History: To Study or Not.

From The Times
May 15, 2009

Is history so horrible?

With the numbers of boys taking history exams falling, bold plans are being made to make it more exciting

School Gate: Why kids should be learning about kings and queens
Was Henry VIII our most important monarch?

The year is 1066 and after hours of bloody battle in a field outside Hastings, King Harold gets an arrow in his eye. A thousand years later, give or take, and a 14-year-old boy at Filsham Valley School, Hastings, watching the action unfold on a large screen, grimaces: “Ow! That’s got to hurt. Where were his safety goggles?” The jokes turn to expressions of disgust as Harold is disembowelled and beheaded by the Normans. There is silence as girls the same age as those in the room are tied to a tree so that Norman soldiers can rape them.

We don’t see any rapes and much of the violence is artfully done, but it is still gory stuff. It also has the 24 pupils gripped and then fizzing for the rest of the afternoon. The action-packed docudrama is followed by a lively discussion and then a session playing a war-fighting video, complete with Anglo-Saxon swearwords.

Lucy Jupe, 13, enjoyed the film but says “it was quite aggressive”. The rape scene “made me think how it would have been if I had been in that time”.

Her teacher, Hazel Lawrence, thinks that because the violence against the girls was implied rather than overt, it was suitable for a school audience and provided a useful lesson in one of the eternal weapons of warfare. Lawrence is pleased with the response from the class as, in the eight years since she started teaching, she has noticed a drop in the number of boys taking history at GCSE. Back when she qualified, boys dominated, representing more than three quarters of classes. Now there is a 50-50 split.

It is too early to spot any long-term trends in data, but last year the number of boys and girls taking history at GCSE dropped. Boys were down by 1,000 more than girls. Justin Hardy, one of the makers of the film that the Hastings pupils have just watched, (1066: The Battle for Middle Earth, to be shown on Channel 4 next week) hopes that he has found a way of hooking them in and serving them history that they can relate to. “I wanted to make something that appeals to the early teenager in all of us. Most of us come across 1066 at the age of 12 or 13. That’s when we become aware of where the English history of kings and queens began.”

Not that you see much of the kings and queens in this film. The story is told from the view of the ordinary folk on the periphery of history as recorded in the annals, but the front line when it gets really miserable. As Charlie Bourne, 14, put it: “They acted it out. It’s not just the man talking. History programmes tend to bore me.”

The pupils also enjoy spotting references to The Lord of the Rings. While Tolkien’s imagination may have created an entire world of Middle-earth, the film points out that in Anglo-Saxon it meant “land between heaven and hell, where men walk”. None of the pupils knows that Tolkien was a leading expert on Anglo-Saxon literature.

The Saxon characters in the film think that they see elves in the words. Then they come face to face with Orcs. Orc meant foreigner or demon; in this case the feared Normans. The battle scenes were consciously modelled on those in The Lord of the Rings films, with a similar level of violence. The narration is by Bilbo Baggins himself, the actor Ian Holm.

The kids like seeing the story of this seminal event from the point of view of characters they embrace as their own. “History just concentrates on the main people. It’s nice to see what it looks like for the people lower down in the world. Ordinary people don’t get enough mentions,” says Jamie Ellis, 14. “In 100 years time, when people look back they are not going to see us. They are going to see the generals and presidents and prime ministers.” Given the confessional generation he inhabits, that may not be true, but I take his point.

The film opens with a Saxon wedding of two 14-year-olds. The pupils find this amusing, rather more so than the prospect of being sent off to battle at the same age. In their lunch-stained polo shirts, the children hunched in their seats in the school cinema do not look like they would have lasted long up against a Viking berserker. “It’s funny to think that we are not allowed to vote or drink or do other things but back in those days we would have been called up to fight,” says Ellis. “It’s sad. They had less of a childhood.”

Lawrence says that when there is a hands-on element on offer the boys grab it. Unsurprisingly, she had a big take-up from boys when she took a party to the First World War battlefields in France. “When they got the chance to go in the trenches and feel what it was like and physically be there, we got a lot of boys.” Many of the boys signed up for this session, which involved staying after school, because of the chance to play a video game that Channel 4 has produced to go with the film.

This involves replaying the Battle of Hastings, but requires tactical thinking rather than slash-and-burn dexterity. The kids all loved it, especially the boys and especially the insults — “You stinking turd!”, “You oozing puss-head”.

Lawrence says: “They like a lot of interactive stuff where they can use websites and primary sources. That engages them. I think history is behind some other subjects in terms of IT.”

Flora Wilson, the education manager of the Historical Association, believes that there is plenty of source material out there but it needs teachers to work hard to find it. As the head of history at a London secondary school, she uses YouTube clips when teaching modern history, and says that there are plenty of good websites and DVDs.

The association’s concern is that pupils are not being given enough history early on. At Key Stage 3, when students are aged 11-14, some are getting only an hour a week. “We are concerned about the squeeze lower down the school. Schools are making a decision about the broader curriculum that is not always favourable to history.”

There is a worry even earlier too, she says. The basic entitlement on PGCE teacher training courses for primary school teachers is for just half an hour’s humanities training.

Recent changes to the history curriculum mean that students at GCSE and A Level now study fewer periods in more detail. The association welcomes this. “It is less pres-criptive. Teachers get the opportunity to really go into depth on subjects that interest them and the kids,” Wilson says. She adds that media concerns about studying only the Nazis and the Tudors are overstated. In reality the examining boards offer a wide range of subjects.

Nevertheless, the take-up of some courses is very low. It is understood that more than 8,000 students sat a paper on Hitler and the Nazis last year set by one examining board. The same board’s paper on the making of the British Empire had just 12 takers.

The Historical Association is also keen on the need for students to gain an overview of history, a theme that has been picked up by both political parties. Gordon Brown has spoken of the need to understand our British roots. Michael Gove, the Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, is more specific. He wants to see a greater emphasis on chronology. “A broad overview has always been there as part of good practice. Good teachers do it,” says Wilson. “That’s how we hook kids, through the story.”

The kids in this class have a rather shaky grasp of the great sweep of history. They recently studied the Black Death but few of them know that it came after 1066. There are references to historical events of the last millennium taking place “thousands of years ago”. OK, they are only 13 and 14, but it felt a bit like being back in the pages of William The Bold.

There is one depressing aspect of the day in Hastings. It emerges that this is not the first school to have been approached by the TV production company with an offer to screen their film. They tried several in the area but were rebuffed with excuses that they were too busy with the national curriculum. In other words, because the kids weren’t specifically studying the Norman Conquest, the teaching staff lacked either the enthusiasm for their subject, the energy or the imagination to expose the children to something new and different. They didn’t have time to invite in a team who had made a film about one of the most important events in our history, that took place on their doorstep. It might not have helped the kids to obtain a better grade at GCSE but it might just have left them buzzing, as it did the pupils at Filsham Valley.

I loved history and went on to study it at university. I had some rather good teachers, some not so good. It was not the lessons that really fired me up but the extra curricular stuff; the archaeology workshops at the Museum of London, the primary school day trip to the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum, the visit to the Tower of London. I once attended a fantastic day at the LSE on the Doomsday Book because my A-Level history teacher pointed it out to me. I became hooked on the Normans and she abandoned the curriculum one afternoon and made me give a talk on one of the most important books in our history. The period that we were to be examined on started 400 years later, but for an hour we lifted our heads up from that narrow period of history and gained a bit of context. More than two decades later it all started filtering back as I watched the film in Hastings.

When I mention this to Terry Deary, the author of the hugely successful Horrible Histories books, it is grist to his mill. “They couldn’t find schools that would do this!” he says incredulously. Deary calls himself an “alternative education advocate”. A couple of the boys in the Hastings class say his books sucked them into history. Another thinks they are “silly”.

Deary wants kids to be drawn to the subject by his books, but he doesn’t want his books in schools. “I detest schools and I want to see them closed down and the children set free. It’s not an education system, it’s a schooling system.” The gist of his argument is that future Wayne Rooneys should not have to sit in classes and be tested on what happened in 1066. Not all students need to study history. Children shouldn’t be sitting in classrooms of 30 learning the same stuff at the same time.

He is not happy when he hears that teachers use his book, in however limited a way. “I’m appalled, because my books are alternative. If they are fed the alternative within the Establishment, where are they going to turn for the alternative?”

He probably shouldn’t worry too much. The focus on violence and bowel movements in his books is unlikely to see them at the heart of history classes soon. But perhaps more teachers should share some of his enthusiasm for alternative sources of learning: “I want to see more media being used: TV and computer games and theatre shows.”

He has been working on a satellite navigation programme in association with the BBC which will point out places of interest from Norman history on the journey from London to Manchester. “It’s about how to entertain kids on a journey while informing them at the same time. The Normans is a huge period that is ignored, but it is one of the most significant parts for today’s life. They destroyed a Saxon culture. That’s important to learn about; 950 years after the conquest we are still burdened by their feudalism.”

For all his railing against teachers – there are not many good teachers because they are not allowed to teach — he and the historical establishment are probably more in agreement than he thinks. History starts with cracking good stories, which we then pick away at. However much we pick, they are still there. Dates are important. And they don’t get much more important than 1066. “But it’s not just about saying 1066 is important,” says Flora Wilson. “It’s about saying why it is important.”

She will like the film then. The memory of Hastings, says Ian Holm as the narrator towards the end of the first part of the drama, “to this day is hard to bear”. The second part concludes by telling us that today more than one fifth of the country is still owned by descendants of William the Conqueror and his nobles.








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