Controversy Bedevils Teaching of History in Britain

British students learn all about Florence Nightingale, the heroic nurse of the Crimean battlefields, but what of Mary Seacole, a Jamaican nurse who served with equal devotion in the same war?

Therein lies the heart of an intellectual wrangle over how history should be taught in British schools.

One side says Britain’s own history comes first. The other believes that, in what has become an ethnically diverse country, one child’s footnote is another’s historical landmark.

Most students know about Cecil Rhodes, the Victorian empire builder who dreamed of a Cape-to-Cairo railroad. But how many have heard of King William Dappa Pepple Bonny V of Nigeria, who was exiled with his wife Annie from their realm and lived in London in the 19th Century?

British children learn about Anglo-Saxon settlers, but the contribution of Jewish settlers in the Middle Ages is often overlooked.

Debate centers on a national “core” curriculum mandated by the Education Reform Bill of 1988 in history as well as English, math and science-technology. The reform limits local choices, but does not do away with them.

The curriculum recommended by a history study group “is the only one that has generated the heat,” Rozina Visram, a former teacher, said in an interview.

“Academics from high and mighty universities have thrown their hats into the ring. No other document has been given such a long consultation.”

Those who approach history as a force in molding national pride and identity view the curriculum reform as a means of regaining the ground that has been slipping away since the liberal 1960s.

They want a return to teaching Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s “great landmarks of British history”: the life of King Henry VIII, Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, the Battle of Waterloo, the Battle of Britain.

Opponents contend that minority history must be included in a country whose ethnic minorities now total 2.6 million people.

Children of the inner cities will not “switch on to an all-white male experience,” said Sylvia Collicott, a senior lecturer at the North London Polytechnic.

“In the classroom, you can’t tell kids what to do; they won’t do that anymore. They expect to be engaged. They won’t sit there and take that.”

Local schools have adapted to the cultural changes. In Bradford, where 53 of the 231 schools have non-white majorities, students learn a little of everything.

Tonnie Ecker’s children attend Birkby School in Kirkliees, suburban Bradford, where “just about every ethnic festival is celebrated.”

“It’s wonderful,” she said. “They come back and tell you the stories about various gods and all that. Sometimes their hands are covered for three days with mehandi patterns,” butterfly or flower designs painted in a reddish dye.

The reform does not prohibit local diversity and ethnic celebrations, but critics say it makes so many detailed prescriptions of what should be in the curriculum that it leaves no room for ethnic studies.

Robert Skidelsky, a historian at Warwick University, said history trains people for citizenship, “and it touches many raw nerves.”

So vehemently have academics disagreed that some fear the government will abandon the history reforms..

Skidelsky got into the debate when his son took a test that instructed him to “imagine that you are a Palestinian gunman attacking the Israeli Olympic team in Munich.”

The question was part of the empathy theory of teaching history, which asks students to imagine themselves as players on the historical stage.

“There were too many theories floating around,” Skidelsky said in an interview. “Pupils were becoming guinea pigs.”

Michael Barber, education policy director for the National Union of Teachers, feels the curriculum is too detailed.

“What we need at the national level is an interstate highway map of the country, as opposed to a map of all the local state roads and foot paths,” said Barber, a former high school history teacher.

For instance, the history working group says students aged 7 to 11 should study invaders and settlers; the Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings in Britain; life in Tudor and Stuart times; Victorian Britain; ancient Egypt and Greece, and exploration from 1450 to 1550.

Each topic is divided into four areas: political; economic, technological-scientific; social-religious and cultural-aesthetic.

“There are hundreds and hundreds of detailed prescriptions,” said Ted Wragg, director of Exeter University’s school of education.

He finds the proposals arbitrary. As an example, he said, students aged 14 to 16 studying modern American history would be required to learn about President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but President John F. Kennedy and the civil rights movement would be optional.

Detractors, including the teachers’ union, say less than the recommended 50% of class time should be devoted to British history.

Thatcher supports a heavy emphasis on British history and told the House of Commons concentrating on the names of England’s kings and queens, statesmen and battles is “absolutely right.”

Skidelsky feels the proposed curriculum benefits the majority: “Some areas have got to adopt entirely unconventional methods, but most people in Britain are part of the great middle class bulge and go to a very standard school.”

Although the opposition Labor Party accused Thatcher of seeking to indoctrinate children with her own view of history, Skidelsky doesn’t believe politics is involved.

“The government has felt a responsibility to increase its involvement because of testing which shows British school children are behind those in other countries,” he said.