The result is an ignorance passing all understanding, Winston Churchill the first man on the moon, Germany and Spain having occupied Britain. Although, in fairness, no 18-year-old can surely match David Lammy’s claim on a celebrity edition of Who Wants To Be Millionaire? that the surname of the woman who, with her husband, discovered radium was Antoinette or that the successor to Henry VIII was Henry VII. So who was that Trafalgar bloke, Mr Lammy?
Ignorance is a shaming thing and we have lots of it. But then the response of Blairism was that knowledge is irrelevant if it gets in the way of business success. “I am not interested”, said Charles Clarke in that brutish way of his, “in any subject which doesn’t serve the economy”. So what about all that higher mathematics which Fred Goodwin hired to maximise returns from the ratios of projected share performances and which so lately went kerflip, kerflop? Clarke remarked once: “I would tolerate one or two Medieval historians – for display purposes.”
That is not what Jeremy Bentham meant by Utilitarianism, as ministers would know if they knew what Utilitarianism was or had heard of Jeremy Bentham. It is philistinism, militant philistinism, a curdled resentment of anything not exploitable or materially gratifying, the arrogance of ignorance. If, as I believe, mankind is best divided into the curious and the incurious, the central-peremptory devisers of the core curriculum do not need the roots and past lives of men and nations as they do not need art, music or literature, Mozart, Raphael or Shakespeare.
No good quoting to them
AE Housman’s words that “Knowledge is happiness”. Housman was only a poet and classical scholar who never grossed serious money. What could he know that was of any use to Charles Clarke or David Lammy? So let us carry the argument along on the enemy’s terms – and they are the enemy. What is the actual use of history?
Never mind recent history and its obvious points like how much we might learn from General de Gaulle on foreign policy and post-war Germany about economics. Try the American-British overthrow in 1953 of Mohammed Mossadeq, the democratically elected premier of Iran, for the modernising, Islam-slighting and hated Reza Shah, which over 25 years incubated today’s fanaticism. Try recalling that to the American politicians putting so many things right with a good bombing here, there and everywhere.
Go further back and learn from the history of the late 17th century. Louis XIV was the most powerful ruler in Europe, France the greatest power. English history was shaped by fear of him. His ambitions in Flanders threatened Holland and, by extension, England, bringing us together under William of Orange to resist him.
His early wars exhausted France. In 1694 he realised as much and made a peace which, if kept, would have let France flourish. But Louis had a recurring itch to meddle and quarrel. The question of the Spanish royal succession rising in, say, 1695 would have been settled by any of half a dozen compromises. Coming as it did in 1701-02, the meddling itch resumed. Louis swaggered and affronted himself into the long, ruinous and avoidable war which, by 1713, had humiliated him, crucified Frenchmen and made England.
Louis believed in an all-preoccupying present and France’s greatness. From history, he might have discovered the presumption of the Athenians and, indeed, the brittleness of English victory in France after Agincourt. I suspect that Barack Obama has read a deal of history, but the American war party should be sat down with a couple of decent books – on Louis’ last 25 years and the entire Spanish 17th century.
All that is crucial. But back in school, how would we get children to start – to read? The bits of history they do get are the Tudors or the Nazis, respectively sex and violence or violence and violence. So try the Wars of the Roses, the field of Towton in 1461, with, proportionate to population, as many dead as fell on the monstrous first day of the Somme. You want a whiff of the horrors? Consider the heads on Micklegate Bar in York. England in the 1450s, like England in the 1130s, “When God and his saints slept,” was as excitingly nasty as any normally vicious 14-year-old could ask. For the better purposes of history it’s a start.
History is the understanding of human folly. It is also, in the way of high-grossing fantasy films, like The Lord of the Rings, entirely compelling. Taught with a bit of flair, nothing anywhere is quite as useful or quite as interesting.
