he may have meant Lucretius and his scientific speculations, but we, historians and Classicists, might adopt the line as a motto with wider application. We both have things to say about why things are as they are.
So we may welcome OFSTED's report which has been widely covered today.
The best coverage I have found has been by the BBC which says among other things:
"History's limited role is also apparent in secondary schools. In Key Stage 4 (the GCSE years), only just over 30% of pupils study history and fewer still post-16."
The inspectors said the subject also faced prejudice, with some policy developers, senior school managers, parents and pupils seeing history as less important or relevant than other subjects.
England focus
Inspectors identified that pupils were poor at establishing a chronology and did not make connections between the areas they had studied. As a result, they were not able to answer the "big questions".
"Although pupils often know something about selected periods or events - for example, children in Victorian times, Henry VIII and his wives or the Aztecs - they are weak at linking this information to form an overall narrative or story."
I vividly remember my history teacher Mr Lace setting out his plan, which was that we would concentrate on certain periods in British History, learning about them in chronological order, and that we would devote a linking page in our hardback notebooks to events and social changes that took place between these periods. I decorated these pages with a chain across the top of the page, and was closely questioned about whether I had used my own time (allowable) or homework time (forbidden) to draw such fripperies.
So OFSTED has caught up with Mr Lace at last.
To read various accounts of the report you could try the Daily Mail (History lessons a thing of the past), The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph ("an endangered subject").
The Times has a good factual account by its education correspondent, with this welcome comment:
The report echoed concerns aired by academics and historians, including Kate Pretty, principal of Homerton College and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, who said that Britain was losing a sense of shared identity, because children were not being taught basic general knowledge in primary school.
“It’s not secondary school that instills the deficit, but primaries. It’s the primary view of the great stories in the past, like Alfred burning the cakes, Magna Carta, Columbus sailing the ocean blue – all that sort of stuff,” she said. “The little tiny stories that make up the common thread which you can pull on, we’re expecting students to somehow implicitly know. It’s not about A-level knowledge of a particular subject, but a general web of understanding that binds us to a past. That seems to me is being lost somewhere in all of this.”
The Times also has an amusing and barely accurate piece by columnist Ben Macintyre.
One issue raised by OFSTED is that pupils don't meet some big issues at an age when they are able to deal with them. The chronological approach would put the Romans to be learned at a young age, and so dealt with very superficially.This may be where Class Civ comes in, and Ancient History at A level.
