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We forget to remember
Teachers don't seem to want to teach British history
Today is Remembrance Sunday. Remembrance is not simply remembering. It is investing memory with meaning and feeling, and rediscovering a relationship between the past and oneself and a sense of identity. Remembrance Sunday does this in a very public way; in commemorating all our dead, it reinforces not only personal and family identities, it evokes a national sense of identity too. I wonder how much longer it will continue to do so. There seems to be a tendency in this country to abandon public memory and public history. This may not yet have affected the memory of the First and Second World Wars, but there is an unmistakable desire to junk facts and dump history.
Teachers don't seem to want to teach history, least of all British history. Children and students don't seem to know any. I feel sure that this is dangerous; it is not just that those who know no history are condemned to repeat it. It is also that independence and freedom depend on having a sure sense of identity, which in turn depends on historical remembrance; and shared memory brings a shared sense of identity and values. It is no coincidence that in Brave New World whole departments devoted themselves to erasing history and then rewriting it. It is no coincidence that it was a thoughtcrime to remember even a nursery rhyme; the traditions of a shared past can bring solidarity against an oppressive present. Yet imperceptibly, this country has also been subjected to a process of forgetting.
There is plenty of evidence for this gloomy view. Only a couple of weeks ago The Daily Telegraph reported claims that Oxford history graduates know very little history. "It is largely a matter of bits and pieces," according to Dr John Madicott, a fellow in modern history at Exeter College. "It certainly cannot be assumed that they have a working knowledge of how their own country has evolved." It is now possible to get a good degree in history without knowing anything about Magna Carta, the Black Death, the Reformation, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, or the Industrial Revolution. In the name of freedom of choice, undergraduates can now construct their own incoherent programmes of this and that, without any concept of a common culture, or any knowledge of the major signposts in the history of our country.
This view is widespread in Oxford, and what goes for Oxford goes just as much for other universities. And the same goes for schools. Schoolteachers seem reluctant to subject children to even the simplest historical facts, presumably under the post-modernist misapprehension that there cannot be such a thing as a fact, or indeed any such thing as objective reality. The preference is for subjective little forays into personal experiences - life in the castle keep or in the servants' quarters. A survey in 1996 found that children and young people were alarmingly ignorant of history. More than a quarter of the 16- 24-year-olds questioned had no idea of the date of the Battle of Hastings, could not name the designer of St Paul's, and did not know who invented penicillin. Less than half knew who sat on the throne at the time of the Armada.
It really is difficult to imagine what inspired this mass flight from intellectual honesty, and this astonishing lack of true curiosity. Of course I agree that it was high time that children (especially non-academic children) were freed from the burden of learning by rote lists of obscure battles and monarchs - so beautifully satirised in 1066 and All That - that were meaningless to them. Of course history teaching needed reform. But that doesn't explain the indifference, and sometimes the hostility, to our country's past, and to the past of any successful country such as the United States. Third World countries, other faiths and oppressed cultures, by contrast, attract lots of interest and, curiously enough, lots of angry insistence on facts. Those with historical grievances are encouraged to remember: those with outstanding historical achievements are bullied to forget.
I don't, as one prominent historian I know, see in all this a conspiracy to wipe out our national memory, in the name of multiculturalism, anti-colonialism and class resentment, but I do see signs of all those things in a common, misguided, lazy and ignorant pull in that direction. It is a powerful pull, and much of its force comes from the US.
This sort of nonsense has been common in American university life for some time. Last week, for instance, it was announced that a distinguished male professor in the department of theatre at Arizona State University has been sacked for teaching Shakespeare, and refusing to stage, instead, a production of Betty the Yeti: an Eco-Fable, the department's favourite feminist play. At Arizona State, it seems, Shakespeare is an unperson, consigned to sexist white European male oblivion in favour of Betty the eco-warrior yeti. And the students will have no memories of Shakespeare to draw on.
Today is a particularly good day to insist on remembering - on remembering not only our dead and the sorrow and the pity, but the traditions for which they fought, and of which we have good reason to be proud.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, November 08, 1998
