How to stop the BNP? Proper history lessons
An endangered species: historically knowledgeable eighteen year-olds
There are a few education stories that make up the staple diet of education reporting in newspapers. There is the good-old A-level results day splash (generally featuring 18 year old lovelies, jumping up and down with bits of paper). The piece that berates how ludicrously easy exams are these days (again, accompanied by 18 year old lovelies, jumping up and down with bits of paper). And then there’s the best of the lot, the favourite of Fleet Street – the piece decrying how astonishingly ignorant/lazy/stupid today’s generation of students are (generally accompanied by a picture of a 14 year old male with a pencil up his nose).
The last story is usually backed up by a survey that shows how students are indeed quite thick. The results are then twisted appropriately to match the biases of the publication and – voila! – you get the Daily Mail’s headline: “Trendy teaching is ‘producing a generation of history numbskulls”.
But that’s just the Daily Mail being Daily Mail. More worryingly, the BNP have got involved and leapt on the findings of Professor Derek Matthews of Cardiff University who studied the historical knowledge of his first years.
In ‘The Strange Death of History Teaching’, Professor Matthews set his first year undergrads a very simple test of five basic historical questions.
Question 1 – Who was the general in charge of the British army at the battle of Waterloo?
Question 2 – Who was the reigning monarch when the Spanish Armada attacked Britain?
Question 3 – What was Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s profession?
Question 4 – Name one prime minister of Britain in the 19th century?
Question 5 – In what country was the Boer War of 1899-1902 fought?
The results were pretty shocking. Only one in 10 could name a British Prime Minister from the Nineteenth Century. Just 16% knew who was in charge of the British at Waterloo. If these figures were simply the young people as a whole then they would not shock as much. But these are people who went to university – a good one – and yet appear to know less than an eight year old who has read Horrible Histories: The Vile Victorians.
Despite the publicity his survey created, Professor Matthews is displeased with the way his results have been covered by the press and the BNP adopting his findings. “I am very unhappy that my piece has been taken up by the BNP. Journalists and others have clearly not read the whole piece, and have used it for their own ends invariably conservative and nationalist. The BNP website uses my quiz results followed by a puff for a book on the great British Empire and Marshall’s ‘Our Island Story’, which I expressly attack in my pamphlet; as I do Thatcher, the Daily Mail and Telegraph, both rags that gave my quiz prominence!”
When challenged over quiz’s narrow timescale and emphasis on military history, Professor Matthews defended the survey. “The questions in the quiz were chosen simply because
they were the easiest ones I could think of. If I had shown a bias towards say the 17th century the results would have been much worse.”
One survey cannot condemn an entire generation. History is more than just recalling a few names and dates. But even so this survey is a rather scary indictment of history teaching in schools today. There is a preposterous emphasis on a few chosen topics – particularly the rise of the Nazis – which leaves even those about to study history with huge historical blind spots. The GCSE and A-level syllabuses need to go through de-Nazification. There is no harm in students being instilled with a traditional, broad chronological understanding of British history. Indeed it is completely necessary to do so. The BNP continue to gain legitimacy partly through their bastardised version of British history, which people swallow due to their own ignorance of the past. The fight against Facism has moved on from the beaches and into the classroom. And if you don’t understand why I just mentioned beaches then that’s precisely what’s wrong.
For any numbskulls who didn’t already know, the answers are: 1, The Duke of Wellington; 2, Elizabeth I; 3, An engineer; 4, There were 20 including Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone and Sir Robert Peel; 5, South Africa. Now go and buy some Horrible Histories and stop being an idiot.
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