{"id":471,"date":"2011-04-02T11:15:36","date_gmt":"2011-04-02T10:15:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=471"},"modified":"2011-04-02T11:15:36","modified_gmt":"2011-04-02T10:15:36","slug":"lament-for-historys-lost-narrative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2011\/04\/02\/lament-for-historys-lost-narrative\/","title":{"rendered":"Lament for History's Lost Narrative"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sitting in a Hay-on-Wye tea shop, reading (what else?) The Guardian, I come across Niall Ferguson's recent blast<\/a> at school history teaching in the face of what seems like complacency by Ofsted who said in a recent report:<\/p>\n

\"There was much that was good and outstanding. \u00a0... Most pupils enjoyed well-planned lessons that extended their knowledge, challenged their thinking and enhanced their understanding.\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One of Ferguson's complaints is that young people don't know very much history any more \u2014 actually, that history undergraduates \u2013 well, actually those at Cardiff \u2013 don't know key events, places, times and actors: think, here, the Armada, Waterloo, Boer War and Victorian prime ministers. \u00a0Another issue is that, in Ofsted's words:<\/p>\n

\"some \u2026 found it difficult to place the historical episodes they had studied within any coherent, long-term narrative. They knew about particular events, characters and periods, but did not have an overview. \u00a0Their chronological understanding was often underdeveloped and so they found it difficult to link developments together.\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The only thing wrong with this observation, Ferguson says, is that Ofsted seems to think it applies only to primary school pupils, whereas it could equally well be applied to those in secondary school \u2013 and students at a good few universities, too. \u00a0The\u00a0inspectors note elsewhere that, in 28 of the 58 secondary schools they visited,<\/p>\n

\"students' chronological understanding was not sufficiently well developed: they had \u2026 a poor sense of the historical narrative\".<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ferguson says that this is hardly a minor deficiency. \u00a0He\u00a0also notes that some young people are actually ceasing to study history at age 13 and wonders what's going on. \u00a0Nothing new here, I thought. \u00a0I 'dropped' (odd phrase as I'd never really picked it up) history when 13 because of the demands of the option sets, and yet I know all the dates, places, actors and events that Ferguson mentions \u2014 and a lot more besides; all self-absorbed in the intervening 50 years. \u00a0Largely because I was interested and curious, I suspect.<\/p>\n

Mind you, whether I have an adequate sense of the historical narrative, is another question, as this is the essence of history for me: where have we come from, and how and why, and what does this tell us about who we now are, and who we might yet be.<\/p>\n

So many gaps to fill ... . \u00a0It's a good job there are people like Ferguson, Sharma, Starkey, ... prepared to go on TV to help.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sitting in a Hay-on-Wye tea shop, reading (what else?) The Guardian, I come across Niall Ferguson's recent blast at school history teaching in the face of what seems like complacency by Ofsted who said in a recent report: \"There was...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}