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The school history curriculum: from Black History Month to Peterloo

KEITH FLETT examines some of the historical events that children aren’t being taught at school

JEREMY CORBYN got some media coverage on October 11, when, speaking in Bristol and marking the anniversary of the 1963 Bristol bus boycott campaign which ended the colour bar on bus employees in that city, he called for black history to be a mainstream school history subject.

At the moment it is often confined to October — Black History Month — and some local authorities are trying to weaken and water down even that focus.

The Labour leader was of course absolutely right to make the case for black history. There have been and continue to be exceptions where good practice in inclusive British history teaching can be found. 

Even when I was at school in north London in the 1970s, I well recall the deputy headmistress, who was a member of the Communist Party, advising me that the history books I should be reading were by Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm. Obviously I took her advice.

Yet too much school history is still about white Anglo-Saxon men, even if the imperial “our island story” has largely disappeared from curriculums in that specific format.

The reality is that any school history that is not looking at William Cuffay, the black leader of London Chartism in 1848, or in our own times Bernie Grant, who was MP for Tottenham in the 1980s and 1990s, is not telling the whole story of British history.

In 2018, students need to know why the slave trade existed, what British imperial meant, why it was resisted and in most cases eventually ended. 

These can be uncomfortable subjects still and certainly the arguments of those who consider British imperialism to have been a civilising influence need to be both addressed and reviewed critically as well. They cannot and should not be avoided.

The issue of what is and is not in the school history curriculum goes wider than the issue of black history, key though that is for any real understanding of why Britain is as it is today.

After 1968, the women’s liberation movement gave rise to a new feminism and that was closely associated with the socialist historians of the History Workshop. 

Yet that still left a real effort to make sure that women featured in school history. Not just Queen Victoria or the suffragettes’ fight for the vote but the struggles of working women, such as the matchwomen’s strike.

More recently a debate has arisen about what the significant events are in British history that should be taught in schools. 

The debate was started by film-maker Mike Leigh who argued that one of the main reasons he decided to make his soon to be released film about the events of Peterloo in 1819 was precisely because this key moment in the development of British democracy was often not to be found on the school history curriculum.

People wrote to the Guardian pointing out that they had been taught about Peterloo at school, which, with the rise of privatised academies and Tory education policies, is actually less likely now. 

Meanwhile Tory ideologue Daniel Finkelstein wrote in the Murdoch Times that he did not think that Peterloo merited being taught as a key moment in British history.

In a sense Finkelstein was making Leigh’s point for him. Even 200 years on, what happened when people protested for the vote in central Manchester is still too sensitive in the eyes of some to be mentioned to school students. 

After all, the magistrate who sent the yeomanry in at Peterloo, William Hulton, was a lifelong Tory activist. Awkward historical realities still.

 

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