Teaching History from Primary Evidence (1993)

Keith Andreetti

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351378932
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1993, this volume will be of particular interest to primary school teachers who may never have taught history as a discreet subject before and who are worried by their negative memories of school history and lack confidence as to their own knowledge of the subject. The author provides a practical guide to the theory and rudiments of history with guidance on how to present it using primary evidence in an exciting way that makes sense in terms of primary practice.

CHAPTER 1
What is History?

I know something about history. I know when I am being threatened.

Edward Albee.

It may be asked why so many books on the subject of history find it necessary to commence by defining their discipline, at least at such length as many such books do. The answer is, I think, that history is a very powerful force that works on the consciousness of every human being on the planet, and it is at its most powerful when we do not think too hard about its nature: we are conditioned, therefore, not to do so.

As I write news broadcasts are once again focused on ‘the Palestinian Problem’. Israeli leaders affirm the historical rights of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. Their arguments are based on the pre-Roman location of Hebrew- and Aramaic-speaking states in that area, and more cogently to its centrality in their religion. They speak of the centuries of anti-semitism culminating in the ‘holecause of the Nazis. Lastly they detail the more recent antagonism of the Arab world. By contrast, the Palestinians prefer to emphasise the Arab presence in Palestine since the seventh century, the importance of Jerusalem as the second holy city of Islam, the dispossession of thousands of Palestinians and their life in refugee camps, and the Jewish settlement in the occupied territories. All these things are, in essence, undeniable historical facts, though partisans of one side or the other will passionately argue their relative relevance or their accuracy in detail. The point is that people live, die and kill for reasons like these. History kills!

Of course it would be naïve to suggest that this is the whole story. Urban deprivation, poverty, family antagonism, the wish for power over others and all sorts of other factors help create the gunman or woman, the chauvanist politician, the violent racist or the patriot. But the justification is nearly always rooted in history.

This is not in the least surprising when one considers the fact that the ability to accumulate and communicate information is one of the main abilities that distinguish us from other animals. Culture and civilisation are based on the fact that each human being does not have to relearn by experience all that others before have learned but can call on the collective experience, the racial memory of our ancestors. Some of this inherited experience is of a purely practical nature. We do not need a justification for using the wheel: once invented, its usefulness ensures its survival. But the complex patterns of social and economic life which characterise human culture need reinforcement. Societies are fragile things; they only work if most of their members play by the rules.

Societies persuade people to play by the rules partly by imposing sanctions on those who do not, but most of the time this is not necessary. As children we internalise the behaviour patterns of our society so that they become part of our identity. When children ask why ‘we’ do things in a certain way the answer is often a story. This is the case particularly when ‘we’ are being contrasted with ‘them’. A Moslem child learns why he or she has to learn the Koran, when others are playing, in terms of a proud Islamic heritage. Others learn to distrust or hate members of another class or religion through the medium of family stories. All of us have a picture of our own identity that is coloured by our origins and the baggage of historical imagery they carry.

So, if history is a powerful force keeping us to the ways of our ancestors, how is it that things change at all?

The answer to this question is that history is not an immutable monolith, but, sometimes at least, a very plastic substance. In saying this I am not suggesting that history is fiction, though sometimes it comes close to being just that, but rather that each group or generation selects elements from the vast storeroom of the past to construct the foundation they need.

Sometimes this is a conscious process, as in Stalin’s Russia where history books and records were rewritten and altered regularly to accommodate changes in the hierarchy. More often it is merely a case of redirected interest, and a reassessment of the importance of events or whole classes of information. This century has witnessed a surge of interest in social history, and the lives of ordinary people in the past, which reflects the growth of individualism. However, politicians, in particular, can and regularly do use history to illustrate their arguments and give them power.

The phrase ‘Victorian values’ was used on several occasions during the Thatcher administration in the context of the family and community care to imply self-reliance, discipline, private charitable work etc. We should ask ourselves why modern social policy should be deliberately associated with life in a former age. The answer lies in the theory of cause and effect. The idea is that the Victorians did x and Victorian society was like y: therefore x contributed to y. I suspect that the image of Victorian society of which the politicians in question wished to remind us involved prosperity, industrial supremacy and the Empire. We are left with the inference that if only we were more like the Victorians in one way, we would be more like them in others.

There is nothing sinister about this; we can learn from the past, but we need not be tied to one interpretation of it. We can examine for ourselves what community care was like in Victorian Britain by looking at the evidence. This evidence may be found in documents, in objects, in buildings, in history books, in novels, in pictures and in the memories of those who lived in the period. As always in history we would find more than one point of view. A historian who wished to oppose the image of Victorian society as the heyday of the disciplined paternalistic family might care to mention the huge incidence of prostitution, illegitimacy, infant mortality and indigence. The evidence for this might be found in workhouse records, in the findings of commissions of enquiry, in novels or in the proto-sociological work of Mayhew. Often the sort of answers that historians wish to find influence the sorts of evidence they select to look at, or the interpretation that they put on it.

We should not lose sight of the fact, however, that history is not, as one of Voltaire’s characters said ‘no more than accepted fiction’. History derives its power and its strength as a justification for present action from the fact that we perceive it as true. Historians are rarely disinterested enquirers but they recognise that without the evidence their ideas mean nothing.

History in the primary school

In the period leading up to the publication of the National Curriculum statutory orders for history, an acrimonious debate raged as to what the emphasis of school history should be. One party argued for an ‘active’ learning approach, where children were introduced to the use of historical evidence at an early stage and where ‘points of view’, debate, role play and interpretation were prominent features. Their opponents advocated a much more factual content to lessons. Before we look at what was finally decided, and who, if anyone, won; we should look at the pros and cons of these approaches. We shall examine first the latter view.

There are really two prongs to the argument, a positive and a negative one. On the one hand there are reasons for a factual school history, on the other reasons against an investigative one.

The first of the ‘positive reasons’ is that history, unlike, for instance, philosophy or literature, is a factually based subject and that one needs a significant base of factual knowledge to work on before one can start to analyse it. Historians work on a very large canvas. Cause and effect may be said to work over hundreds of years; history is a continuous process and an understanding of its broad sweep is necessary to contextualise evidence which usually relates to one tiny corner of it. So, the argument is, schoolchildren should concentrate on getting the general picture into their heads.

It is not disputed by the proponents of this argument that even general pictures vary with viewpoint, but it is felt that there is a British national view of history which British children should learn. This point deserves, I think, to be taken very seriously.

If one examines school history books from the first half of this century, one does find a fairly unified picture. Infant histories were mostly concerned with telling a series of stories, ‘Caractacus and the Roman Emperor’, ‘How King Alfred burnt the cakes’, ‘Hereward the Wake’, ‘Bruce and the spider’ etc., which often had the character of moral parables. As the child grew older a more chronological and continuous story emerged; ‘The ancient Britons’, ‘Julius Ceasar and the Romans’, ‘Hengist and Horsa and the Saxons’, ‘King Alfred and the English’, ‘The Battle of Hastings’, ‘King Richard the Lion Heart’, etc., the emphasis being on famous men, usually kings, and battles, with the odd chapter of ‘scene setting’ detail on, for instance ‘London before the Great Fire’.

More recent history was generally left until the secondary years which also featured a great deal of politics: ‘The Great Reform Act of 1832’, ‘The Repeal of the Corn Laws’, ‘The Treaty of Vienna’. Books at this level are often arranged with sub-headings like the above in bold type on the left of the page and a few paragraphs of explanation under them. This facilitated the use of the book for its purpose of ‘rote learning’ the contents for an examination.

During the early part of this century, then, history in schools was learned as the story of how Britain became great, the stories of great men were given as exemplars of the formation of the British character, and the whole was intended to produce pride in the British identity. In doing this it had considerable success, and there can be little doubt that national pride was higher then than now. To gauge the conscious use made of history in this, we have only to look at the resources put into the production of historical films like Henry V during the Second World War.

Most people would, I think, agree that a certain amount of pride in one’s national culture and identity is a very good thing (provided of course that it does not develop into contempt for other people’s). I think that they would also accept that it is desirable for our children to gain a broad outline of the development of the British nation. The problem might be, and in the context of the National Curriculum has been, to reach agreement as to which particular historical facts should go into this National Story. For better or for worse the Britain of today is a very different place from that of the pre-war years and we need different elements from our past to help us understand it.

Let us take, for instance, the question of ‘women’s history’. Amongst the hordes of ‘famous people’ mentioned in my collection of about thirty pre-war history books I can find only twelve women. They are: Boadicea, Lady Godiva, Queen Matilda, Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth, Mary Queen of Scots, Queen Mary Tudor, Queen Anne, Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale, Grace Darling and Marie Curie. Of these five were reigning monarchs who could not therefore be left out. This does not appear to give much weight to the contribution of the female half of the population to the development of the British nation. Note that it is not a question of whether there is any ‘women’s history’: women were there therefore they have a story. It is rather a matter of whether we choose to look for it. There is no doubt that the view that women’s lives may be subsumed into those of men is no longer acceptable in our society, so our national story must change.

Another major change in British society since the last war is its increasing heterogeneousness. Of course, Britain has always been a very diverse nation, containing a wide variety of ethnic, religious and class groupings. But its diversity is now much more visible, partly because the minority groups are now much greater in numbers, and partly because many are of non-European origin. Many Jewish or Italian immigrants in the early years of the century avoided discrimination by anglicising their names and accents, but this is not possible if you are black. Our nation is now very clearly a multi-cultural one with a common heritage that draws from half of the world. As Professor Stuart Hall, amongst others, has cogently argued ‘Black History’ is not just for black children, it is part of the story of modern Britain, and we all need it if we are to find our identity as a people.

There is a case to be made for many other elements not present in traditional British history to be included in our new national story. Unfortunately there would never be time to teach them all in schools. The curriculum is already, in the eyes of most teachers, vastly overloaded, and a considerable amount of selection must take place. Equally unfortunately Margaret Thatcher’s opinion, voiced in parliament, that there were certain ‘landmarks’ in British history that we could all agree about, has proved incorrect. Experts consulted by the working party for history, and those who offered unsolicited advice, disagreed, and still disagree vehemently about what should go in and what stay out. There is also a substantial body of opinion that feels that it is not the place of the government to dictate content at all, and that this decision should be left to the school or to the individual teacher.

To sum up, then, if you have a ‘fact-based’ history, we have a real problem deciding which facts, and who chooses them.

The negative reason against the active learning approach to primary history, as given by the so-called ‘right wing’ in the history debate, is that young children are held to be incapable of using evidence in a useful manner. Such work, it is argued, takes a great deal of experience, skill and knowledge; and is properly left to the university years. I feel that this argument shows little understanding of the nature and purpose of primary education. After all, nobody expects a primary school science class to make major discoveries in nuclear physics, yet we feel it our duty to teach the pupils scientific method, and expect them to carry out experiments. As I hope will be quite clear in the following chapters the skills required for historical research in the primary school are life-skills: observation, discrimination, the weighing of points of view, logic and above all the ability to recognise our common humanity manifested in the innumerable ways of living of which human beings are capable.

Probably no factor has had a more profound effect on post-war society, at least in the ‘first and second worlds’, than the all-pervasiveness of modern communications. In 1938 it was possible for Neville Chamberlain to refer to Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia as ‘a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing’. Such a statement would be inconceivable today. Whilst I would not suggest that we are now all internationalists, the television brought images of Czechoslovakia and Vaclav Havel into all our living rooms during the recent collapse of the communist regime in that country. In the attempted right-wing coup in the Soviet Union of August 1991, President Gorbachev, beleaguered in the Crimea, kept up with the news by listening to the BBC World Service. We are deluged by images, stories and points of view from around the world.

It is a common complaint that our media are biased. During the Falklands War and the war with Iraq many felt that the anti-war arguments were not given sufficient weight in the newspapers and on TV. But it is an undeniable fact that such opinions were available nationally. The so-called ‘quality press’ and television documentaries did give some space to alternative points of view. If these points of view had no impact it must mean either that they were weighed and rejected by the mass of the population, or that the mass of the population were not sufficiently educated in looking for and processing such information. Whatever one’s views on this, it is clear (to me anyway) that a democratic country in the modern world should be teaching its future citizens to form their opinions by evaluating the evidence and opinions available. There is no better way of learning these skills than in the critical study of history.

The last, but by no means the least important argument for an investigative approach to primary history is that most children find it much more enjoyable and challenging than just learning facts. The proof of this pudding is in the eating.

The statutory orders for history

I do not propose to attempt here a detailed analysis of the statutory orders for history. For one thing they are reasonably clear in themselves; for another, it has already been proved that the National Curriculum is not unchangeable, it has already been revised and is quite likely to be revised again. However, certain points should be noted in the light of the preceding debate.

The writers of the document have used the standard National Curriculum structure of Attainment Targets (ATs) and Programmes of Study to try to satisfy, to some extent, both parties in the debate (naturally enough, with limited success). The ATs lay down a framework of historical skills and concepts. These should be progressively applied through the Programm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 What is History?
• 2 How to Look at Artefacts
• 3 Artefacts in Context
• 4 Using Museums
• 5 Experimental Archaeology
• 6 Oral History
• 7 Documentary Evidence
• 8 Planning a History Study Unit
• Index