Citizenship, nation, empire

The politics of history teaching in England, 1870–1930

Peter Yeandle

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781526149350
  9780719080128
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847799982
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Educational Policy
• Index: History

Citizenship, nation, empire investigates the extent to which popular imperialism influenced the teaching of history between 1870 and 1930. It is the first book-length study to trace the substantial impact of educational psychology on the teaching of history, probing its impact on textbooks, literacy primers and teacher-training manuals. Educationists identified 'enlightened patriotism' to be the core objective of historical education. This was neither tub-thumping jingoism, nor state-prescribed national-identity teaching, but rather a carefully crafted curriculum for all children which fused civic as well as imperial ambitions.

The book will be of interest to those studying or researching aspects of English domestic imperial culture, especially those concerned with questions of childhood and schooling, citizenship, educational publishing and anglo-British relations. Given that vitriolic debates about the politics of history teaching have endured into the twenty-first century, Citizenship, nation, empire is a timely study of the formative influences that shaped the history curriculum in English schools

PART I
Contested histories: the teaching of history in its ‘golden age’

CHAPTER ONE
Enlightened patriotism: or, what was history for?

In 1902, Liberal politician Richard Burdon Haldane prefaced the publication of a series of his lectures on Education and Empire:

Today, at the beginning of the twentieth century, we as a nation have to face the problem of preserving our great commercial position, and with it the great Empire which the great men of past generations have won and handed down to us. That empire it is our duty to hold as a sacred trust, and to pass on in such a fashion that those who come after may be proud of us, as we are proud of the forefathers who did their work before our time. The duty which we have to discharge requires an effort. That effort must assume the form neither of swaggering along the High Street of the world, nor of sitting down with folded hands on a dust heap. It is rather to be sought in clear views and activity of the kind that is at once unhasting and unresting. Around us is surging up a flood of new competition. If we are to hold the ground which our predecessors won before the days of that competition, we shall require above all enlightened views.¹

It is valuable to reproduce this since it encapsulates much contemporary thinking about the empire. There is an evident sense of paranoia: competitor nations threaten Britain's economic supremacy. Thus, Britain must take urgent action to maintain her position and, critically, if the correct actions are not taken the achievements of ‘the great men of the past’ will be undermined. The teaching of history was, explicitly, to inculcate ‘enlightened views’. The significance of the word ‘enlightened’ within contemporaneous educational discourse will become clear below. In Haldane's lecture ‘Great Britain and Germany: A Study in Education’, he outlined how schooling in Germany was attuned to the needs of the state.² That, he argued, was a model the British should mimic. He urged those who had the power of influence in society to take action by manipulating what was taught in schools. For Haldane, Britain had for too long taken its international position for granted. Reverence for the past and responsibility to the future were key to Haldane's formulation of how to avert this worrying situation. If the nation were diagnosed as sick, the appropriate teaching of history was prescribed as a sure-fire antidote.

In this light, it becomes clear why the government sent a number of researchers to Germany to find out how such a newly created nation could economically advance so rapidly and thus threaten Britain's empire.³ Michael Sadler, school inspector and made Director of the Office of Special Enquiries and Reports in 1895, was dispatched to Germany in 1906 with the task of researching how they taught Civics in particular. It was he who, upon his return, introduced to British educational jargon the phrase ‘Education for Citizenship’,⁴ not the more recent think tanks who succeeded in 2002 in their aim of having citizenship introduced to the curriculum as a discrete secondary school subject.⁵ From Sadler's advice, it was clear that much work was needed to continue inspiring children to want to do their best for their nation. The Germans, he argued (rather contentiously) in 1916, have ‘made profitable use of second-rate intelligence [because they have] not neglected the mind’ and had thus ‘made systematic cooperation a habit’.⁶ The conclusions which were returned cited education as an especially significant factor: to continue to compete in the global market the English, like the Germans, needed to fuse the ends of education and economic policy.⁷ In 1913, W.H. Webb had fretted in History, the in-house journal of the Historical Association, that Germany, Japan, Italy and the ‘regressive Balkan states’ had put history to effective use whereas Britain had done too little to gear teaching towards the promotion of imperial pride. In ‘our school code’, he lamented, ‘History is barely recognised and Patriotism, the twin sister of History, is ignored […] the children of those countries imbibe the love of country with their mother's milk, and when they grew older, History and Patriotism took their hands and guided them into paths every true lover of his own land ought to go’.⁸ On the evidence of such statements, it comes as no surprise that a number of studies have focused on the development of the history curriculum in Britain predominantly in the context of asking questions regarding the reach of imperial propaganda. The content of some texts used in classrooms may well have reflected that turn of the twentieth century Britain was an imperial nation concerned to instil patriotism in its young. Yet, closer attention to the history of history teaching, as well as debates about its intended purpose, demonstrates that these assumptions are fraught with methodological problems. Educationists, wary of the overt politicisation of the curriculum, pressed not for the teaching of patriotism per se, but ‘enlightened patriotism’.

To do so, educationists concentrated their efforts on elementary school education – where the vast majority of the nation's children were taught their lessons in history through literacy primers. At the outset of our period, subject-specific lessons in history in state schools were significantly few in number. John Smith's analysis of Her Majesty's Inspectors' (HMI) reports finds that, prior to Education Acts of the earlier twentieth century, ‘the take-up of history, despite various government initiatives, was derisory’.⁹ History was considered poorly taught (strict emphases on rote-learning was lambasted) and poorly resourced (textbooks and teacher training was deemed woeful). One head teacher informed the Cross Commission in 1887 that history, in elementary schools, ‘was almost extinct’.¹⁰ By the 1900s, however, history's status as a low-ranking subject had quite reversed, to the extent that discrete lessons were made compulsory. In secondary schools, history was made a statutory part of the curriculum in 1900. For elementary schools, the regulation was implemented in 1901 and endorsed by the Balfour Act of 1902.¹¹ In the words of Olive Shropshire, a near-contemporary doctoral student researching history teaching in English schools for a Colombia thesis: ‘[t]he effect of the Act of 1902 was fairly electric. In 1901 history had been taught in 5,838 departments of the elementary schools. Almost overnight these figures leapt to 25,053’.¹² Prior to the 1902 Act, less than 5 per cent of children in London's Board Schools sat in subject-specific history lessons (only 26,781 out of 581,976) which became a compulsory minimum of two hours per week in 1901 for those children in Standard IV or above (above the age of seven).¹³ C.H.K. Marten, one-time President of the Historical Association, recalled when writing in the 1930s that ‘History may be said to be a creation of the twentieth century’.¹⁴

If discrete lessons in history were slight in number, and those that were taught were criticised, attitudes to historical stories in literacy primers, especially from the 1880s onwards, were markedly different. Educationists, and those who campaigned to influence the curriculum, recognised that reading books (designed for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Selected Titles Available in the Series
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Founding Editor's Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Text
• Introduction
• PART I: Contested histories: the teaching of history in its ‘golden age’
• PART II: Imperial values and enlightened patriotism in the teaching of history, c. 1880–1930
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index