The question we have to ask is what history is it necessary to teach the young? (at the moment the consensus in Britain seems to be Tudors, Nazis and the Russian Revolution)
Haha, yes. The problem here o/c is that history teaching (more than any subject really) is politically sensitive. No one wants a return to the ugly rows of the '80's and early '90's so you get a sort of strange, and politically fairly neutral, compromise. But the other reason for that is that the two main sides in the history debates of the past (Whigs on the one side, New Leftish on the other) are intellectually bankrupt and obviously so.
The history sylabus in both schools and even in universities is 'disjointed.' Theres very little progression from one idea or event to the next except within the context of each individual topic. Once on 'bloc' is finished you move on, theres no link. The debate is whether or not history is about events or ideas or both. History used to be about dates, and famous people and famous battles, now it has much more form and substance.
History used to only record the lives of the great and the good, not the poor and the desperate and the Annales school's emphasis on 'motionless history'; looking at structures and the actions of people and movements within them was revolutionary. The idea of history being linear of being 'One f-cking thing after another' was quietly and rightly put to bed. However whil history began to take on form, it lost some structure.
The new left certainly adapted this for political gain and the foothold they held within the 'redbrick' universities is still felt today. Without the redbrick expansion, the possibility that the Annales school would have faded would have been very tangable. Afterall the traditionalists had a new war (WWII) to scrutinise. Those who like history to be sequential, about the powerful and the tactics and decisions they made had another domino effect in appeasment as they did with the road to WWI. The new left took up the banner, it was just the wrong carrier. Without them however much would have been lost. Yet because history is contextual as well as historical, the political reality of the fall of communist Europe did not register and many of the older professors have failed to grasp this some twenty years since the event (the overlap between history and sociology in many institutions and in many minds has not helped but that would require an essay in itself to explain! ). People still think along new left lines.
Ioften think along new left lines, but taking a different direction. Theres nothing wrong in the technique as such, but it is selectively applied.
Glasgow labour historians love 'Red Clydeside'. Thanks to them we have economic, social, womens, childrens, minority voices and experiences recorded and referenced...
if your working class. Theres one hell of a void out there as I discovered when I research for my dissertation. What about the petit bourgeois/middle class? Most interestingly what about the employers themselves and their vested interests and experiencies of the era. Theres was precious little out there, and few people had taken the time or the energy to create more than a class biased social and labour history. The only reliable sources came from the archives of local history enthusiasts and while you can only do your best, the picture I wanted to paint was left incomplete.
