Telling Tales in School
Seán Lang looks forward to the return of narrative to the teaching of history in schools.
Set beside the intense public appetite for history, school history appears a decidedly poor relation. Millions lap up Simon Schama or David Starkey on television, yet GCSE or A-level students are subjected to a dry diet of endless Nazis and finicky source exercises that bear little relation to actual historical practice. I was recently asked to go into a school to talk with a bright GCSE group about how ‘real’ historians use ‘real’ sources, because the exercises they were doing for the exam were rapidly turning them off the subject itself.
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