History in crisis
Why do so few students want to study history nowadays?
I was delighted to speak at the History Reclaimed conference in Cambridge this weekend. The small group of independent scholars who established History Reclaimed believe that history ‘should not be a vehicle for facile propaganda’. They provide a platform for nuanced articles teasing out fact from politics and rescuing history from the culture wars. I spoke alongside Alka Segal-Cuthbert and Katharine Birbalsingh on a panel discussing history teaching in schools. This is what I said:
It is hard to overstate the current crisis in the study of history in British universities. Numbers provide give us a small indication of the scale of the problem we are facing.
The number of undergraduate history students fell 17 per cent between 2014/15 and 2019/20. The number of postgraduate students fell 16 per cent over the same period. This fall came against a backdrop of overall student numbers increasing. Numbers of have continued to fall in every subsequent year since 19/20.
There are clearly lots of factors behind this sharp decline. Student numbers are down across the humanities, perhaps, at least in part, because fee-paying students have been taught to think instrumentally and study a subject that leads more directly to well-paid employment. But there is more to it than this. Fewer students see any reason to study the humanities in general and history in particular.
As a consequence, universities are severely cutting the size of history departments or even closing them down altogether. It seems that history, as a subject, is no longer integral to a sense of what makes a higher education a university. It has become dispensable - nice to have if the money is there but a luxury to be discarded when it is not.
This sense of ‘disposability’ speaks to a crisis in the discipline. Historians have failed to make an intrinsic case for the study of their own subject. When history, as a subject, is reduced to a series of transferable skills, and these skills can be picked up in other - perhaps easier or just more fashionable ways - what reason do students have to study history? Students numbers are falling and history departments are being cut because the study of the past is neither valued as an academic discipline nor as a culturally valuable endeavour.
Some sense of this begins in schools. History remains in the top 10 of subject choices at A-level and, thanks to the more demanding National Curriculum requirements introduced by Micheal Gove, is being studied by more children at GCSE level. The problem is that many give up at this point. The more children study history, the less likely they are to want to continue.
The past, it seems, is not popular.
For clues, we can look at what is happening in the history classroom. The ‘Gove reforms’ have been recognised as transformative by many teachers. They introduced (at least in theory!) a new focus on chronology with a far more rigorous, ambitious and content-heavy curriculum.
A 2023 Ofsted subject review (Rich Encounters With The Past) recognises the progress made in history teaching over the past decade. However, it notes that there is still an emphasis on teaching skills and even facts through topics rather than a systematic sense of chronology. In this way, children can encounter history as a ‘pick ‘n’ mix’ of different topics, or even issues, with some Ancient Egyptians one month, World War Two the next, and the Tudors some time later. At some schools, topics readily morph into ‘issues’ with ‘power’, ‘religion’, ‘society’ or ‘women’ forming the focus of study rather than a specific historical period. The danger is that currently fashionable causes, rather than what is important about the past, drive teaching.
Diversity is one such currently fashionable cause. Research carried out by the Universities of Oxford and Reading in 2021 found that 87 per cent of secondary schools had made substantial changes to their history curriculum to address issues of diversity. 72 per cent claimed to teach the history of migration while 80 per cent taught ‘Black and Asian British history’. The most common period to focus on was post-World War Two.
There is clearly nothing wrong with teaching these topics. The problem is, they are often being taught in lieu of a broader understanding of general British history. But it is hard to make sense of a topic like migration without this more general historical context. And in an era of identity politics, foucsing on ‘Black History’, as opposed to the history of black people within British society, can serve to divide students and alienate them from a sense of national identity.
Reasons for making the curriculum more diverse included ‘a sense of social justice, to better represent the nature of history and the stimulus of recent events’. There is clearly no need for history teaching to be set in aspic. But gearing history around the values of diversity and the stimulus of recent events paves the way for the subject to be politicised.
Back to Ofsted…. Its 2023 report notes that:
In nearly half of schools, teachers expected pupils to make their own judgements on sources of evidence without having developed secure historical knowledge to do this meaningfully.
This is a damning statement. It suggests that a significant proportion of history teachers view their role as getting children to judge the past - and, presumably, find it wanting.
But when the past is all bad, and only there for us to score political points in the present, why study history?
The curriculum is, of course, only half the story. Children pick up other messages about the past at school too. Over recent years, many schools have changed the name of their houses. As a recent Telegraph column put it: Out with Churchill in with Greta. Schools have dropped Drake, Raleigh and Nelson as the names of houses and brought in Rashford, Greta and Malala. Children are told there is nothing valuable in the past. They are consigned to a permanent present.
Outside of school, in broader culture, children receive similarly negative messages about the past. Children’s history books have been dumbed down and turned into comic strips that focus on the gross aspects of the ‘olden days’. Museums have been transformed into playgrounds for toddlers and re-education centres for adults. Moral messages take the place of ‘scratch and sniff’ displays. Great for five-year-olds, deadly dull for any teenager who takes him or herself seriously.
So, by the age of 18 children get the message from school and wider society that the past is for children, it’s gross, it was evil, racist and bad. They learn the aim of studying history is to pass judgement with a view to proving our own moral superiority. Serious study is out, political point scoring is in.
In this dire context, the surprise is not that so few people want to study history at university but that so many still do.
We need to introduce children to history as a coherent national story, a chronology, with both good and bad bits, a past that made our society what it is and is intrinsically worthy of study.
Just a couple of points.
Why should 'Black History' be confined to the history of black people in Britain? Black History should be about what black people have been doing for last few thousand years in their own countries. And not merely complaining about imperialism. I want information about their literature, their scientific developments, their territorial and religious wars, and, especially, their development of the slave trade in Africa.
Another reason for the growing unpopularity of History, is that the study of History requires not only the learning of new things, but the acceptance that one was wrong about many things.