Britain now plans to engage with the world outside Europe.
Emily is a staff writer for Campus Progress. She attends Princeton University.
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