Paradigm, No. 24 (December, 1997)

According to Nicholas Tate, Chief Executive of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority, 'the transmission of an established account of the past' has ceased to be a primary purpose of school history lessons. To Tate this is something to be lamented, and over recent months he has used his position to reintroduce issues of history teaching to the arena of public debate. Summarised briefly, Tate wishes to engage education more explicitly with the enterprise of cultural reproduction. Looking back to the first thirty years of this century, he identifies history textbooks as being primarily involved in communicating a unified vision of national identity. Indeed, Tate sees much to admire in these prewar schoolbooks, particularly their concern with strong narrative and their taken-for-granted affinity towards a mainstream, national heritage based upon a canon of recurring stories about figures and events from the past -- stories like 'Alfred and the Cakes'.

This picture of educational and historical consensus, however, becomes somewhat blurred when we move beyond the pre-war textbooks to analyse the pre-war classroom itself. My own research into history teaching reveals the early years of this century to be marked not by harmony but by conflict. Just as it is today, school history was a contested area. Oral testimony from retired elementary schoolteachers and from ex-pupils, alongside an examination of the teaching press and History (the journal of the Historical Association) reveals the educational community to be deeply divided over the goals and methods of history teaching, and shows the practice of actually teaching the subject in the classroom to be marked as much by improvisation and ignorance as by erudition and systematic instruction. Furthermore, the textbooks which have so impressed Tate had come under sustained assault from writers and teachers after the First World War.

As most of us would probably expect, history teaching in the 1920s and 1930s was dominated in practice by the 'political outlines' approach, which sought to communicate a large body of mainly factual information about an essentially English past. European and world history were seldom taught, and the syllabuses of most schools stuck broadly to the same stock of figures and events. Personalities, especially kings and queens, loomed large, as did military achievements, and Tate is correct to identify a general concern with the heroic in both the tone and the content of history lessons. As former elementary schoolteacher Robert Dawes recalls of his own school-days in the early 1920s:

The history that we did was to a great extent heroes and legends: King Arthur, of course, William the Conqueror, King Alfred; he burned the cakes, you see. Legends: Robin Hood came into it . . . Heroes: Henry V and all those people. And the 'bad-boys': King John . . . we loved it. Guy Fawkes was a 'baddy' of course, and that was that. And of course we went on as far as Nelson, Wellington, Clive, Wolfe, that sort of thing. That's what I remember.

Some pupils recollect being made to learn the dates of reigns and battles, but this was the exception rather than the rule. For most children in the inter-war years, the dominant experience of the history syllabus was of 'chalk-and-talk' lessons in which individual characters -- heroes and villains formed the largest part, followed by battles and outstanding events; for example the Great Fire of London or the English Civil War.

Yet the persistence of this syllabus in most schools should not be taken as evidence of universal agreement over its merits. Many teachers and educationists were deeply unhappy about the history they were teaching, as Mary Evans, who taught in the 1920s and 1930s, admits:

It was all about Queens and Kings and the dates, and what was I interested in lineage and that sort of thing. Of course it was wars, wars, wars . . . It was all rubbish to me, you see, I was so uninterested.

Mrs Evans, like many of her colleagues, felt unable to challenge the existing curriculum. She had not the time as an elementary schoolteacher; she was expected to prepare and teach lessons on every subject of the curriculum -- and she did not find that there were texts available to enable her to devise an alternative.

It was the general sameness and unadventurousness of history textbooks that provoked a series of attacks on history schoolbooks in the teaching press after the First World War. They were commonly regarded as dull, dry and uninspirational. An early editorial in The Women Teacher's World in 1911 set the tone:

Apropos of history being badly taught in schools, surely this is very largely due to the fact that too frequently the teacher's lesson depends for its inspiration upon a textbooks A textbook is useful for facts, but very few textbooks, from the nature of the case, are sufficient to give the historical atmosphere.

More fundamentally, the average history textbook was regarded by many critics as being out of step with the educational times. A growing concern with 'child-centred' education fed a backlash against the old didactic tradition of historical instruction. History teaching had to be alive to the interests and aptitudes of the child; according to Stanley Leathes, writing in The Teachers World in 1916, children should set the agenda, not academic historians: 'If we are to present history in a form that is suitable for the young, we must not find our model in any form of history written for adults'.

By 1924 the situation was such that Hillaire Belloc could write scathingly of the 'false method' which had 'struck deep root' in contemporary history teaching, which had abandoned facts and dates in favour of a more woolly concern for making history interesting. Belloc's fright is exaggerated, but his concern for the decline of traditional virtues in history teaching was not uncommon in the 1920s.

While textbooks remained slow to adapt to the new fashions in pedagogy, the popular weekly The Teachers World was not. New courses in social history, European history and historical handwork were provided, along with teachers' explanatory notes, which could be cut out and kept for later use in the classroom. Taking their lead from the vogue for the 'dramatic method', and spurred on by the young Enid Blyton, 'History Playlets', were provided to encourage pupils to empathise with the past through its aesthetic re-enactment. Many young teachers were willing to try the new courses and methods, and a lack of resources was not permitted to get in the way, as Jim Oswald recalls of his childhood in Smethwick:

Class rulers did for swords, and maybe the class duster might do as a turban if we'd got as far as the crusades. Odd little things like that. You had to use your imagination, as people did in Shakespeare's day.

Oral testimony also reveals that it was the teacher, and not the pupil, who was most likely to read, and learn from, the history textbook. Elementary teachers were generalists and seldom received any instruction in history after leaving school. As a result, most remember their history preparation as a continual struggle to find information and illustrative material. The hardest-pressed simply resorted to pillaging their own school history notes -- often reproducing their own adolescent misunderstandings. More conscientious teachers journeyed to the local library in search of reference books. Most, however, made use of whatever they could find, whether it be teachers' magazines like Pictorial Education and The Teacher's World, or newspapers and encyclopaedias, or even historical novels and comics.

Henty and Harrison Ainsworth, along with the ubiquitous Shakespeare, formed the inspiration for many history lessons. As former teacher Gerald Field admitted, in many cases 'you were just about a lesson ahead of the class'. Eclecticism and improvisation were the determining themes of classroom history in elementary schools up and down the country before the war. Couple this with enormous class sizes (fifty was not an unusual number in the 1930s) and the shortage of books and resources and we get a truer picture of history teaching before the Second World War.

In many rural schools the teacher was the greatest consumer of the history textbook because the teacher would have access to the only copy. In some schools there were none at all, and then the teacher really was thrown upon his or her own devices.

The memories of teachers and ex-pupils do locate history as an essentially narrative-driven exercise. Leaving aside the question of the storied nature or oral recovery, it seems that recollections of the nature of the history syllabus are defined by the picturesque and outstanding. It was the telling of a good story that attracted pupils and teachers to history, and this might often focus upon the romantic or the bloodthirsty. For Robert Dawes, history textbooks were a source of grim entertainment, in which the detail lost out to the drama:

I can remember one picture of a head on a pike -- we loved it, we loved to see this one. And then another one where, somewhere in Scotland, a chap was being pushed over the top of a parapet. And, of course, there was the one where, was it? -- Who got? -- Which Saxon got stabbed in the back? I forget who it was. There it was, the dagger going in -- just loved it!

Indeed it would seem that it is not only the construction of historical memory, but also the construction of history teaching itself, that is defined by the social forms of popular knowledge and iconography that Raphael Samuel discusses in the first volume of his recent Theatres of Memory. History lessons were literally 'cobbled together' by teachers, themselves unsure of the meaning of what they were supposed to teach, and were then rearranged, to suit this or that fancy of this or that pupil, by children saturated in family lore, local knowledge and fired by their search for entertainment. The evidence suggests that story and personality made a greater impact than the dry factual outline. Samuel is right to argue that 'it is the remarkable occurrence and the larger-than-life personality which stirs the interests of listeners, readers and viewers'.

For history to be effective it had to be meaningful, it had to make imaginative contact with the lives and aspirations of the pupils themselves. To use the words of former teachers and pupils it had to be made 'real' or 'alive'. This could only be achieved by the use of points of detail and colour, and through enlivening history using the techniques of story-telling; by using the gory and the picturesque, or the dramatic and the romantic. With a few notable exceptions, the textbooks of the inter-war years were not the suppliers of this colour and interest -- that task was left to the improvisational skills of the teachers. Yet these were parsimonious times when books and resources for history teaching were in short supply. Teachers were left to their own devices, some succeeded in making history 'live' by engaging imaginatively with both the subject and their pupils, but many other teachers failed.

Debate over the nature of history teaching in schools is nothing new. As historians we must take care not to simplify our view of past practice and pedagogy. We cannot assume that the content of the textbook was the same as the content of the lesson. So if we really want to understand the nature of history teaching we must move from the textbooks and into the classroom.

Reprinted with the kind permission of History Today.

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