Grand narrative history

What a wonderful and thoughtful writer Colm Toibin is. I love his work (just reading The Testament of Mary), and really enjoyed this piece. Thanks, MiceElf

I absolutely adored history from the time the subject was first introduced to me at school. As I went to 10 different schools teaching varied in content but I since I read so many history books outside school, it never really concerned me. I did A level History and was going to read it is university but every time I told anybody that there instant response was 'Oh, you are going to be a teacher'. Since whatever I planned to do in life teaching wasn't on the list I read economics instead - and watched DS get a BA & MA in history and work in historic building conservation! It has remained an abiding interest.

DGC, 6 & 3, adore the Horrible Histories and are already getting a sense of historic chronology from that. Probably helps that DS is an archaeologist and DDiL, a historian!!

Thanks for the link MiceElf excellent, enjoyable article.

As with most things I think you need a mixture. Enough of a romp through to know that the Romans came before the Saxons and the Plantagenets before the Tudors and so on coupled with in depth studies of important areas such as the rise of parliamentary government, the agricultural revolution and the Reformation.

There is so much history you cannot teach it all during a school career so we have to 'choose' parts!
I personally believe it is best to teach good research skills and chronology as a core part of History lessons.
Chronology can be taught through themes such as education, fashion, science & technology, crime & punishment, music etc. alongside the 'facts' of who was the ruler at the time and this ,in my experience, engages children and younger secondary students more effectively as does local history.

Once they are engaged and understand that all history is interpretation of evidence and perspective then they can move on to political and social history.

One of the interesting problems of history teaching is where to stop. There was a tutor at my university who was said to have claimed that everything after 1918 was current affairs! The other interesting problem is what to include. Do you do a quick romp through everything from the old Stone Age to yesterday? Or do you pick a chunk and cover it in some detail? Or a place? Or some people? If you do the quick romp, with any luck the learner will develop some idea of chronology and you won't get people mixing up Napoleon and Charles de Gaulle (Pointless, the other day). If you do the in-depth chunk the learners may have a very good idea of what happened in the Reformation in England but nothing about the European movement or what went before or after. Fortunately, people aren't restricted to knowledge and skills they are taught in school. Or even university.

Oh nanaej you did the same GCE syllabus as me! The Great Reform Bill and the Chartists and The Corn Laws! I couldn't understand why we stopped at 1918 - I thought it would have been more useful to cover WWII as well. My real interest in history stopped at The Stuarts so the whole thing bored me rigid anyway.

DGD1 is doing "A" Level history, and is now embarking on China as one part of it - absolutely fascinating. All I knew about China when I was her age was gleaned from my grandmother's missionary books, and her favourite novelist, Pearl Buck!

I agree re local history. the school I worked at in Fulham had a memorial, in the main hall,to ex-pupils who had died in WW1. That always inspired the children to want to know more abut that time. We used the school log books to look at the employment at different times and we did an interesting project on names as there were 'honour boards' on the stairwells .

made it more tangible.

I think any syllabus is limiting. The aim is pass examinations, not to produce historians. And so, often, especially in the 40s and 50s these were tests of memory.

I've always felt the way to make enthusiastic and questioning historians was to start locally with the immediate environment. I remember my father taking me as quite a small child to parts of the city and telling me the stories of continual invasion, conquest and resistance. Not just to armies and invading nations but to those who appropriated land or set up factories to create wealth for themselves. Looking at a factory building or a ruined abbey and having questions posed rather than answers given, is the way to set an enquiring mind on the path to discovery.

MiceElf I agree re teaching research and interrogation of sources skills. Sadly that educational approach is being sidelined for a list of someone's important 'historical facts'! I think we should grow up knowing key points in British history, such as the Civil War etc. But we should be encouraged to look at the situation from both the royalist and Roundhead points of view etc.

Social history engages me now but my history lessons at secondary school were dire and i am afraid I was bad and buggered about in the lessons..so my historical knowledge 1832-1918 ( my GCE course) is very lacking! And as for other eras non existent except from what i have gleaned through reading , TV and film

The old GCE syllabus was very limiting. We studied Europe, 1789 - 1840, for two years. I found out the causes of the two world wars, the Spanish and American civil wars, the struggle for a welfare state, and the history of unionism, by my own reading after leaving school.
When we looked at England during the Reformation, we were given no inkling of the reasons that so many people accepted it willingly, because that would not have proved how evil the Protestants were. All our history was skewed by the Irish nuns who ran the school. One girl who questioned it was expelled.
I am very happy to say that my grandchildren have been given a far wider perspective and were encouraged to think for themselves and discuss without fear.

Thank you for the link,*MiceElf*. My DH and I call the 'grand narrative' the Braveheart version.

Bags, the truth, I think, is undiscoverable. But at least those who study, or who are made to study history, however reluctantly, should be given the tools to begin to interrogate sources, be aware of bias and understand that however clear cut a conclusion might seem to be, there is always another story lurking beneath the surface waiting to be uncovered by diligent research.

Very enjoyable and thought-provoking article. I went on to read some of the comments and was struck how the first few I read were an argument about the very arrival of the Taliban that Colm Toibin mentions. Is "the truth" ever settled in history?

I do believe all children should study history, and it should be as unbiased as possible. At grammar school we started with ancient history, ie prehistoric Britain, the bronze age, the iron age, the Romans and so on. By the time we reached the end of the 5th form, we'd got to the Congress of Vienna 1815. I presume the ones who did it in the 6th form would have taken it to the end of WW2.

It gives you a mind picture of the world we live in, how it evolved. I was lucky in that it was taught in a fairly unbiased way, and involved the stories of people as well as kings, and I do remember being surprised that Cromwell and the roundheads were not evil, but were a necessary movement. But I also remember the French exchange student who stayed with us for a while, was shocked at how our history books portrayed Napoleon!

At my grammar school we had the Kings and Queens and nothing about the Romans or the Greeks or the Celts or the Vikings. I was able to give it up in favour of Art at the age of 14 and that was considered an education!.
I do hope it is better now, it could hardly be worse.

Sorry, MiceElf i've got a habit of doing that - dashing about instead of sitting down to check the OP. I'm going to try harder!

Good points When (BTW I'm MiceElf not Lilygran!). History teaching is a world away from the versions taught years ago and in the hands if skilled teachers is a sure and effective way to develop questioning minds. Of one thing I am sure, the curriculum should not ever be defined by politicians.

Very interesting article, Lilygran. My grandson doesn't study history per se at his grammar school, but they have modules like the History of Childhood, or Politics, or Science.

The History I was taught at school was all about the British Empire, and the Anglocentric view of wars fought and won across the ages. Not that I remember much of it. I was bored rigid. I think I woud have been interested in comparative History, enabling children to view these events from different vantage points like now and then, and from the standpoint of opposition and support for those events. Also, studying the history of other countries would enlighten children. It was a real eye opener for me when I visited the USA and learned about the history of their immigrants as they arrived from this side of the world. So much mytholgy and distortion of facts, it's difficult to fathom what actually happened as the stories differ greatly. I don't believe many of our history books, nor theirs. No wonder there are entrenched views when children are fed a diet of distorted historical accounts that were made up to fill the gaps in knowledge.

Narrative history, studying first hand accounts of historical events, can be interesting and can evidence what has been pieced together to form an overall view. It doesn't go far enough when information gets suppressed by governments, but curiosity to learn more and to be able to critically appraise what is taught can only be a good thing.