One of the dangers of the modern world is that people become too fixated on the now, and on their own stories, condemned to live in the present and not understanding what their current social reality has emerged from. With this in mind, at our school in east London where we teach history, we began to explore the development of democracy from the Great Reform Act of 1832 to the Equal Franchise Act of 1928, with our Year 8 (12-year-old) students.
Keen to skirt away from oversimplification or history as anecdote – the Chartists were a group of men who in the end failed to achieve anything, the Suffragettes were violent and Emily Davison threw herself under a horse – keener still to ensure students saw that all important link between the past and present, we settled on an overarching enquiry question:
