Teaching history is a maddening blur. From class to class, keystage to keystage, year to year, through assessment and skills, to content, final levels and added value; the day to day concerns of a history teacher can often obscure the bigger picture. This bigger picture consists partly of why we teach history at all at secondary school. The reasons for teaching history are various, and many attempts have been made to categorize them.
My purpose is to explore what “progress” or “progression” in school history means. It seems logical that we should start off by asking the question “what is school history for?”, in the hope that, having established what the aims should be, we can treat this as an endpoint, and therefore begin to plot a course showing us how to get there. It is hoped that, in the day to day confusion of the average school history teacher’s day, it will be useful to have an overriding sense of purpose, a meta-purpose, if you will, of why he or she is doing what she is doing. I hope to provide something approaching a rule, or tool, to provide this sense of purpose.
The word rule implies something straight – as crystalline as previous commentaries on the purposes of school history. This however, is not my aim. Kant one said that
“Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made, nothing entirely straight can be built” (quoted in Berlin 2003: p.v).
History is a (the?) quintessentially human activity and as such is prey (if that is the right word) to the foibles, facets, faults. nooks and crannies of all human experience and effort. Just as the linguistic turn has taught us that these human aspects should encourage us not only to be more circumspect in the claims that we make about history, but also to be more creative in our historical methods, so it should make us think more carefully about whether we can set out clear and unbending aims and purposes for school history.
School history is taught and learned by humans. The aims of school history will themselves be devised, selected, received and understood in an infinite variety of ways, many of which will compete with each other, and some of which will be incompatible with each other. Taking my inspiration from Isaiah Berlin, I aim for a rule that preserves the humanity of history:
“To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed in schemes is almost always the road to inhumanity” (Berlin 2003: 19).
Therefore, I aim for a rule that Berlin might approve of, a rule that bends so as not to break at the first test of reality – a rule made from the crooked timber of humanity.