Can history teach us who we are?

Guy Aitchison (London, OK) Can education make us feel more British? Will a good factual diet of historical battles and key events help tackle our unease about who we are as a nation? Vron Ware has raised the issue in OK in terms of Empire. Tristram Hunt, writing in last Sunday’s Observer argued more generally that “one of the forces unpicking a cohesive British identity is an absence of historical bearings”. He called for a unifying narrative to foster ownership of the “institutions and functions of the British state and civil society” to ground a sense of citizenship (a parallel with Peter Oborne perhaps?). At the same time the right of centre think tank Civitas has brought out a multi-authored report The Corruption of the Curriculum (only available by order but with an online summary). It raises an alarm about citizenship studies and the “politicisation of education”, claiming that if education seeks to change the way students feel about things, in the interests of “deep citizenship”, then teachers are denying students the “freedom of their own personal consciousness”. While Hunt seems to assume a Whig view of history (what Gordon Brown might call a “progressive consensus”) and bemoans its absence, team Civitas is opposed to any kind of “politically correct” moralising in education, let alone citizenship classes, since it means that students are “no longer free moral beings”. It nevertheless agrees that a more traditional teaching of history can promote British "values" and provide answers to the question of who we are. But is it really the role of education to address this? Yes, teach more history, but this, and education more broadly, should be about critical awareness rather than inculcating patriotism or civic values. The current education debate seems to me strained and distorted.