I’m certainly willing to go along with the idea that emprical methods are the best approach for deciding the most effective teaching methods – just as governments are usually wise to first pilot new social policies before going nation wide and it would be commercially prudent for businesses to market test new products before national or international launches.

There are substantive reasons for concerns about schooling standards and attainment in Britain: firstly, international comparisons, and secondly this:

“Up to 12 million working UK adults have the literacy skills expected of a primary school child, the Public Accounts Committee says. . . The report says there are up 12 million people holding down jobs with literacy skills and up to 16 million with numeracy skills at the level expected of children leaving primary school.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4642396.stm

I’m totally unconvinced by the new Conservative fad for “localism” – as well as for elected executive mayors.

Local councils are far too susceptible to influence or control by powerful but quirky personalities, who can have entirely foolish or even dangerous notions. I have seen it happen all too often. It’s no use saying local elections are a safeguard against failing political leadership because turnout at local elections is usually low and lives and families can be destroyed between elections.

Up to only a few years ago, we had an epidemic of Munchausen’s Syndrome By Proxy – as one medic sagely remarked online. Some local social services department fell victim to that fad just as some departments fell victim to the earlier fad of satanic-abuse. Fortunately in one way, as the supposed practices of satanic abuse amount to a criminal offence, the police were obliged to investigate and they couldn’t find evidence to support criminal charges. But that didn’t prevent some families from being destroyed and lives ruined.

Believe me, some councils discovered the potency of this formula years ago:

Failing standards of local schooling => poor local job prospects => entrenched Labour control of council

Looks like a compelling reason for junking that modern Newton stuff and bringing back the old, tried and trusted, geocentric Ptolemaic idea of the universe which had been around for centuries longer.

Was it really necessary to rehabilitate Galileo in 1992?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13618460.600-vatican-admits-galileo-was-right-.html

“the general emasculation of local government”

Having worked in both local and central government, I have to say that there is often much that needs junking in local government. It may come as an unwelcome surprise, but local government is internally often far more hierarchical than central government departments and much less tolerant of pluralism.

How come some district councils regularly rank at or near the bottom of the local education authority league table year after year – while others rank at or near the top, year after year? The correlation between local authority spending on schooling and results is rather poor.

Remember the epidemic of statanic abuse scandal of the early 1990s which swept parts of the country and the genuine abuse of children in local authority care homes which went on for years? Curiously, no local politicians ever felt obliged to take responsibility for that. Some even became government ministers.

Kenneth Baker, as Mrs Thatcher’s education minister, introduced a national curriculum for schools in 1988 because of prevailing concerns about school standards. Some schools, given the freedom, would likely end up teaching Creationism, as happens in America. After all, Darwin an’ all that evolution stuff is relatively modern.

Btw it happens that the Thatcherite chief inspector of schools referred to above attended the maintained school down the road from where I’m writing and which my son went to. That and another maintained school, also within walking distance, gain better average A-level results than Eton.

History is only relevant insofar as it has practical applications today.

Even by the standards of the blogosphere, this is a depressing statement. You and Michael Gove are twin sides of the same philistine coin.

Does the fact that Einstein came up with the thoery of relativity matter one bit in the understanding of the physics? No, it doesn’t. Name’s, inventors, dates…they DON’T matter, ever.

Nonsense.

Names, dates, etc, are of tremendous psychological and narrative importance, even in the sciences, where they frame the context in which ideas developed and ‘humanise’ them.

That it was Einstein who developed both the special and general theories of relativity, or Darwin the theory of evolution by natural selection, matters because, at least at the outset we, as humans, can relate to Einstein and Darwin in a way that we can’t to their ideas if they’re presented to us entirely in isolation. Its their association with those ideas that helps draw us in, that ignites our interest in them and, ultimately, makes us want to learn.

That is only feasible when machines in factories are relatively simple and before computers – which stress literacy and numeracy skills – became ubiquitous in the workplace. On visiting Japan in the early 1980s, I was surprised to learn that well over 90% of pupils there stayed on at school until 18. We need to ask why and how it is that Germany and Japan have relatively large and competitive manufacturing sectors compared with other advanced market economies.

Michael Gove’s careful selection of history topics is manifestly tendentious. It leads to an inevitable suspicion that the primary motivation is indoctrination rather than education. Fairly obvious omitted topics, for instance, include:

- Wilberforce, the slave trade and the abolition of slavery – how long did it take?
- The later industrial revolution and the political necessity of the factory acts
- Trade unions and trade union legislation
- Industrial revolutions in mainland Europe – motivated and directed by state intervention
- The history of scientific discoveries – to which Britain made important contributions
- The Opium Wars in China and how Britain acquired Hong Kong
- The Indian Mutiny 1857
- The Boer Wars
- Winston Churchill and the Wage Boards Act of 1909
- Did Henry Ford pay Efficiency Wages?
- The arms race before WW1
- Churchill’s persistent opposition to Baldwin’s India Act 1935
- The rise of Japan’s automotive industry

That said, why should we be more concerned about little knowledge of history by school leavers rather than about little knowledge of the sciences or understanding of maths and statistics?

I would say yes. If Churchill wasn’t in charge during WW2, things might have turned out very different (for better or worse, he was far from perfect). If you don’t know about him, you don’t know all the history that has led us up to this point.

But even if you don’t agree, as I said before I think it is worth knowing history even when it lacks relevance to the modern world. Partly because it allows you to practice historical methods in areas that are not obviously politically charged, partly because you never know when you might come across something that is useful after all, and also because it is part of what it is to be human – to pursue knowledge as an end in itself.

“We have noted a substantial body of original research . . . which found that stagnant or declining literacy underlay the ‘revolution’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. . . Britain in 1850 was the wealthiest country in the world but only in the second rank as regards literacy levels. [Nick] Crafts has shown that in 1870 when Britain was world economic leader, its school enrolment ratio was only 0.168 compared with the European norm of 0.514 and ‘Britain persistently had a relatively low rate of accumulation of human capital’.”
Sanderson: Education, economic change and society in 1780-1870 (Cambridge UP, 1995) p.61

Of course, stuff about why state intervention to ensure better basic standards of education was found to be necessary does rather subvert the Free Market message.

On the Winston Churchill issue, I haven’t actually said anything so far, but I happen to believe that personalities can and do matter in history. That is what makes it different, as a subject, from sociology. If you don’t know who the key players are, what their personal backgrounds are, you are missing out on part of the explanation for historical events.