CPS Board Member Professor Niall Ferguson writes for The Guardian on Friday 15th February 2013, discussing the new national curriculum released by Education Secretary Michael Gove.
To view the full article, please visit The Guardian website
“Michael Gove’s new national curriculum is out, and already the big guns of Oxbridge are blasting the changes it proposes to the way English kids are taught history.
From Cambridge no less a personage than Richard Evans, the Regius Professor of History, condemned Gove’s attempt to restore “rote learning of the patriotic stocking-fillers so beloved of traditionalists”. According to Evans, the new curriculum was “a Little England version of our national past, linked to an isolationist view of our national future”. It constituted “a mindless regression to the patriotic myths of the Edwardian era”.
From Oxford came the echo. David Priestland said it was a “depressingly narrow … resolutely insular … politicised and philistine” document. “We are … firmly back in the land of the Edwardian bestseller Our Island Story.”
The pomposity of these attacks is in inverse proportion to their accuracy. Indeed, if you want a perfect illustration of how depressingly narrow, resolutely insular and politicised Oxbridge historians can be, read these two. You have to wonder when, if ever, these learned professors last set foot inside a school classroom, or last had a conversation with a history teacher or a pupil about the current key stages 2 and 3.”
To view the full article, please visit The Guardian website
Date Added: Friday 15th February 2013
