heathenhistory.co.uk

You often get more informed and reflective comment in the Sunday newspapers. So it seems here in this week’s Observer. Historian and MP for Stoke Central, Tristram Hunt, writes about falling numbers of GCSE and A Level History students. For me he makes a particularly interesting / controvertial point when he argues that the decline in steepest in what he calls  “our most deprived communities“. He cites the example that “in Knowsley, near Liverpool, just 16.8% of pupils were entered for history, compared with 45.4% in Richmond upon Thames“. It is valid to put this point next to Mr Podesta’s comment about statistics on my earlier post on this topic.

Whatever you think of that, the article is useful to us as A Level historians, because Hunt uses arguments from the Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawn (shown). He cites Hobsbawn’s view that, “the destruction of the past or, rather, of the social mechanisms that link one…to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late 20th century. Most young men and women…lack any…relation to the…past.” 

I don’t know what Hunt thinks about Hobsbawn’s ideas on duel revolution and liberal captialism -personally they are not really for me. The point is that a confident historian can cite and interact with evidence that might come from a source that they have real problems with if it is helpful, as here.

By the way – this is a Band One skill on your forthcoming Russian dicatorships paper.

Eric Schmidt (Google chairman), has recently condemned the UK education system.  He claims that we tend to separate students into ‘science’ and ‘humanities’ categories too much.  According to Schmidt, instead we should be encouraging more to become ‘polymaths’ – people who are good across the science / humanities spectrum (not people who can easily add or subtract parrots).

Anyway, in the spirit of Schmidt’s call for more cross-over between the sciences and the humanities, here’s an interesting piece (yet again from the lefty Guardian) about the first business computers – developed and used in conjunction with a chain of British tea-shops in the 1950s.  It combines three loves of my life, history, computers and a nice cup of tea. What more could you ask for?

At this time every year there is a conversation in the media about grade inflation and “hard” V “soft” subjects. In truth it is a more complex topic than some would have us believe. However one fact shines through – the number of students undertaking GCSE History continues to decline. There is a very good account of the reality that 70% of students drop the subject at fourteen in England from the Channel Four News website here (for the record about 70% of you opt to study the subject at Little Heath).

What makes this version of the story more interesting to me is that they bother to interview Paula Kitching from the Historical Association. She focuses on the subject’s worth rather than it’s difficultly.  She argues “History widens the mind and for that reason alone it is valuable. It gives young people a sense of why a country is what it is, how a society is what it is and helps them interpret the world we have today.”  One could argue that this its strongest defence, and perhaps makes the subject more important now than ever. Perhaps also it is just another version of my context point (see the earlier post on historians and the riots).

Mr Kydd.