History

“They say that the UK is the most constipated country in the world.

I’d like to see some hard evidence of that.”

If you teach history, you probably encourage your students to think like TV police detectives. This method of pedagogy wasn’t so popular in the 1970’s, unless your teacher wanted you to use casually racist terminology, kick seven shades of shit out of people and order women to either put their knickers on or take them off before making the tea.

Teaching history in the 1970’s and 80’s rarely strayed from the imparting of facts and the expectation that these facts were all remembered. There was no analysis, synthesis, comparison, evaluation, interpretation, enquiry or any other skill that required application of the knowledge acquired from copying lines from textbooks and undertaking simple comprehension exercises.

Nowadays, all of you find yourself questioning students in order to develop their own questioning abilities, whilst hoping that they don’t question you about anything that you don’t know the answer to.

Like history.

The difficulty you probably encounter when confronted by interested students with inquiring minds is that they expect you to know everything about history. Given that history is everything that ever happened to everyone ever, this expectation is a somewhat unreasonably weighty one.

Unlike Marmite subjects, such as Maths and Geography, people tend to either love or hate parts of history depending on the era studied. Adults will often tell you which bits of history they enjoy, although this rarely strays outside the ubiquitous Tudor, World War Two and Roman periods. You’ll be told at Parents’ Evening how a son or daughter (or to be fair, it’s usually a son) watches the History Channel a lot. But this channel only really exists to remind us that the Nazis were bad and to show us what brilliant weapons we had in the war.

Two of the most ignorant accusations made against History are:

“Why do we have to learn about stuff that happened in the past, rather than what’s happening now?”
and…
“Why don’t we learn about British History?”

If you’re a teacher worth your salt, you’ll answer a question with a question. To the first, you might respond with, “Do you watch the news?” If the student doesn’t watch the news, then you’ve identified the pointlessness in trying to answer when they’ve just undermined their own question. If they do watch the news, then you’re onto a winner.

The second question does have more worth. The answer is that we know people are naturally more interested in death, disaster, extremism and suffering and these characteristics are best served by studying slavery, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. All of which are important to study, but their very presence overshadows all the British history that you also teach, because students soon forget about our nation’s more moderate and gradual historical evolution over the centuries. The development of Parliamentary power, the social reforms of the Industrial Revolution, the conflict and consensus between political parties; none of these match the emotionally-charged badness of History’s evil bastards.

Death and disaster sell. The students who lap this up are the future motorway rubber-neckers. In showing the film “Mississippi Burning” to some 14 year-olds recently (yes, I know it’s an 18 certificate, but it was all done above board) a girl acted on our advice to leave the room when she found a scene too distressing. She sat through the close-range gunshot to the head in the opening scene and the racist violence and abuse thereafter, but told me that watching a fish being cut open was just too disgusting to bear.

Film and other multi-media have made History far more visual and (therefore) appealing than it used to be. Back in those less enlightened decades mentioned earlier, History books might have had a black and white drawing every fifth or sixth page. Some people might argue that at least in those text-dominated days students were encouraged to use their imagination, whereas now we can show them History in the manner of a form of entertainment. Arguably, we shouldn’t abandon visual stimuli when it is available out of some fear of strangling imagination, because throughout history the development of art, writing and performance only served to encourage imagination rather than replace it. (So, the old fart that once criticised interactive whiteboards to me, citing the restricting imagination argument, can go whistle out of his arse.)

And there is so much multi-media to choose from. You might want to avoid those TV documentaries that have a Simon Schama or David Starkey constantly on camera, walking across a historical site, trying to describe the events in a patronisingly, supercilious and annoying voice. Both of these wankers need to be locked up in the Tower for a decade before being beheaded by their personal gimp with a blunt hardback volume of one of their books.

Better than that is You Tube. A lot of what you’ll find, though, is some American kids’ High School projects; and for all the reasons obvious in that sentence, these videos will be as good as diarrhoea. So avoid that soft option and find proper footage of 20th century events or some nerds dressed up and recreating a Civil War battle or a memorably foolish song from the Horrible Histories franchise.

In fact, the only way to make students remember History and therefore want to learn more about it is to send it up. Granted, there’s not much mileage for humour in slavery, genocide or any wars within living memory; but everything else in history is fair game for ridicule. We all have a nasty streak to our sense of humour, and this should be exploited.