Why Do We Teach History?

As regular readers of this blog will know, I'm a history graduate. Twice. And, for reasons we don't have time for here, I've hit a glass ceiling with regards to taking this further. Suffice to say that not quite good enough grades, a university funding crisis of incredible proportions and a blue-sky idea of dubious proportions have got in the way.

So, this week I'm going back to square one. I'm going into the history department at my old secondary school, to see whether I'd consider teaching history as a job. At the moment, I'm not sure. If it proves to be more than Hitler and Henry VIII (both baffling to an Anglo-Saxonist such as myself), I'll be willing to give it a fair hearing.

But this begs the question: Why is history taught in schools? A vexing question, and I've heard a variety of answers:

• It helps you learn from the past- Really. Well, thank God we learnt from our defeat in Afghanistan in the early nineteenth century, or the Soviet invasion in 1979-89 and never joined the American attacks of 2001, otherwise we'd still be bogged down there too... As for this non-repeat of the Great Depression we're currently experiencing... financial bubbles and crashes are nothing new either!
• It makes you a better citizen to know the past- Because trying to make a group of perfect citizens has never backfired in the past... 
• It's interesting- To quote Captain Edmund Blackadder: "Baldrick, I find the Great Northern and Metropolitan Sewage System interesting, but that doesn't mean that I want to put on some rubber gloves and pull things out if it with a pair of tweezers." 

These questions are hampered by the way history is taught, at least here in the UK. The Greeks fought Persia with 300 men, then the Romans invade Britain using their togas before Henry VIII dissolved their monasteries, while the Spanish Armada was defeated by his daughter Victoria who then evacuated people from the cities during the Blitz...

So much is missing. The Anglo-Saxon period, when the English actually arrived on these shores, and modern England was born against the backdrop of the Viking onslaught, whilst the rest of the Middle Ages, 1066 aside, only get a look in as Richard III is going down at Bosworth Field. The story of the Tudors is promoted over that of the Stuarts, a royal family so bad that Parliament was twice forced to remove the monarch by force of arms. Britain's struggle with France, from the 100 Years War through to the final showdown with Napoleon, the dark legacy of colonialism, the war which gave birth to a country which one day would stand as the self appointed leader of the free world, not to mention coming to our aid in our moment of direst need, the Industrial Revolution... If we truly seek to answer the question of Scottish nationalism's calls for independence, shouldn't we teach the example of the only entity to have successfully left the United Kingdom, Ireland? The list goes on. As for international history, Hitler, Stalin, and America after 1900 rule supreme. I was lucky. For A-Level, my international history was the European Reformation, Ottoman Turkey and such. But most British school-leavers couldn't tell you about the Reich which really did last 1000 years, only the one which promised to and failed (The Holy Roman Empire, if you're wondering).

Anyway, what is the point in teaching history in our schools? Put simply, it's what used to be called the historical method. Source analysis is central to all that historians do. Jeremy Paxman is often, wrongly, attributed to have said to think "Why is this lying bastard lying to me?" when interviewing a politician. This is the same way the historian approaches their sources. Yet proper source analysis is rare before degree level. This ability to evaluate something and really get to the bottom of what it's really saying is far more useful than knowing what measures Hitler brought in to suppress internal dissent in Nazi Germany, or the problems endured by Æthelred 'the Unready' in the tenth and eleventh centuries. To then be able to explain why you think something to be correct based on viable evidence is also a really crucial life skill. One of my old lecturers said he could only think of two such societies where no one thought like that; Nazi Germany and the USSR. He was being flippant, but the point still stands. And to turn from historical villains to modern ones, I once heard a senior RBS Executive saying he wished he had more history graduates and fewer economics graduates coming to him for a job. (exact circumstances can be found here: http://inaneramblingsofahistorystudent.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/i-agree-with-ed.html). Now there's a tantalising what if for you...

And if all else fails, the joke about King John losing the crown jewels in the Wash is the definitive argument...

P.S. I actually wrote this on Sunday night. Yesterday, I was sat in a Year 8 (12-13 years old) history lesson watching the live feed from the Richard III conference at Leicester. When the dig team announced it was his body they'd unearthed, all the children broke into spontaneous applause. Maybe I didn't need to be so worried about history after all!