The Politics of History Teaching in England and France during the 1980s
alw58{at}cam.ac.uk
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Abstract |
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In the 1980s an unprecedented politicization of school history occurred in both England and France. For the two preceding decades ‘new’ history, which encouraged children’s active use of historical sources to study the past from a variety of perspectives, had gained popularity at the expense of more traditional methods which favoured pupils’ memorization of a national chronology heavily oriented towards key political and military events and personalities. The reaction against ‘new’ history in the 1980s was prompted by fears that its methods deprived children of the strong sense of national identity and pride which traditional school history had sought to instil. Both the Thatcherite ‘new right’ and Mitterrand’s Socialists therefore sought to restore traditional history in schools, but where the British ‘traditionalists’ were faced by opposition from teachers, the Department for Education and Science, the Inspectorate, numerous historians and the Labour Party, a political consensus on the need to restore chronological national history to its dominant place in the curriculum was quickly reached in France. This article proposes an explanation for this respective opposition and consensus, focusing in particular on traditions of governance in education and curriculum control, and on the impact of dominant British and French discourses on the relationship between schooling and citizenship, ethnic diversity and national identity.