Changing history teaching

IN HIS FOUR years as education secretary, Michael Gove learned that no subject on the curriculum was as contentious as history. As he acknowledged in a speech in 2013, it can be an “ideological battleground” for “contending armies”. “There may, for all I know, be rival Whig and Marxist schools fighting a war of interpretation in chemistry or food technology, but their partisans don’t tend to command much column space in the broadsheets”.

In the past few months, the history wars have spilled onto the streets. Revisionism has required toppling statues rather than hosting seminars; the worth of classics of literature and television is being radically reappraised. Campaigners want the curriculum “decolonised” and the history of black Britons made compulsory in schools.

Partly in reaction to such demands, Policy Exchange, a think-tank close to the government, launched a “History Matters” project on June 29th, to “address the rewriting of history as it happens”. But right-wingers are equally keen on disseminating the right kind of history. Mr Gove’s first attempt to rewrite the history curriculum to give “a connected sense of the narrative of our islands” was widely criticised as narrow and triumphalist. Referring to a comic take on English history, Simon Schama, a historian, damned the proposals as “‘1066 and All That’, but...