But which island story? Kings, queens and battles? The old Whig one – how Britain has got freer and better over time? A radical one – from the peasants' revolt to today's TUC march for the alternative? An island story that includes the backgrounds of all our immigrants over the centuries? A Daily Telegraph readers' one, perhaps: how Britain has gone to the dogs? How about one that gives as much attention to women as to men? Well, I'm sure one could strike some kind of balance among all these but it would be bound to confuse students (rightly), which is why they would still need analytical skills to sort out the strands.Īnd "British" isn't the only "identity" in the running. The favoured one is usually British, in order to inculcate "British ness" – "Our island story", as Gove likes to put it. History is too important and valuable in other ways – helping us to understand "other histories than our own", for one – to be prostituted to this end.Īnd then there's the vexed question of which "identity" should be taught. The demand usually comes from politicians but surely this is their job, which they could do much better – by preserving the institutions the British are most proud of, for example (the BBC and the NHS come to mind), or by making the country something we can be (even) prouder of in the future. There are anyway problems with using history to teach "identity". But in fact it furnishes an almost perfect illustration of why children need to be taught analytical skills, more than "big stories" or facts. The implication is that this book, or something like it, could serve as a textbook for any new Goveian syllabus. He has said this sort of thing before, in support of his new friend Michael Gove's reforming ambitions for the school history syllabus. How can this identity-preserving knowledge – the "big story" – be inculcated in the young, "given our educational theorists' aversion to formal knowledge and rote-learning", their preference for "everyone's history but our own", usually in "chunks", and their obsession with study skills and textual analysis? Now there's a challenge! The second is to correct deficiencies in the way he claims that history is currently taught in British schools. Otherwise "civilization" could very quickly collapse. It's important for our sense of cultural identity, he believes, and consequently our ability to defend that identity against external threats, not to lose sight of this. One is to put over his view of world history, which he sees as having been dominated by "western" civilization (here generally just called "civilization") for 500 years. (They smiled weakly.) I still don't (the "killer" part, that is).įerguson also has two other agendas. In the film the youngsters clearly understood this. That will account for his use here of terms such as "killer apps".
#Civ 6 play europe again series#
Some of them appear at the beginning of the Channel 4 series accompanying the book. "The book is partly designed so a 17-year-old boy or girl will get a lot of history in a very digestible way, and be able to relate to it," he told the Observer recently. N iall Ferguson has written this, his latest book, largely for teenagers.