Citizenship, nation, empire: The politics of history teaching in England, 1870–1930

By Peter Yeandle

Citizenship, nation, empire investigates the extent to which popular imperialism influenced the teaching of history between 1870 and 1930. It is the first book-length study to trace the substantial impact of educational psychology on the teaching of history, probing its impact on textbooks, literacy primers and teacher-training manuals. Educationists identified ‘enlightened patriotism’ to be the core objective of historical education. This was neither tub-thumping jingoism, nor state-prescribed national-identity teaching, but rather a carefully crafted curriculum for all children which fused civic as well as imperial ambitions.

The book will be of interest to those studying or researching aspects of English domestic imperial culture, especially those concerned with questions of childhood and schooling, citizenship, educational publishing and anglo-British relations. Given that vitriolic debates about the politics of history teaching have endured into the twenty-first century, Citizenship, nation, empire is a timely study of the formative influences that shaped the history curriculum in English schools

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781847799982

Peter Yeandle

Peter Yeandle is Lecturer in History at the Loughborough University

Book preview

Introduction

When we look at a map of the world, and we see how wide is the red that marks the British Empire, we may feel proud […] Our race possesses the colonial spirit which French, Spaniards and Germans do not possess: the daring that takes men into distant lands, the doggedness that keeps them steadfast in want and difficulties, the masterful spirit that gives them power of Eastern races, the sense of justice that abuses them from abusing this power.¹

This is a book about the politics of history teaching. The chronological period for this study ranges from the onset of mass schooling in the 1870s up to the end of the 1920s. Broadly put, research investigates the extent to which imperialism influenced those responsible for the creation of historical education. If previous studies of the history of history teaching are characterised by the tendency to focus on the content of textbooks alone, this book offers original insights drawn from investigations into the pedagogical culture of turn of the twentieth century England. Analysis of contemporary debates about the intended function of historical education demonstrate that the teaching of history in England has a far more complicated past than has often been assumed.

This book is timely for two predominant reasons. First (and writing in early 2013), the current British government perceives the teaching of history in England to be in need of a radical overhaul since it does not fulfil the objective of instilling national pride: a national curriculum, it is argued, should serve the ends of state. The suggested solution, now as in the 1980s, is a return to a ‘golden age’ of history teaching: a golden age characterised by a content-led curriculum, devoid of educational theory, and intended primarily to promote national identity.² One prompt for this study, then, is the desire to enquire what precisely constitutes this golden age. My findings suggest that the teaching of history was far from straightforwardly aimed at the delivery of state-prescribed patriotism. The cultivation of patriotism was a key ingredient underpinning rationales for the teaching of history; however, the ‘patriotism’ conceptualised by educationists was one which merged civic and imperial objectives. Significant weight was attached to the creation of a history curriculum which would promote ‘enlightened patriotism’: that is, an education which prioritised the needs of citizenship and morality above the inculcation of what contemporaries dubbed ‘crude’ or ‘blind nationalism’.³ Indeed, this book explains how educationists exercised far greater influence than has previously been recognised. This is the first study to trace the impact of pedagogical innovation, led by a little-known but prominent group of theorists called the Herbartians, on the teaching of history.

Second, recent debates about how far imperial propaganda pervaded popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century demand renewed attention to the teaching of history. These debates are twofold: on the nature of sources historians have used to reconstruct past practice; and on questions of intention and reception. It has long been held that history lessons served as a vehicle for the promotion of imperial patriotism. John MacKenzie's seminal Propaganda and Empire (1984) cited a series of examples demonstrating that school textbooks were one of the many sites of imperial propaganda. A number of scholars followed suit.⁴ A shift in content towards the explicit teaching of imperial history is certainly evident in analysis of textbooks and syllabi for older children:⁵ witness, for instance, the praise of Britain's imperial character evident in the extract from G.T. Warner's A Brief Survey of British History cited above. In 1892, the considerable efforts of the Royal Colonial Institute were rewarded when the Board of Education included the teaching of imperial studies as a subject for scholars in the higher standards in its Code of Regulations.⁶ In The Handbook of Suggestions of 1905, the history of the empire was included in provision for older scholars, since it ‘formed a stirring theme, full of interest to every young citizen’.⁷ In the absence of a state-prescribed curriculum, the Handbook was as close as the state came to indicating best practice. Using such evidence, R.D. Bramwell maintains that ‘the profound imperialistic fervour of the times penetrated history syllabuses’.⁸ These interpretations, however, have been subjected to scrutiny in the last decade.

Overconcentration on subject-specific history textbooks can be misleading. Textbooks were, more often than not, used in subject-specific history lessons for older scholars who had stayed in school beyond the compulsory leaving age. Prior to the turn of the twentieth century, there was no such thing as the subject-specific history lesson in the vast majority of schools. Instead, children learnt their history from reading books designed for the teaching of literacy (one of the notorious, compulsory, 3 ‘R's of reading, writing and arithmetic). Stephen Heathorn's meticulous study into these primers, For Home, Country and Race (2000), demonstrates that it was these texts that were far likelier read by all children.⁹ In 1882, lessons in literacy were rigorously reorganised on the premise that if children were to learn to read, then they were to learn to read from other less frequently taught subject material. One-third of all reading books used in literacy sessions needed to be historical.¹⁰ These advances were endorsed by the ‘Revised Instructions of 1896’, issued to school inspectors, and which stipulated they ensure children read from at least two readers in their first and second standard, and at least three for Standard III and above. This doubled 1882 levels.¹¹ Historical topics featured heavily. In particular, reading from a ‘history of England’ was used in place of the study of the plays of Shakespeare, or texts by Milton, for scholars up to Standard IV and above.¹² This was to remain the case until well after the First World War.¹³ Harry Withers, in his state-sponsored appraisal of historical education in his London elementary schools, confirms:

It has no doubt been the case in many schools, in which History has not been presented as a class subject, that nevertheless, lessons in history have been given. And in every school without exception the rule had held good that out of the three reading books in every class above the Second Standard one has been a ‘History reader’.¹⁴

The Education Committee of London County Council reported in 1911 that reading books were best used up to the end of Standard III (approximately aged ten), and for the want of better textbooks, used thereafter too.¹⁵ One can be confident, therefore, that all elementary schoolchildren at some stage of their schooling were exposed to the historical reading book and few, prior to 1902 (after which history was introduced as a compulsory discrete subject for the first time), had formal subject-specific instruction in addition to their literacy lessons. Historical reading books incorporated cutting-edge developments in educational psychology and were subject to far more contemporary discussion than textbooks. The study of these, Heathorn correctly argues, should thus form the basis of research into common experiences of historical education.¹⁶

Heathorn finds that imperial ideology figured just as prominently in reading books as textbooks. This book confirms his findings through extending analysis into educational culture; indeed, this study would not be possible had he not laid the groundwork by providing such a detailed and methodical study of literacy primers.¹⁷ Focus on how pedagogical intent shaped the content and tone of teaching resources reveals significant contemporary debate about what the teaching of history should aim to achieve. Across both genres of text used to teach history, children were presented with a series of lessons – explicit as well as inferred – in which they were intended to absorb prescribed values: values which, specifically, sought to inspire an emotional identification with England as the founder and home of a great empire. In his controversial The Absent-Minded Imperialists (2004), however, Bernard Porter contends that imperialism exercised much less of an impact on both the development and the practice of history teaching than previously argued.¹⁸ In his preface he claims the empire ‘was usually neglected in English schools’:¹⁹ in the remainder of his text he argues that where it did feature in history lessons (and according to him, it featured very little), it had little impact. My findings, to the contrary, indicate an abundance of evidence not merely demonstrating the intent to inculcate national-imperial values, but significant thought about how to translate this intent into practice. ‘Intent’, if one follows Porter's rationale, equates to a statement that it was desired children internalise knowledge of empire: what empire was, where it was, how it was and why it was; for imperialism to have affected popular culture, in Porter's rationale, it needed to be expressed unambiguously. Yet, as Stuart Ward identifies in his astute review, Porter's definition of ‘imperialism’ is at times so limited that he necessarily weakens his own argument that researchers need to pay more attention to the wider context.²⁰ If imperial content were missing, and Porter emphasises that it was, it need not indicate that imperial values were not being taught. On the contrary, the subtlety of imperialism – as an ideology expressed through the concept of ‘enlightened patriotism’ – is more than evident when one probes a little deeper into contemporary debates.

As will be demonstrated in the first chapter, educationists certainly emphasised that history teaching, especially in reading books, justified its place in the curriculum since it was uniquely positioned to teach citizenship above and beyond the inculcation of crude patriotism. What becomes apparent, when analysing debates in their educational context, was that history lessons were intended to teach a correlation of civic, national and imperial values. Chapters Three, Four and Five are organised thematically to demonstrate how imperial values were interwoven into the content of reading books: on stories of national origins and the medieval period, on stories about England's relationship with other British nations and colonial subjects, and in the use of history texts as lessons in moral biography. My argument is that material not specifically about the physical presence of the empire was still intended to teach imperial values: stories which concentrated on the period of Anglo-Saxon settlement, for instance, might not have instilled in children knowledge of the glories of nineteenth-century wars of territorial conquest, but they deliberately drew attention to a predisposition to seafaring and colonisation as innate ingredients in the English story. The study of the pedagogical culture in which texts were produced is vital both to assist understanding of the intended purpose of historical education as well as to contextualise thinking behind the selection of content. This study is particularly timely since David Cannadine, in The Right Kind of History (2011), both takes Bernard Porter's view regarding the paucity of teaching about empire at face value as well as incorrectly dismissing ‘pedagogy [as] a largely undeveloped field’.²¹

It remains entirely possible to argue that history teaching was conceived of, and intended as, a vehicle of patriotism. ‘Patriotism’ – like ‘imperialism’ – was never a clear-cut concept. In the period of the making of a mass historical education between 1870 and 1930 debates raged between educationists, politicians and pressure groups about what history to teach, and how it should best be taught. Far from being divorced from educational psychology, I argue history gained credibility as a compulsory classroom subject only because it incorporated cutting-edge pedagogical developments. Educationists coined the concept of ‘enlightened patriotism’: for them, teaching history to young children should encourage an emotional relationship with the past; history should be presented as a narrative march from distant medieval origins towards the triumphant imperial present. Imperial values of mastery of the seas, love of liberty, courage, duty and hero worship were duly stitched into the narrative fabric of the complete duration of English history. In short, it is my argument that the imperial culture of late Victorian Britain did become manifest in the teaching of history, but in ways far more discreet than assumed and by use of methods which require further explication and analysis. The teaching of history was considered too politically sensitive in the formation of civic and national identities to leave to politicians alone.

The ‘traditional’ teaching of history?

It would be remiss, therefore, to carry out a study such as that presented in this book without reflecting on current developments in the National Curriculum in England. Since the election of the Coalition government in May 2010, the Conservative Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, has set about installing a narrative-based National Curriculum for History in which tales from ‘our island story’ take centre stage. As Terry Haydn explains, Gove's explicit aim is ‘to use the school curriculum to shape the values, attitudes, and dispositions of future citizens and restore the Victorian Values of patriotism, service, duty and obedience’.²² The phrase ‘our island story’ has appeared in every speech and interview given by Gove on the subject of history education. Writing on 10 November 2011, I have counted sixty-three instances these past eighteen months alone. For instance, on 5 October 2010, Gove announced:

One of the under-appreciated tragedies of our time has been the sundering of our society from its past. Children are growing up ignorant of one of the most inspiring stories I know – the history of our United Kingdom. Our history has moments of pride, and shame, but unless we fully understand the struggles of the past we will not properly value the liberties of the present. The current approach we have to history denies children the opportunity to hear our island story. Children are given a mix of topics at primary, a cursory run through Henry the Eighth and Hitler at secondary and many give up the subject at 14, without knowing how the vivid episodes of our past become a connected narrative. This trashing of our past has to stop.²³

According to Gove, the English do not teach enough of their own history and, when they do, it is rendered pointless by an overconcentration on skills above narrative content. Ultimately, the complaint is that the history curriculum in its current guise fails to promote national pride.²⁴ The former criticism – that not enough national history is taught – is blatantly false.²⁵ The latter criticism, that school history should serve the explicit ends of patriotism and national identity, arguably explains the yearning for a return to a presupposed golden age of history teaching in which lessons are presumed to reinforce patriotic sensibilities. It goes without saying that questions of how to teach Britain's imperial past remain hotly contested.²⁶

Prior to the 1902 Education Act, discrete lessons in history were not compulsory in any school. Indeed, although the Board of Education published a series of Suggestions at regular intervals,²⁷ it was not until the introduction of a National Curriculum in 1990 that the government effected any statutory requirement for the content of history lessons. Yet, critics of contemporary historical education demand a return to past practice in which the narrative of continuous English national history was taught so that lessons (allegedly) served the ends of the state, all children were (supposedly) fed a bountiful feast of patriotic stories and grew up (it is assumed) to be proud members of the nation state. The ‘traditional teaching of history’ is identified as a product of the later nineteenth century, which found consensus in the interwar period but was believed wrongly abandoned in the 1970s as a result of educational psychologists exercising a pernicious influence on the schools by their prioritisation of child-centred learning.²⁸ ‘New’ style history modules, introduced by the Schools Council History Project in the 1970s, were variously labelled by (old) New Right critics as the ‘Friendly Red Army’ and the ‘Shop Steward Syllabus’ and were accused of ‘peddling crackpot ideologies’ and ‘leaving our young people distrustful and confused’.²⁹ In 1987, New Right pamphleteer Stewart Deuchar yearned for a time when ‘a school was a school and a teacher was a teacher and history was – more or less – history’.³⁰ In the words of the Education Secretary from 1980–86, Keith Joseph, ‘an unholy alliance’ of socialists, teachers and educationists had contributed to the dismantling of traditional teaching to the overall detriment of children's national self-understanding.³¹ Jonathan Clark, lecturer in history at Oxford at the time, lent his support. In 1990, in a debate on ‘History, the Nation and the Schools’ held at Ruskin College,³² he argued that this desire to return to a halcyon age of history teaching was owed to a modern crisis of British national identity demonstrating nostalgia for a time ‘when we were more like ourselves ’.³³ The restoration of a golden age of history teaching would, in Clark's summation, rescue children from the condescension of ‘post-liberal’, ‘post-imperial’ and ‘postmodern’ approaches to history: in doing so, the aim was that this would return to them a simple and politically expedient historical knowledge-base out of which to understand their nation and their place within it.³⁴ It is in this context that Gove revealed to The Times: ‘I am an unashamed traditionalist’.³⁵

It is the intention of this book to demonstrate the fragilities of such assumptions about past practice, especially since it is difficult not only to pin down when the golden age was, but also to decipher which ‘tradition’ critics are invoking. Peter Mandler has suggested the mobilisation of a ‘golden age’ itself is likelier a reference to critics' memories of their own education: that is, the history taught in grammar (or, one assumes, fee-paying) schools in the 1950s and 1960s.³⁶ Yet, in the 1950s, educationists bemoaned that they had inherited a system forged in the late nineteenth century. C.F. Strong (textbook author, school inspector and teacher educator), for instance, wrote that:

current conceptions of history teaching have evolved in a period of less than a century. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that in no short time, the material and method of that teaching should have remained substantially what they were in the early days of their development in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.³⁷

Maureen Bryant, similarly, in her Report of the History Syllabus Conference of 1967, stated: ‘No-one in this country would advocate a prescribed course and yet there is a great deal of uniformity. Pressures from tradition – our own school days, courses at older universities, the whole apparatus of textbooks and examination syllabuses which we have inherited, all tend to produce uniformity’.³⁸ Both Strong and Bryant were aware that history teaching operated on two levels: the formalised system for older children in school beyond the compulsory leaving age, of whom there were relatively few, and a separate, simpler, system for the mass education of the many. Calls for the restoration of a golden age of history education conveniently both forget mass experience and neglect the crucial role of educational psychology in the development of compulsory history teaching.

In his analysis of the national education debates, Stephen Ball identified a restorationist impulse in the language of New Right critics which valorised ‘traditional’ teaching methods and denigrated progressive pedagogies.³⁹ Robert Phillips took this analysis one step further with particular regards to the teaching of history: ‘it should come as no surprise to see attempts to define and cultivate certaintist notions of culture, identity and nationhood. A crucial arena in this process of cultural restorationism or cultural acclamation is the educational arena, particularly what is taught in the history classroom’.⁴⁰ Gove's insistence on a return to an island story narrative of national history constitutes precisely such an act of attempted restorationism. Theorists agree that shared history plays a vital function in the construction of both the ‘nation’ in general and national ‘identity’ in particular. Craig Calhoun, for instance, argues that central to identity formation is the notion of ‘temporal depth’ – that the peoples that make up a nation are linked through shared history.⁴¹ Geoff Cubitt emphasises that nations are ‘imagined as things enduring – endowed with origin, tradition, memory, heritage, history, destiny’.⁴² Such arguments are not controversial. Rather, controversy emerges when one considers how those in the present select historical narratives from which to prescribe national identity. It has been over two decades since Eric Hobsbawm coined the phrase ‘invention of tradition’, a concept used to describe how – for political purpose – the past is shaped by the cultural, commercial or political demands of the present generation.⁴³ Anthony D. Smith, in contesting Hobsbawm's modernist approach to the making of nations and nationalisms, developed concepts of ethnosymbolism and myth-history, emphasising that selective stories of national ethnic origins generate nationalist sentiment since they tap into psychological symbols of belonging. Whether one subscribes to the modernist or ethnosymbolist point of view, it is hardly surprising that the teaching of history should excite so much debate: after all, the national curriculum for history denotes, hypothetically, control over a shared history out of which it is intended collective identification to the nation can be generated. It is no overstatement to argue that the battle to control the content of school history constitutes ‘nothing less than a public and vibrant debate about the national soul’.⁴⁴

It is worth dwelling on Smith's identification of the three-part process invoked in how telling stories of national origins can dovetail political agendas.

1. Myth of a golden age – every nation requires a myth of origin, from which the ‘people’ emerge; the golden age is made up of stories of heroism, and a clear articulation of the accumulation of desirable national attributes. These stories should be connected together in a clear narrative demonstrating national progress over time.

2. Myth of decline – a need to show how the present was divorced from the past by enemies of the nation, or those who would seek to undermine national sentiment.

3. Myth of regeneration – requires the identification of why and how the nation lost its way; the restoration of the golden age to be achieved by a shift from ‘explanatory myth to prescriptive ideology’.⁴⁵

Smith's taxonomy is reproduced here for three reasons. First, nostalgic accounts of history teaching in its ‘golden age’ produce and popularise false accounts which require investigation. Second, the identification of educationists as the folk devils responsible for decline is deliberately misleading; and, third, Gove's prescription of more Anglocentric history is troublesome in a context of multiculturalism and growing independence movements in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Calls to restore a ‘traditional’ teaching of history privilege English history. There is no explicit space in the New Right version of our island story for those other nations that make up the British and Hibernian Isles; nor – besides the tokenistic inclusion of post-1945 immigration – does Gove's narrative include space for the relationship between the English and those millions of people colonised as part of the imperial project. Even when taking into consideration timetable constraints and the day-to-day pressures of teaching, a history curriculum designed to promote a form of national identity which excludes as well as includes is worrying.

The role of the past in identity formation – of how ‘we’ represent ‘us’ to ‘ourselves’ – remains divisive. It is far from surprising that scholarship on four-nations historiography, prompted in the mid-1970s, has been reinvigorated in recent years.⁴⁶ ‘National’ histories were frantically rethought as a means to underpin constituent nationalisms in a manner that meant historians not only interrogated historical relationships between England, the metropole and ‘her’ peripheral nations,⁴⁷ but also wrote national histories which augmented independence movements.⁴⁸ In this context, the academic search for a distinctively English identity was revived. Paul Langford's Englishness Identified (2000), Robert Colls' The Identity of England (2002), Krishan Kumar's The Making of English National Identity (2003) and Peter Mandler's The English National Character (2006) are but a few. The English, in a context of political devolution, find it especially difficult to understand their particular ‘identity’ in a culture of post-imperial decline.⁴⁹ Following Colls and Mandler, that confusion is confounded by academic recognition that Englishness has never been constant and can only reliably be defined by its inconsistencies.⁵⁰ As Ernest Barker so presciently observed in 1927, ‘not only is English national character made; it continues to be made and remade’.⁵¹

National identity is not a monolithic entity. It is an elusive, slippery and contested concept: it is shaped by a variety of factors; it is moulded to meet political concerns; it is often defined by the nature of questions asked by the researcher.⁵² In the case of the relationship between history teaching and national identity formation, one must be aware that the reintroduction of perceived past practice is seen not only as a source of comfort but the means of reinvigoration. History teaching has been identified as a means for creating identity in ‘new’ nations.⁵³ In the case of an ‘old’ nation like England, the teaching of a single uncomplicated narrative is fraught with difficulties, especially if it incorporates, or seeks to revive, an outmoded version of English imperial history. To reintroduce the presupposed ‘best’ of past practice is but one of many ways to tell the story of English and British history. To teach only the one version, which is to the admitted ideological benefit of a particular political position, is not education but – to put it mischievously – the stuff of propaganda itself.

The past teaching of history was not as straightforward as made out by critics and it is the task of this book, therefore, to investigate what the teaching of history was like in its so-called ‘golden age’. A series of important questions need to be asked. When taught, what was the content of and teaching methodology employed in historical education? If current critics bemoan the influence of educationists, what was the relationship between educationists and those fundamental to the creation of history syllabi and teaching resources a century or so ago? What types of resources were used in the classroom, both for the child to read, and to augment teachers' knowledge? And, on the question of teachers, how were they instructed to teach history and how were the key educational and political objectives of a historical education explained to them? The answers to these questions provide an alternative narrative to the presupposed ‘history’ of history teaching. Analysis of texts actually used in classrooms, and intended to be seen by all children, demonstrates that history was guaranteed a prized place on the curriculum precisely because of its unique contribution to citizenship education. It is a rich irony that critics of current historical education bemoan the influence of educationists as meddling and destructive; yet history gained a compulsory place on the curriculum in the early 1900s only because it embraced the most advanced, cutting-edge, pedagogical thinking of the period – a topic on which this book is the first to offer detailed analysis (see Chapter Two in particular).

The first half of this book investigates debates about the purpose and content of history teaching from the introduction of mass education in the 1870s to the onset of the First World War; in particular, I identify a dominant trend towards the incorporation of new educational theories in the 1890s. The second half examines how the content of reading books, with some contrast to textbooks, integrated pedagogical recommendations. More might be said on the social history of history teaching: for instance, if we had a better understanding of