Gove's School History Reforms "Debated" Again

First as farce...

OK - so the original title of this post was too flippant a way of drawing your attention my thoughts on the interchange you can find here and here between the historian to whom we at HotE like, for legal reasons, to refer as ‘Fire-His-Ass’ (hereafter FHA) and the historian to whom we at HotE like, for legal reasons, to refer as Regius Prof, or Sir Regius Prof as he now likes to be known, on the subject of Michael 'Pob' Gove's reforms of the schools history curriculum. So I've changed it to something more 'vanilla'.  It is, after all, a pretty serious subject.

But anyway, now that I’ve drawn a bit of traffic and attention, let me meditate on the implications of all this for History.  As it stands this all looks (especially, I imagine, to outsiders) more than a little bit pathetic: like a pissing contest between two overgrown schoolboys.  You have to think that if this is the best that modern history can do the discipline really is in a parlous state.  You could say that the fact that this became an exchange at all was a victory for FHA (see here for an analogy).  Regular readers of this blog will know that I have quite a lot of time for Sir Regius even if, as in this episode, he sometimes makes you want to give him a good shake.  The British Medical Association, I believe, tells us it’s dangerous to shake small children who become vexatious but I’m not sure what its stance is on Regius Professors of History, even where, as here, the boundary between the two categories becomes a little blurred.  Really, though, you do wish that sometimes he’d just forego his desire to have the last word and rise above the provocation offered by FHA who, as a cleverly commercially-manufactured, million-selling crowd-pleaser is surely little more than History’s answer to Justin Bieber or, perhaps better, given his age, origins and likely lack of consequence, The Bay City Rollers.  [Actually that doesn't really work as I suspect it'd be the parents rather than the teeny-boppers that would mostly be into him; we'll come back to glib analogies.] After all, if you read his initial piece in the London Review of Books and compare it with FHA’s response, Sir Regius wins hands down.  His response to FHA’s goading only undermines that.

So this was never going to be a clash of intellectual heavyweights but it descends to such a level that I suggest the referee steps in and disqualifies the pair of them for bringing the game into disrepute.  You might say I’m in no position to criticise anyone on this count, and you’d be right, but then I’m not a Regius Professor or a knight of the realm and I never will be.  Nor am I a Harvard professor with a senior research post at Jesus College Oxford, and nor will I ever be.  How does it make any sense at all to judge competence to think about these things by the number of popular books sold or TV appearances, let alone the number of school-aged children?  If we go by the first two then we’d have to proclaim Andrew Roberts and Dan Snow as the greatest living historians, and then God help us all.  As to the third, when did fecundity become a historical qualification?  I suspect that all this – like those academics who feature pictures of their children on the web-pages – comes down to a statement that, believe it or not, I’ve had sex and here’s the proof.  By those lights – I doubt I’ve sold even 10,000 books, only have a personal chair in a provincial university, never went to Oxbridge, have never had a TV series and am a mere divorcee whose loins have, to date at least, proved fruitless – I’m a nobody (perhaps there is something in it after all…) and I doubt either of them gives a damn what I think, probably rightly too.  That said, I suspect that my first (and worst) book may have had more influence upon my own little corner of the discipline, and the way people think about the practice of history and archaeology within it, than their oeuvre has thus far had on their (admittedly rather larger and more populous) patches.  On the other hand, my father was a history teacher so I do have some (though maybe not much) experience of what professionals in that field might think.  I also like to think that I am rather prettier than either of them but let’s let that pass.  [That last bit was irony by the way; I know that some people who read my words aren’t good at spotting that.]

This debate, if we can even call it that, barely reaches the dizzy intellectual heights of a playground ‘I may be rubbish at football but at least I don’t smell’ exchange, but it brings out a crucial issue.  It takes us to the heart of the crisis facing history.  When thinking about raising what I have called ‘the siege’ this gives us a choice (but in detail I’ll have to come back to that another time).  It may not be a proper choice, as both Sir Regius and FHA are conservative in their views of history (the difference being whether the c in conservative is upper or lower case).  The way they do history does not differ, fundamentally; it's just that Sir Regius is (in my view) rather considerably better at it.  But there's an important choice to be made all the same.  There is a vital difference between them and it behoves everyone with any sort of claim to being interested in history to choose on which side of that difference they stand.  As will become clear, my view is that (although, clearly, they don’t) serious, committed historians ought to take their stance on the side of Sir Regius, for all its eventual limitations.  My view will come as no surprise, given that I have made – on this very blog – many points similar points to his.  This is not to say that I don’t think there are two or three points that Sir Regius makes in his LRB article that are fundamentally mistaken (one or two examples of incoherence are pointed up in the letters), but there’s no space to delve into those.

On the one hand, FHA’s view (backed by Gove) is that history is sequential fact-learning (they call it ‘narrative’ but let’s be clear) focused upon Britain.  Sir Regius on the other hand supports the status quo and the relative stress laid upon source criticism, imagination, empathetic exercise and so on, in which the wider world features at least as strongly.  The latter, says FHA, has been a disaster, although no evidence is given as to why.  All we are offered is sneering assertion, anecdote and hearsay from people (unsurprisingly) who share his viewpoint (e.g. an elitist diatribe by an inexperienced teacher in reactionary, Gove-founded rag Standpoint), rounded off with the conclusion that anyone who disagrees doesn’t have a view worth listening to.  This, I should say, is pretty typical of males of FHA’s socio-educational background and intellectual formation: they argue by swaggering assertion, shiny, glib (but paperweight) analogy and a supreme self-confidence born of the notion (drummed into them from the age of eight or so) that their views are inherently superior to everyone else’s because they themselves are, by virtue of their socio-educational background, superior to everyone else.  Ironically, this eventually makes them far worse historians than everyone else because a little self-doubt is essential to good history.  FHA is a fine example of all that (as is the historian to whom, for legal reasons, we at HotE frequently refer as Gussie Finknottle); Sir Regius rather less so (however bullish he may seem, his irresistible urge to answer back to every criticism speaks, to my mind, of a nagging and persistent insecurity in spite of all his considerable and well-deserved success, which is kind of sweet really).  Be all that as it may, the only evidence proffered in support of the Gove/FHA contention comes in the comments to Sir Regius’ LRB piece where one of the devisers of the Schools History Project (SHP) proclaims it a failure because of a flight away from the subject among students given a choice.  I am unconvinced either that this is, in itself, a disaster or that the solution is to pander to what excites teenagers.  Is the solution to the flight of teenagers away from the lab sciences the introduction of more experiments featuring bad egg gas and explosions?  I’m not a scientist but I expect the answer is no.

Let us consider FHA’s position.  Note, first, that everyone who does not share his position, or who defends the current situation is ‘politicised’ or 'partisan', as though his own position isn’t.  This has long been a standard tactic of demagogues of the Right, to berate educators or other holders of office as ‘politicised’ or 'partisan', essentially for not being politicised or partisan in the way they’d like.  The conservative or Conservative view, you see, is not political; it’s not Right, it’s just right: the way things should be.  This would be undercut by FHA’s desire to disrupt the status quo with a radical move back to the alleged good old days, pre-SHP, but here he makes a currently not untypical move by the Right (and pseudo-Left), which is to denigrate and thus, in a way, politically decentre, the status quo as ‘the establishment’.  The move attempts to recoup a sort of fundamental conservatism even while proposing radical, reactionary change.  Note how FHA scorns Oxbridge ivory towers, in spite of being an independent-school-and-Oxford-educated beneficiary of all the advantages (including, let it be said, access to popular media) that that background brings; in spite of having taught at Oxbridge for most of his career and retaining a grace-and-favour post at Jesus College (ironically, Sir Regius’ alma mater).

What Gove and FHA offer is narrative and fact.  I have argued before on this blog that factual historical narrative does not teach you ‘how we got where we are’ or help one to understand one’s place in the world, and that it is not ‘relevant’, as relevance is usually understood; there’s no need for me to repeat that argument.  The points to stress are that any narrative depends upon selection and choice (and is thus politically implicated) and that no facts, historical or otherwise, exist independently of language.  This means both that the language we choose to describe facts (‘victory’ or ‘defeat’, for example) is not neutral and that the function that facts fulfil within narrative depends, as in linguistic syntax, upon their juxtapositions to other facts, the choice of the mode of the narrative, and so on.  I’ve made these points before (they’re hardly novel anyway).  Simple narrative is not – it cannot be – politically neutral.  The national narrative – and this is clear from Gove’s own speech – is predicated upon being, in itself, explanation, and upon the notion that modern Britain is somehow the best of all possible worlds.  Similar points undermine the highly incoherent notion of ‘cultural literacy’, supported by Gove and other right-wingers, and ‘national memory’ but there’s no space to go into that.  It is impossible to claim that a return to a focus on British historical narrative is anything other than shot through with politically-laden ideas or that those ideas are not precisely the ones that Gove’s opponents accuse them of being.  The implications of any attempt to claim either of these things will emerge below.

Why does it matter to study British history?  “Surely”, says FHA, “they [Sir Regius and his ilk] can't sincerely think it's acceptable for children to leave school (as mine have all done) knowing nothing whatever about the Norman conquest, the English civil war or the Glorious Revolution, but plenty (well, a bit) about the Third Reich, the New Deal and the civil rights movement?”  Surely.  Note the rhetorical strategy.  It’s there too in a response by another Cambridge professor (let’s, for legal reasons, call him ‘Grave Robin’) to Sir Regius’ LRB article: “I doubt that anyone [anyone] interested in history, professionally or otherwise, thinks that the purpose of studying the past is to acquire skills, let alone that what Evans describes as ‘the transmission and regurgitation of “facts”’ is unimportant.”  Let me say, first, that I don’t see any reason at all why it is ipso factobad to know ‘nothing about the Norman Conquest, the English Civil War or the Glorious Revolution but plenty … about the Third Reich, the New Deal and the civil rights movement’; at least I don’t see that leaving school knowing nothing about the Norman Conquest, the English Civil War or the Glorious Revolution but plenty about the Third Reich, the New Deal and the civil rights movement is any worse than leaving school knowing nothing about the Third Reich, the New Deal and the civil rights movement but plenty about the Norman Conquest, the English Civil War or the Glorious Revolution.  The only argument in Gove’s or FHA’s favour is the ‘cultural literacy’ one, that not knowing about the facts they list puts a student at a disadvantage in a culture where political and other participation requires the ability to talk knowledgably about the Norman Conquest, etc.  But what if we want to create a culture where it’s important to be able to talk knowledgably about the civil rights movement or the New Deal (no prizes for guessing why the latter wouldn’t be on FHA’s list!).  Even speaking as a specialist in pre-modern history I have to say I’d rather the latter culture than the former, but I’d prefer, to either, a culture where people had the skills to be able to think critically about a historical event and look up and assess the facts of the matter, rather than just thinking that fact-knowing was all there was to civil or political engagement.  So, even as someone interested in history, at a professional level, actually I most certainly do see the fundamental purpose of a historical education as the acquisition of skills (maybe Robin and I differ over what is a skill) and I do see the regurgitation of facts as unimportant.  So, FHA, we surely do, and, Robin, you doubt wrongly.  And?

Then the defence becomes, via the historian to whom, for legal reasons, we will refer as Long John, author of that mighty historiographical work British History for Dummies (a tome curiously absent from his Anglia Ruskin web-site but of which I was the reader – you can fill in your own ‘target audience focus group’ gag here) - just, you might say, the man to advise the Tory Party - that ‘the kids’ want to know what happened.  They like stories; they want to be entertained or excited.  Sure, but I return to my science analogy.  Can you imagine a lab science curriculum based upon considerations like these?  It would involve the listing of things that happen, a descent to the experiments with the most dramatic results.  Add X to Y and … Bang!  Woo!  Cool!  So what?  You could make an analogous, and equally coherent, argument (to FHA’s about history-teaching) that all ‘hard science’ teaching should focus on the learning of results: knowing what happens when you mix X and Y, add A to B, or do Z in fashion C.  It’d be useful, practically.  It’d certainly give students some orientation in the world they inhabit.  But science (I’m not a scientist as I keep saying but I don’t think I’m way off-beam here) is about knowing principles, knowing why these things happen and how you’d test the notion that they do, or that they necessarily do, not just that they do.  The question one then has to ask of Gove, FHA and the rest, quite apart from querying their assumption that history teaching of the current kind is necessarily not exciting or interesting (and Sir Regius in a letter replying to the replies to his article – yes, again – provides decent evidence to the contrary), is why they think that historical education should be less than scientific? 

In my view, one produces politically-engaged citizens through teaching general principles and the skills of finding out if or why, of testing the extent to which, those principles are valid, not by drumming into them a series of events whose importance is held to be self-evident in a story which is explanation and whose justification is the idea that the present is the best of all possible worlds.  Unlike the author of the Standpoint piece, I just cannot see the notion that teachers challenge supposedly eternal canonical ‘truths’ in ‘progressive’ education as a bad thing (it’s telling that ‘progressive’ is employed a dirty word).   Grave Robin feels he’s scored a real point by pointing out that this Tory view is in fact … wait for it … a ‘Whig’ view of history (a point that Sir Regius had made in any case) but it’s a point that goes nowhere except to the curious counter-factual that if we had a view of history, now, that was based around Tory views of the eighteenth century it would be – get this – different.  Blinding.  The drumming of a standard factual narrative into schoolchildren will not produce critically-engaged citizens, it will produce uncritical acceptance of the status quo as the inevitable and best outcome of ‘our island story’ – that’s why the Right like the idea.  Would the ludicrous parody of a science curriculum I set out earlier produce better scientists or citizens better equipped to deal with the world around them?  I’m not a scientist but I expect the answer is no.

So let’s return to the Glorious Revolution.  How would knowing about it make you a better citizen than knowing about Rosa Parks and MLK?  What on earth is there in learning about the English Civil War, let alone the Norman Conquest, that would make you a more engaged citizen?  OK, next time the issue of the Divine Right of Kings or the legality of levying Ship Money without parliamentary consent become political hot potatoes, the next time that the King of Norway and the Duke of Normandy team up for a cunningly simultaneous invasion of England, we’ll be looking to you for political and strategic advice.  For Gove/FHA and co., there are two responses available to this admittedly facetious point.  One (the better) is that the significance of an event transcends its factual specifics; that it’s not the what but the how and why that matter.  The other is that the importance of the events of 1066, 1642 or 1688 consists simply in the fact that they, in and of, themselves led to the situation we find ourselves in – in Britain – today, whereas the civil rights movement (rather arguably) didn’t.

Consider the first response.  It produces, in return, two questions.  First: how does one evaluate issues of how and why without source criticism?  Second: if the significance of knowing about 1066, 1642 or 1688 does not consist in the specifics of those events, if its value is more than simply learning a triumphal ‘island story’ narrative, if its role in forming a politically-engaged and responsible citizenry transcends the event itself, then why learn about that particular event rather than the end of the Roman Empire or the coronation of Charlemagne or the revolutions of 1848?  If there is a transcendent value to the study of events, is it not in explaining and evaluating them and their significance?  If one is to explain an event, rather than just learn it, then one has to question the idea that it simply followed on naturally from the preceding event in the sequence – that other things were possible.  Thus one questions narrative as explanation (and thus, at least implicitly, the importance of narrative context).  If one wants to evaluate an event, rather than just learn it, one has to weigh up its positive and negative effects - unless of course one simply wants to teach children that all things are for the best that lead to the best of all possible worlds.  Weighing up positives and negatives, critically, implies looking at the problems of the sources (or ‘identifying bias’ in the awful language of school history that we have to spend so long trying to exorcise at university): source criticism.  If one wants to get away from a simple depersonalised history of institutions or Great Men and Battles (and note that the triumphal island story does rather minimise any sort of attention to gender), evaluating the consequences of an event involves an exercise in trying to think how people at the time, of different sorts, experienced them – unless, as I keep saying, it’s all for the best in our celebratory island story.  Doing that means an appeal to a shared humanity, in other words an exercise in imagination and empathy.

What I am arguing, then, is that the FHA/Gove/Long John approach cannot logically remain within the terms of its own rhetoric - unless it aims actively to suppress critical evaluation, and/or unless it aims no higher than the promulgation of historical facts, whether as an empty-headed Lang-esque series of lame puns or a Deary-esque sequence of gory factoids, training history students to be no more than prurient raconteurs, or as a triumphal, teleological nationalist narrative, unless – in other words – it does exactly what its critics accuse it of doing; unless – in fine – it ceases not merely to be a historical education but an education of any kind.

Let me put that another way.  Unless it adopts the second response listed above to the question of how the value of knowing about an event transcends its factual detail (that the importance of the events of 1066, 1642 or 1688 consists in the simple fact that, in and of themselves, they led to the situation we find ourselves in – in Britain – today whereas, say, the civil rights movement didn’t) and thus admits to the charges its opponents lay before it, the Gove/FHA idea of school history cannot logically remain within its own rhetorical parameters.  The moment it tries to transcend the accusation of narrow, teleological, triumphalist, nationalist fact-learning, it transgresses – it cannot but transgress – onto the territory, aims, ideals and principles of the ‘progressive’ SHP history-teaching that it claims to despise.  The moment it claims to be other than what its opponents accuse it of being, it empties its own rhetoric of any and all content and reveals itself as what it is: a narrow-minded reactionary attempt to play politics by pandering to the lowest common-denominator amongst Daily Mail columnists (like FHA himself) and the more gullible elements of their readership.

The reason why schools history prepares pupils so badly for university history has nothing to do with the current curriculum or the ways the subject is taught, or by whom.  The problem lies in political interference in schools and in the examination processes that that has engendered.  There are great history teachers, there are mediocre ones, and there are terrible ones, as in any other subject.  I had a mix at my school, from wonderful to dreadful.  The problem came (and here things do get ironic for the FHA view) with the Thatcherite and sub-Thatcherite (New Labour) mantra of choice.  The desire to ‘enable’ parents as consumers and give them a choice of local schools led to the production of league tables according to exam results (everyone knows how problematic those tables are).  Once that happened then – naturally and indeed rightly – teachers demanded more transparency about the marking of examination papers, how marks were awarded and so on.  That has led in turn to the current situation where teachers have to teach to the test, where they have to drill their students in mark-scoring.  That leaves the legacy that we have to deal with in universities, a deep-seated, ingrained belief that there will be measurable ways to get specific marks.  Recently I was asked (not by a bad or lazy student) ‘how many historians do I need to cite to get the best mark?’  Students write in specific ways because they are drilled into thinking that they will get them marks.  None of any of that has anything at all to do with the ‘progressive’ history curriculum.  It certainly wouldn’t get any better under Gove’s reforms.  What would really improve schools history would be to remove political interference from it.  But, as Sir Regius says, that’s unlikely ever to happen.  History is (or it ought to be) dangerous.  I tell prospective students that a history degree is (or ought to be) three years of thinking dangerously.  FHA benefited from precisely that, you might say.  It’s a shame he now wants to make it so safe for everyone else.

A few more thoughts on contact hours

[Here's another extract from my 2nd-year briefing, which I present for prospective (and indeed current) university students and their parents.  It's a sort of attempt to make a kind of contract between me and my 2nd-years.  So far - though they're a tough crowd - they seem to be working very well in class, so maybe some of it went in, with some of them!  But it follows on from what I've said before about contact hours and how to understand the issue.]

[What I expect of my students]

No, Mr Bond, I expect you to give me
 your take on Book II of Gregory
of Tours' Histories

It’s easy enough for me to say what I expect of you.  In the inverse of what Auric Goldfinger said to James Bond, I don’t expect you to die; I expect you to talk.  In other words to take a full part in the discussion groups.  And I expect you to do the work.  I expect you to engage critically with what I say, not to parrot it or slavishly agree (which would go against everything I’ve just said), but not just to stick your fingers in your ears and say ‘la la la I can’t hear you’ either.  You don’t need to agree with me to get good marks – the highest marks I’ve ever given have been for essays that disagree with me.  I don’t have to be convinced; I just have to think you’ve made a good, solidly-based argument that shows you’ve thought critically about what I’ve said, within the parameters of what can be expected of a second-year undergraduate.  And those are the parameters you’re judged against; not some abstract historical ideal but what you can be expected to know and do in (or after) a one term 2^nd-year undergraduate course).

 

[What my students can expect of me]

That’s what I expect.  What can you expect?  Now as I see it there are certain demands on the part of students which come up again and again.  One is the issue of contact hours; the other is a concern to be taught by the senior, permanent members of staff, the currently-recognised established historians.  I understand both of these concerns, and to some extent I share them.  To take the second one first, I will say – sincerely – that being taught by the established staff-member doesn’t necessarily mean getting the best tuition.  The young grad student might very well have more enthusiasm and newer and better ideas for teaching.  But what we are going to do nevertheless on the course is swap over half way through, so that the two groups taught by [my TA] in the first half of the term will be taught by me in the second half, and vice versa.  Whether you want to see that as ensuring that you all get a turn with the big hot-shot professor or as making sure you aren’t stuck with the old lag for the whole term but get a chance with the sparky young historian too, is entirely up to you!

Now: contact hours.  Like I said, I share your concerns about this, up to a point.  What’s more I share your concerns about value, especially now you have to pay fees – which is an obscenity in my view but then it would be.  But numbers of hours are a crude measure.  You shouldn’t just think in terms of quantity but quality.  You should work to ensure that you get the most out of the small-group contact-hours you get, by being fully prepared, by having done the reading, by being willing to talk in class.  Contact hours can’t just be pushed up and up because we expect you, especially in years two and three, to prepare properly for them, so for each extra hour you get, you’d have to do more preparation.  That’s the bottom line.  The point is not for me to stand up here and tell you what to write, what to think, what you need to say to pass the exam.  I don’t think it’s what you want either, whatever you might think superficially.  If that was all that happened in a History degree, then a BA History wouldn’t be worth the paper it’s written on; in just the same way as people’s attitudes to A-Levels have changed since it became possible just to coach people to the high grades.  There’d be even greater qualification-inflation and even more expense to get them.  So think on.

What’s more if you just wanted to be told what’s what, that would contradict your concerns to be taught by the most renowned and established members of staff.  …  There’s no point in having a top-flight, internationally-respected historian just telling you what to write to pass an exam, for the simple reason that if it were that simple, a first-year PhD student could do that every bit as well.  Come to think of it, a top third-year undergraduate could tell you.  It’d be like having a Ferrari but only using it to drive down to the shops at the end of the street.  It’d be like buying Lionel Messi and using him as a ball boy.  So, if you want your money’s worth then you have to make the most of me lecturing to you on stuff that I know and am actively engaged in, or talking about it with you in class.

There will be tough stuff to grasp on this course.  It will make your head hurt at times.  It makes mine hurt sometimes.  But – and this is the most important thing – I’m here to help you with all that.  Again, if you want your money’s worth – and why wouldn’t you? – you have to make use of what’s available to you.  I’ll be available in my office hours ... and you should come and talk to me; you can e-mail me and ask questions; you can arrange an appointment at another time.  You can just bang on my door.

I’m paid to teach you.  That does not mean lowering the bar and making it all so easy that you can coast through; it means helping you to raise your game so you can get over a higher bar more easily.  Let’s be clear about that.  I’m sure you’ve had this analogy before, but think of University as like an expensive intellectual gym.  If you joined a gym with a world-class athlete as a personal trainer, you’d be mad not to make use of him or her.  But you wouldn’t expect him or her to do the exercises for you, to get fit on your behalf or lose weight for you.  The trainer’s there to help you get fit but you won’t get fit or lose weight without doing the exercises yourself and feeling the pain.  I’m the trainer.

I spent the first 11 years of my career teaching mature students so I’m used to treating my students as adults.  I expect you to behave as responsible adults and therefore to work to make sure you get the best value for money and the best education and to ensure that you get the results you want.  What you can expect of me is, as I just said, to do whatever I can to help you get intellectually into shape to make sure you do yourselves justice.  I hope we have a deal.  If we do, we’ll learn a lot, expand our minds, be able to think better about the world and – I hope – have a bit of a laugh too along the way.  If we don’t you’ll just make me angry and – believe me – you won’t like me when I’m angry.

Professor Grumpy's Historical Manifesto

[This is an edited bit of my introductory 'briefing' lecture to my new second-years yesterday.  I didn't get the feeling it went very well - I think they were expecting a 15 mins 'here's the course book and my office hours are...' rather than a full-on manifesto.  But still, I got some decent feedback later on...  A Facebook friend asked how we justify medieval history not long ago, so here's my answer.  This section came after a section about why late antiquity had attracted my interest, personally, about all the big changes that took place around 600, and about why they might be important.  That concluded, though, by asking why it mattered to know any of that.  Now read on...]

 

Why does any History matter?

Think of the ways in which people – maybe you – justify the study of history. I expect two themes come up: relevance and ‘how we got where we are’. I’d say, though, that no history is relevant … or alternatively that all history is equally relevant.

What do people mean when they say that history is relevant?

It’s, let’s face it, usually a justification for modern history. To understand the modern world, the argument runs, we have to understand its history. So, to understand the problems, say, of Iraq, Afghanistan, or Ireland, or the Balkans, we need to know the history of those regions. Sounds reasonable, but actually we don’t. It’s no more use to study the modern history of those regions than it is to study the end of the Roman world.

Why? Well, let’s look at the problem more closely. Let’s take, for example, a modern Ulster Unionist or Irish Republican, or a Serbian nationalist (or a nationalist from any other area – including Scotland). Does a knowledge of the history of Serbia or Ireland help us understand his actions (let’s assume it’s a he)? No it doesn’t. For one thing, we’ll soon discover that the ‘history’ that he uses to justify his case or actions is cock-eyed and wrong. Does it help just to know the events he makes reference to, that he keeps harping on about – the Battle of Kosovo Pole or the Battle of Boyne, say? Does it help to know that in reality King Billy’s army was paid for by the Pope, or alternatively that Cromwell’s troops killed rather more English soldiers than Irish civilians at the sacks of Drogheda and Wexford? Does it help to know that for most of their history Serbs and Croats and Bosnians rubbed along together in their communities just fine (think about it; if they hadn’t, ‘ethnic cleansing’ wouldn’t have been ‘necessary’)? Does it help, when confronted by Greek nationalism (such as there’s a lot of at the moment), to know that in the 1830s 80% of Athens spoke Albanian? That the only reason that (allegedly) Socrates could still read a Greek newspaper if he came back to life is that Greek was reinvented on more classical lines, and purged of Slavic and Turkish words in the late 19th century (as was Romanian, which is the only reason why it’s as close as Italian is to Latin)? No. It might get you punched in the face but it won’t help you understand why.

Knowing 'what really happened in history' is Chronicling not history.  And it isn't much practical use outside pub quizzes*. 1: It reduces history to simple fact-finding; and simple factual recounting isn’t history. 2: It assumes that the simple course of events explains them, and thus that the course of events naturally, inevitably, led to particular outcomes (where we are today). 3: Our modern nationalists aren’t operating under compulsion from the Past. The past has no power; it’s dead and gone. It can’t make you do anything. These people are choosing events from their understanding of the past to justify what they are doing or what they want to do in the present. 
*Though it does provide a useful basis for undermining the claims of Nationalists and others, and that is important, it's not (and this is really my point) really history.

There’s another justification. If we’d only known more about Iraqi or Afghan history in the 20th century – so runs the argument in e.g. John Tosh’s Why History Matters – we’d have thought twice about invading because we’d have seen what would happen. What – because these people always act the same way in response to certain stimuli, according to some kind of timeless national characteristics? Isn’t that just a mite – well – racist? There are some general similarities for sure between Iraq in the 1920s and in the first decade of the 21st century but to assume that the latter state of affairs was predictable from the former is essentialist at best.

These arguments are usually deployed to bolster a claim that modern history is somehow more useful or relevant but, as I’ve just shown, they’re all a bit weak theoretically, relying on a pretty poor conception of history: history as only a collection of fact. Further they provide no justification for any sort of cut-off point in how far back we go. By their own logic, there’s no reason why, to ‘understand’ Afghanistan today you shouldn’t go all the way back to Mahmud of Ghazni in the tenth century, or to Sikhander himself, Alexander the Great, or further. For if the events of say the 1990s can only be understood by studying the events of 1900-1990, then the explanation is incomplete, because surely the events of 1900 can only be understood in terms of those of 1800-99, and the events of 1800 by those of 1700-99, and so on back to the earth cooling. A modern ‘relevance’ cut-off point is purely arbitrary and contingent and doesn’t at all follow from the logic of the argument.

So: let’s unpack the historical project and see what the really important – and relevant – elements of the analysis are. In looking at our modern nationalist and his/her relationship with the past, what are we, essentially, doing? First of all we’re showing an interest in understanding the world view of another human being – I’ll come back to that. Second, though, we’re adopting a critical stance to his or her thought or world view. Thus we’re recognising similarity in the sense of a shared humanity, but simultaneously acknowledging difference. We’re not taking the nationalist’s account as gospel truth; we’re questioning it, examining it critically. And that goes for all the voices from or about the past, or from the past about the past. History is about never believing what you’re told – taking a stance of radical scepticism. Put another way, slightly flippantly, the question we are always asking is not ‘is this bastard lying to me, but why is this lying bastard lying to me?’ (an adapted quote from a famous journalist.)

And that’s exactly it, because what we’re doing after that analysis of the evidence is trying to understand why people are acting like that. Why are they making that cock-eyed use of the past? These are questions that require not data but theoretical models, an analytical tool-kit if you like – and you can get that tool-kit from the study of any history. Thus all history is equally valid, equally relevant – or equally invalid and irrelevant if you prefer!

The true point of history, as I see it is as a basis for engaging with, and action in, the world, not a simple exercise of sitting in a library finding out stuff about the Emperor Maurice or Stalin or Philip V. That exercise of critical engagement with what you’re told is a key to that. But there are other key elements at stake.

Another key point concerns the idea that history had to be like that, that it had to have particular outcomes, that the world we know was the natural outcome of all that. But nothing is ‘just like that’. It doesn’t have to be that way. To understand change you have to see all the other possibilities that were open and that could have come about. It’s about ‘keeping faith with the impossible’. Many of the things we think of as natural ways of classifying the world aren’t natural at all: like race and sexuality. If studying late antiquity does have an advantage it is in making that very clear. Late antique people didn’t see colour as the basis for their way of organising the peoples of the world; they didn’t have concepts of homosexuality or heterosexuality. Their ideas of sexuality were quite different.

Which brings us back to understanding the other: seeing these people as humans, like us, and yet somehow different; listening carefully to their stories but critically examining them. Paying attention to alternatives and different ways of doing things isn’t about wishy-washy relativism; it’s not saying that all things are equally valid – it is about trying to understand them.

All that gives us enormously important skills in dealing with, and acting within, our world in the present. When the papers tell us that this or that category of people are doing this, or are like that, or are to blame for something else, historical analysis gives us the skills of source criticism; it also accustoms us to think twice before accepting a judgement; it allows us to try and see other possibilities, the other side of the story. If we make a judgement it will almost certainly be a more sophisticated and less extreme one, but wherever we end up it will be a more responsible and informed choice of opinion and action, and if we spread that, we do good.

There’s a humanity that permeates the entire process of historical enquiry; the critical questions we ask, the desire to understand, which we must bring from history to our everyday lives. They make it impossible in my view to cast human lives off to the demands of the market, or the nation, or the class struggle. That’s why I always say there’s a huge ethical demand involved in history. Huge. Unbearable in fact. But a good historian doesn’t switch off her critical faculties when moving from the seventh century to the twenty-first. There is a demand for commitment there. So I hope you see why I think my politics are the politics of history; they’ve after all grown out of twenty-odd years of being an historian, and I think being a pretty good one at that.

Now – all this, I am sure is making some of you a bit uncomfortable. Good. History is meant to make you uncomfortable. Clio, the muse of history, is like Jesus: she brings not peace but a sword. She will make you rethink everything you think you know; everything you think you hold dear; she will make you question everything. Everything you were brought up with; everything you thought natural. She’s not here to wrap you in cotton wool and say ‘there, there’ everything is just how it’s supposed to be. She’s not there to bring succour to your view of your country, or smooth over the bad stuff that it did, or to soothe your conscience about the massacres perpetuated in the name of your religion, or the slaughter committed by people who at least claimed to share your political beliefs. She’s there to make you uneasy. She’s there to stop you from falling victim to her evil twin, Myth. In a sense I want to free you from feeling like the past controls us; that we have to base our identities in the present upon myths. That means we don’t have to feel guilty or apologise, either – just to be aware; to understand.

Put another way, the historian is the ‘Internal Affairs guy’. This is a well-known figure in popular TV ‘cop shows’ and rarely a ‘good guy’. He or she is there to suppose that the hero has lied or done something wrong and that the villains might have been wronged or be telling the truth. The character rarely turns out to be as unsettling as that but it works as an analogy. For me, the historian is not there to provide comforting truths but to question them. The historian must always be prepared to wonder whether the ‘heroes’ of history are not, in fact, the villains,

If you believe anything at all, if you want your belief to be solid, in other words, it has to be on the basis of taking it apart and putting it back together on the basis of radical scepticism.

Politicians of all sorts – left and right - always want to control the teaching of history. History is a real political football, and in the light of what I’ve just been saying you can see why. It’s about not believing what you’re told without close scrutiny; it’s about trying to understand the other; it’s about trying to see and evaluate another point of view. That makes history potentially VERY dangerous. What a history degree should be is three years of thinking dangerously. And the sixth and seventh centuries are as good a thing to think dangerously with as any other era.

So, voilà. That’s my historical manifesto. You can read my views on this sort of thing at various stages of development on my blog. The main thing is that that’s what I want this course to do – to bring out this sort of critical ethical tool-kit through the study of an interesting, and important period of change.

School History: A reflection

Since I posted my last somewhat exasperated comments I thought a bit more about this.  I'm not saying that there is no purpose to straight factual, chronological knowledge about the past - what I called Pub Quiz General Knowledge.  Surely it does enrich one's life to be able to look at one's surroundings and know that that church is older than the manor house, which is older than the factory.  or to have some idea about the periods in which they are built.  And if - as it surely is - education is to some extent about enhancing one's cultural awareness, then there is important value in that.  I suppose what I am wondering is a: whether this sort of thing ought to be compulsory; b: whether it needs to be examined; and c: the extent to which damage is done by trying to weave this sort of thing into some sort of 'Our Island Story' narrative.  I think that this basic 'cultural awareness' sense of history is more than slightly sullied by its insertion into some nationally-determined, compulsory curriculum.

When it comes to what I think history REALLY is, when we get beyond knowing who came first out of the Romans or the Vikings, we don't need any of this.  The real, socially and culturally valuable skills of History proper can be taught regardless of the place or period under study - they are all equally 'relevant' if one has a more sophisticated understanding of what relevance might mean.

School History: really, what is the point?

All right, I will cheerily admit that I am not entirely averse to saying things just to provoke people, and even - sometimes, just sometimes - just to annoy them.  So you might want to take what I am going to say in that sort of spirit.  In fact, however, although I am entirely willing to be disagreed with and indeed to change my mind, I am actually quite serious in what I am about to say.

And that is that I find the debates over what sort of history should be taught in school, both the political proposals of the odious Gove and the responses to them to be so intellectually worthless that it leads you (well, me) to wonder whether we might not be better off not teaching history in school at all - or at least not making it compulsory.  I'm serious.

Gove wants schools to focus on a triumphalist narrative of British history.  Is this what Schools history is for?  To foster some kind of petty nationalism? (There was a good response to Gove by Richard Evans not long ago.  I will post the link when I find it.)  I think most of us will agree that it is not, not least because it really runs a risk of alienating significant parts of the modern population of Great Britain unless the way that 'British history' is conceived of undergoes a serious, radical overhaul.  I don't mean by including the Empire, or making sure that all of the British Isles are covered.  I mean by rethinking what Britain (in the present) is and what history has to contribute to it.

Answers to that sort of question have tended to be couched in terms of 'narrative' and 'relevance' - neither of which terms seems to me to encourage any sophisticated understanding of history.  It is perhaps not surprising then that most of the public contributions to the debate (apart from Evans') have come from people that I do not regard as historians, but as writers, journalists, broadcasters and gentlemen-chroniclers or antiquaries.

Many of those of us who teach history at university will agree that schools history instills in students very little sense of what history is really about, and very few of the skills for university history.  I am not entirely sure what a simple factual awareness of British (or any) history is really supposed to do to enhance anyone's life or culture.  I doubt it would do any more than memorising the county towns of England in geography lessons would, or taking up English literature classes with learning which British writers wrote which books (perhaps accompanied by 'memorable quotes').  In other words a rather shallow form of pub quiz general knowledge.  After all, most people think that's all history is in any case...

I have argued before on this blog that history is about interpretive skills and understanding other cultures.  The whole debate needs a major imput from proper historians and moving completely outside the limitations within which it is currently constrained. If schools history is to continue as a political football and the debate on it remains focused simply on what sort of British story it should tell or what bits are most 'relevant' then - seriously - I would be all for making it an optional subject and replacing it with compulsory philosophy.

News from 'the siege' (or On 'Being Brought up to Speed')

Last week I made the inaugural ‘Historian on the Edge Dumb-Ass TV-History Moment of the Week Award’. Not, you'll agree, something that was meant (or indeed deserved) to be taken very seriously.  I went on to express a view that this bit of egregious nonsense presumably entered the programme courtesy of the director/researcher/script-writers rather than the person upon whose book it was based, one William Hastings Burke (aet. 27).

However, although on the TV he seemed nice enough, a sensible sort and certainly someone whom you couldn't fault for involving himself with a just cause, I then read this in Burke's on-line biography:
Fed up with the stuffy academic approach to history, he is part of a new generation bringing history up to speed.
http://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/william-hastings-burke/

I expressed the view that, if he agreed that blurb or (worse) actually wrote it, then it smacked of more than a little arrogance. I went on to describe what sort of arrogance it was in some fairly 'up-to-speed' language rather than in the 'stuffy' discourse of actually qualified historians, as it seemed more appropriate.

None of this was meant massively seriously; I certainly never expected the outcome.  Today I heard from his publishers, demanding that I modify this ‘defamatory’ comment, which I have done, cheerfully enough. It was probably inappropriate, though I don't agree that it was actually defamatory. They make the very good points that Burke spent five years on his book, working in near poverty, devoting himself to promoting the rehabilitation of Albert Goering.

Well if that's true, (seriously and honestly) hats off to Burke for all that. But none of that is what I was talking about. The point I was discussing was his on-line biography and its claims. You might wonder why I get so angry with this sort of blurb from pop publishers; why I seem to be getting my Calvins in a bunch over one stupid twenty-one-word sentence. Here’s why (and remember that here I am entirely dealing with the claims made in his blurb, not with his espousal of the cause of Albert Goering, whom he rightly regards as a hero – good luck to him on that front and all congratulations on raising A. Goering’s profile are deserved):

Burke claims (or his 'literary and talent agent' claims on his behalf) to be part of new generation ‘bringing history up to speed’. For someone with no qualifications beyond a BA (and not even a BA in History!) to claim to be able to do this is – let’s face it – monstrously arrogant. Such is the lack of funding for post-graduate degrees that ‘stuffy academics’, in order even to get on the path possibly to being ‘stuffy academics’ in the first place, have to pass exams at a level that puts them in top few percentile of people who read history at university, making them well within the top 1% of people interested in history. They then have to work hard (and hardly rolling in wealth as they do it, even if ‘near poverty’ might be going a bit far) while they carry out their research, research which must then be judged by their elders to be of a sufficient quality to earn them their MA and then their doctorate. Then, to get a job in academia, of which there are few, they must additionally prove themselves better than significant numbers of their contemporaries in a tough competition. To get published they must again prove their right to enter the field of historical debate through acceptance by more established scholars (‘peer-review’ is in effect something you only get later on in your career). And their first book (and subsequent ones) usually take a sight more than five years. More to the point, I don’t think it unfair to suggest that ‘stuffy’ academic historians see what they are doing as a real cause for the betterment of humanity. Many stuffy academic historians (not least those who work on the Nazis) have worked hard for real causes every bit as serious as the rehabilitation of Albert Goering.

But after all this, they have to endure the likes of William Hastings Burke, and/or his publishers/agents, telling them they are stuffy and need bringing up to speed, while publishers refuse academic historians’ work because it does not tell simple enough stories. Of course I get angry, and so should all professional historians and indeed anyone who gives a damn about the place and value of proper history in modern society. If my selection of William Hastings Burke as an example happens to be fortuitous or even contingent (there are - sure as hell - more deserving targets and, unlike some I could mention, he has at least done his own research), the case is entirely symptomatic of the threat that proper historians face from pop/TV history and its perpetrators. Evidently, historical training and qualification are irrelevant.  Real historians aren't needed.  Anyone who can read or write can do history.  I refer to the situation as ‘the siege’, but I will have to come back to that anon.

To expand: Burke has not had to put himself or his work, or his scholarly abilities, through any of the process above (which is certainly not to say he has none - for all I know he might (potentially) be the world's greatest living historian - just that he hasn't exposed those abilities to rigorous scrutiny) and has not had to do any teaching of history and so hasn’t had to face up to the problems of making serious history less ‘stuffy’ to undergraduates like Burke himself. That’s all fair enough; it’s not something one can be criticised or blamed for, in itself, so I don't regard any of the above as defamatory or intend it to be read as such.  What is (to me) objectionable is that he then claims to be (or his agents claim he is) in a position to "bring the discipline up-to-speed". In my book, whether on his part or his publishers’, that is arrogant, pure and simple. The claims made in his on-line biography won't win William Hastings Burke any friends among proper historians.  He may not care, and that's fair enough - there's no reason why he should - but, if he does and he didn’t write it himself, his agents aren't doing him any favours by writing and publishing it.

Here is some more from the blurb on his 'literary and talent agents'' page (try not to laugh; I assure you I am not making this up; read it for yourself here: http://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/william-hastings-burke/thirty-four/):

“Enter William, a twentysomething from Sydney, Australia, who stumbles upon the tattered pieces of Albert’s history. Shelving plans for a Ph.D., William sets off on a three year odyssey across eight countries and three continents to piece together the puzzling life of Albert Göring.

“Forget staid biography. Think seat of your pants travelogue mixed with a Spielberg eye for storytelling and you start to get a taste for the energy William brings to the page. Delivering the kind of must-read story that turns history on its head, Thirty Four gives us a new hero. Standing alongside Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg is the Göring history forgot.”

No one should necessarily be blamed for the idiocies of publishers' marketing departments (when my first book came out, the CUP marketing department produced a flyer which mangled my blurb from saying that this was 'the first study in English of a part of the Merovingian world for nearly twenty years', to saying that it was 'the first study of the Merovingian world for twenty years': oh, the embarassment).  If it were true that Hastings Burke were indeed ‘stumbl[ing] upon the tattered pieces of Albert’s history’ for the first time, to ‘piece together the puzzling life of Albert Göring’, whom ‘history forgot’, to ‘turn history on its head’, then one would have to doff one’s hat to him and forgive a certain amount of misplaced chutzpah.  Likewise even if it were only the case that the claim made by his publishers in their letter me were true: that 'his book and dedication to Albert's legacy have meant that this story has been able to reach a far broader audience.  Until recently Albert was almost unheard of'.

Here are three points.  You can draw your own conclusions:
1. The documentary (at least in the part I saw – I missed the beginning) did not note that much of the story was already easily available on line, having been posted by Louis Bülow:
http://www.goering.dk/.
Bülow’s website also draws attention to the suspicious resemblance between Albert Goering and his godfather, though it at least does not explain the differences between the brothers on the basis of alleged illegitimacy.

2. As Bülow points out, the German Journalist/TV-Historian Guido Knopp had, in a book published in German in 2000, already drawn attention to Albert Goering’s work in rescuing people from the Nazis. Knopp’s book appeared in English in 2001 and is, I believe, a best-seller translated into many languages.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hitlers-Holocaust-Guido-Knopp/dp/0750937823

3. Nor (again, as far as I could see) was any mention made of James Wyllie’s book, The Warlord and the Renegade: The Story of Hermann and Albert Göring (2005) which, five years ago remember, had also drawn attention to the fact that:
“Albert deferred to Hermann as head of the family, but spent nearly a decade working against his brother's regime, intervening wherever possible to rescue the victims of Nazi tyranny, from humble shopkeepers to heads of state.”
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Warlord-Renegade-Hermann-Albert-Goring/dp/0750940255

Neither Knopp nor Wyllie are professional academic historians (though Wyllie at least has a history degree) but neither, to their credit, has made silly claims about how they are bringing ‘stuffy’ history ‘up-to-speed’.

Now, all that having been said, you’d have to be mad not to wish William Hastings Burke the very best of luck in getting Albert Goering recognised more generally or formally, but it is, to say the least, more than a little ‘naughty’ of his publishers and producers to claim that all this is ground-breaking news or fresh research. For all I know, Burke may have brought some new insights and information to all this (rest assured I will find out and let you know one way or the other) and Albert Goering's story probably does indeed need to be better known, but for historians, ‘stuffy’ as well as ‘up-to-speed’, Third-Reich-specialists or (like me) not, or for the many (hundreds of) thousands of people who have read Wyllie and Knopp's books or visited Bülow's web-site, Albert Goering’s courage and good works were not news.

Last week I suggested that being young and good-looking probably makes up for a lack of qualifications or originality in the world of Popular/TV history. Good luck to them that’s got the looks and the youth, but – please – don’t set yourself up as something you ain’t. You’ll just look silly, arrogant or w … orse.

Thanks all the same, but academic history doesn’t need 'bringing up to speed.'

The Revolution begins (in which I become involved with ‘rampaging’ student ‘protesters’ ‘fighting running battles with the police’ throughout central London … apparently)

I went to the demonstration against the government’s education cuts in London yesterday. It was very well attended. The organisers had expected 24,000 people but in the end claimed that 45,000 came, with other estimates topping 50,000. From where I was it was impossible to judge (fill in a comment here about the difficulties of estimating the size of early medieval armies…) though I would hazard a guess that it was closer to the latter figure than the former. Who knows? Anyway, after a trio of lacklustre speeches from representatives of the organising bodies (believe me, I could have done better myself) we were off, slowly moving down Whitehall past the Houses of Parliament (timed to coincide with Prime Minister’s Questions) and to Millbank. I think it took our bit of the march about an hour and a half to complete the route, which ought to give an idea of the numbers present, and we were very far from being at the back; people were still coming in large numbers all the way along the route as we walked back to central London to get something to eat. So it was good to see such a huge turn-out but, being the disillusioned type, I felt there were nevertheless grounds for concern. One (obviously) was that it is disheartening if not unexpected that students only get politicised and active when it is a matter of their own pockets (if our students are anything to go by, I imagine that a fair number of them voted for this government; indeed I quipped that the 'Poppleton' student contingent was probably there to protest that the proposed fees were far too low…). Disappointing, but I suspect it was ever thus, to some degree at least.

Amplifying this point and underlining my general unease, was the fact that – overwhelmingly – the student placards were concerned only with the fees issue. One at least made a demand for ‘value for money’ (I wager groans from 90% of any HE teachers reading this)! But the fees issue is only a symptom, not the cause. Successive governments (Labour as well as Conservative) have cut back on the funding of higher education and focused what government money there is on satisfying the perceived demands of ‘business’, something that utterly misunderstands the nature of ‘education’ as opposed to ‘training’. This, incidentally, is not a complaint limited to arts and humanities students; the ‘hard sciences’ were amongst the most vocal in protesting against the imposition of Mandelson’s ‘Impact’ agenda (indeed the official response from my own professional body, the Royal Historical Society, was so pathetic and lily-livered that I nearly resigned my fellowship in protest). So much the worse in a profoundly anti-intellectual culture, but the cuts threatened by Cameron and co. will so slash university funding that the universities will have no option but to raise fees, or else cut jobs and departments (they had already started this after the last Labour government’s cuts, and it’ll hardly get any better now). The focus on the placards suggested to me, though, that as long as fees are not raised (or are cut) the student body will be happy enough. The response will inevitably be more ‘mass-delivery’ teaching (i.e. lots of lectures) from fewer staff, but then my suspicion (alluded to in a previous post) is that, provided they get their increased ‘contact hours’ (students have a *very* poor understanding of this issue) telling them what to write for their exam, they’ll be happy enough. Maybe I’m wrong. I very much hope that I am. The chants didn’t always suggest a particularly tight focus on important matters but anyway, in the jargon of British journalism, ‘a carnival atmosphere prevailed’. I’d have liked a bit more anger, to be honest. No middle class revolution, this. Shame.

But, no. Apparently I was mistaken. On the Tube on the way home, having spent the rest of the afternoon in the middle of London, in an area encompassed by Victoria, Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road, I read The Evening Standard (latterly given away free, and so now changing hands at a price only marginally exceeding its value) and was struck by the coverage of the event. ‘STUDENT SIEGE’ shrieked the front page, which described how thousands of student ‘protesters’ (nothing so becomes a demonstrator as being called a protester) had ‘brought central London to a halt’ by ‘fighting running battles with the police’. Having spent all afternoon in central London this came as a bit of a surprise, I have to admit, as the only time I had been brought to a halt was by the usual slow-moving crowds of shoppers on Oxford Street. I certainly hadn’t seen or heard any sign of the alleged ‘running battles’, although clearly there were angry confrontations – the Standard had pictures after all – and clearly some students had broken into a building containing conservative offices on Millbank.

A look at various editions of the Standard was interesting. The earliest version simply had a picture of three young female students with placards (the sort of thing that Private Eye would satirise along the lines of ‘Journalists fear education cuts will reduce the number of fruity* female students they can photograph’ [* the word the Eye always uses]), a later version went along the lines of peaceful protest hi-hacked at the end, before the ‘all hell breaks loose’ version I saw.

Because I know (vaguely) one of its co-authors (a former York student, as it happens), today I read this piece in the Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/8124834/Student-tuition-fee-protest-lone-call-to-hit-Millbank-then-the-mob-descended.html
(Read the comments if you want to peer into the void, and see just how dim the British public [or Telegraph-readers at any rate*] is; note in particular the visceral islamophobia of the second comment.
* How did the old joke go?  The Times is read by the people who run the country; the Telegraph is read by the people who think they run the country; the Guardian is read by the people who ought to run the country; the Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; and the Sun is read by people who don't know who runs the country and don't care either, just as long as she's got big tits.)

Now, all this puzzles me further, because I reached the end of the march at 2.00, and then walked most of the way back down Millbank and didn’t see any of this mayhem, though I did see Police vans heading off somewhere with sirens going. Yet apparently, to read this piece, one could be forgiven for getting the impression (as the commenters clearly have) that the capital had been in the grip of anarchist outrage for half an hour by this point. Indeed I have spent most of today in baffled consideration of the print media’s coverage. What one notices very quickly is the repetition of the same pictures, none of which seems to show a huge crowd of ‘anars’ storming the bastions of English democracy. Look closely, and you will see the same few people, often doing the same thing but photographed from different angles. Look closely and you’ll see a lot of people standing about in anything but aggressive posture. Look closely and you’ll see a lot of police looking on, not doing very much, clearly not needing to. There are some shots of physical confrontations between some policemen and some ‘hard-core’ demonstrators. No one familiar with the media coverage of the Miners’ Strike can look at a photograph of a protestor and a policeman shouting at each other and blithely assume that it was the protestor who started the shouting (which isn’t to say it was necessarily the policeman either, of course).

Baroness Warsi: Not defenestrated
by an angry mob

One estimate places the trouble makers at 2,000. Maybe that’s right. I don’t know. I have not thus far seen any great reason to trust the coverage by the Great British press. Whatever, it was clearly too many for the police in attendance, who had been a pretty light-touch presence for the most part, and who didn’t feel a heavy-handed response was appropriate. Interesting in itself. The total ‘butcher’s bill’ seems to have been 40 arrests, which hardly suggests a repetition of Paris ’68 or the storming of the Bastille. Yet this element of the day's events has dominated the coverage.  Assuming the press figures are correct, 1/26 of the demonstrators (that’s fewer than 4%) stormed the building containing Tory offices, and a small percentage of this number (look at the photos) smashed the place up (not Tory offices apparently, and nor, fortunately as I’m sure we all agree, was Baroness Warsi, who was on the premises, defenestrated by an angry mob, which naturally is a tremendous relief).

This was not A Good Thing. I’m not going to condone it; the only elements I will condemn are those which caused or threatened harm to actual people  (e.g. the fire extinguisher incident). Tactically, it played – as you can see – straight into the hands of the right-wing press who were thus able to conceal the real point completely. Tactically it was a disaster. Morally, some elements were stupid at least and did as much (if not more) physical damage to the fellow protesters than it did to the police (not that the Police had any business being targeted either). Some may have been the usual suspects, the ‘professional troublemakers’. (Where do you get a job as a professional troublemaker? Where are the positions vacant advertised? And what do you earn?) But who knows? If there were some students angry enough to do this – mistaken, misdirected and to be condemned though it was – then someone really ought to listen. The coverage, though, says little or nothing about the 96% of the march that passed off peacefully and is able to take reasonable points and demands and make them into the ravings of extremists. The protest began peacefully; 96% of it ended peacefully too.

You can probably guess where I am going with this. Yes, it is – yet again – the value of a historical education. The press coverage has taken an unpleasant and reprehensible incident and blown it quite out of proportion. You only need to look at the comments on the Telegraph article to see how people have uncritically leapt straight on the bandwagon, accepting it as all the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and stirred in their own personal bigotry. The historian’s training makes her question everything she is told, look closer at the evidence, find other sources, and weigh things up without being too carried away with the rhetoric of autopsy (‘I know; I was there’). I was there, and saw and heard nothing other than the vans leaving the scene; my Facebook-friend Heidi was there and saw people getting glass thrown in their faces and concrete being slung willy-nilly into the crowd; I have no reason to suppose that she’s making it up.  Neither of us has the whole picture. I would say that my experience (I was on Millbank at exactly this time) shows that the extent or scale of the trouble has been overplayed; Heidi’s shows very clearly how unpleasant the business could be at the eye of the storm, and that one can’t just say that nothing happened. The question you have to ask is whether a few dozen idiots behaving dangerously in a courtyard outweighs 50,000 people of all sorts of origins (I saw a Wadham College banner and I saw banners from the post-’92 institutions; there were mature students from Birkbeck too, as well as students of conventional age; artists and scientists) taking to the streets to say that what the government is doing is mistaken and wrong, or (better) balancing the two sides to the event. Which is the headline event? I’d say it was the second element not the first. Why has the press chosen the other option? You decide… Either way, this is the sort of question the historian always has to ask. Not just is this bastard lying to me but ‘why is this lying bastard lying to me’ (the latter element of this at least is attributed to Louis Philip Heren [1909–1995]).

What worries me is essentially what I have said before, that far too many history students don’t want to be taught the value of critical scrutiny of evidence; like the commenters on the Telegraph piece, they just want to be told what is what and what to think. How are they to respond to this sort of issue?  With this attitude among a largely complacent de-politicised electorate, who needs repression!

So, if I go back to Schama in Tuesday’s Guardian, what does it matter what bits of History you study at school, as long as they teach you the arts of critical thinking and reflexion, which I would say are what history is about. In evaluating the information, misinformation or imbalanced information about yesterday’s events, does it do you any more good to have studied Henry VIII or Hitler, or Alfred the Great or the Hittites, as long as you know how to assess information critically, and try and see that there might be more than one point of view?

Anyway, enough of this bourgeois chatter. Pass the Molotov Cocktails, Tarquin; it’s fuckin’ kickin’ off.