Texas style historical revisionism spreads to Britain!

[miscsoc]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/30/niall-ferguson-school-curriculum-role

Niall Ferguson, the British historian most closely associated with a rightwing, Eurocentric vision of western ascendancy, is to work with the Conservatives to overhaul history in schools.

Speaking at the Guardian Hay festival, the Harvard-based academic, whose historiography is often considered to be an apology for imperialism, laid out his ideas for a vision of the school history curriculum in which, he said, children should be taught that the "big story" of the last 500 years "is the rise of western domination of the world".

Michael Gove, the education secretary, was in the audience, and publicly praised Ferguson's "exciting and engaging" ideas for a "campaign for real history". He asked: "My question is, will Harvard let you spend more time in Britain to help us design a more exciting and engaging history curriculum?"

Prompting the event's chair to remark that the session was becoming a job interview, Ferguson replied that he had deliberately taken leave from Harvard and was in London for the next academic year. "I am looking forward to your call," he said.

Gove told the Guardian he "definitely" wanted Ferguson to be involved in a review of the curriculum, though he stopped short of signing up to Ferguson's proposal of a compulsory GCSE in history. "There has been too much prescriptiveness in the past and I am not committing myself," he said. But, he went on: "We need a more connected sense of narrative history – of how Hitler and Henry VIII fit in to the rest of history."

He added: "I am a great fan of Ferguson, and he is absolutely right. Before the election, David Cameron was saying that we need to have a spine of narrative history in our curriculum. He talked about 'tapas' history taught in schools; Niall has just used the word smorgasbord."

Ferguson said he had been prompted to turn his attention to history in schools as a result of the way his children were being taught. The problem was not, he said, the quality of teachers, but rather that: "In this country, the vast majority of school pupils learn only about Henry VIII, Adolf Hitler and Martin Luther King. That is what teenagers leave school knowing about, and that is not really enough." His own children, he said, had not been taught who the original Martin Luther was.

The paradox, he said, was that in general culture, "history has never been more popular" – as evinced by the success of history on TV – "but in schools has never been more unpopular. It is a declining subject with a reputation for being boring."

Analysing the options for history at GCSE and A-level, he noted the "near oblivion of ancient and medieval history". He said: "There is no grand narrative that knits together what pupils learn over a year, leave alone over a school career."

His proposed solutions are to make history compulsory up to GCSE, to have two major sets of exams so that teachers have more freedom, and to "enforce a chronological range".

Along with a Channel 4 television series, he plans to produce materials for use in schools: "a four-year history syllabus on the west and the world".

The big question the course would attempt to answer, he said, was how in AD 1500 "the small warring kingdoms of Europe, which looked so feeble compared with the Ming or Ottoman empires, got to be so powerful". He said the syllabus was "bound to be Eurocentric" because the world was Eurocentric.

Answering criticisms from the audience that the project sounded uninterested in the fates of the oppressed, Ferguson lashed out against "the militant tendency" in the audience and said: "Can we get away from this rightwing-historian, apologist-for-empire crap?"

Asked whether he approved of Ferguson's moulding school history, the historian Simon Schama said: "I had rather hoped to get there first, actually. May the project prosper. Though there may be a case for having more than a single enlightened dictator."

Jerry Brotton, professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of London, said he thought Ferguson's working on the history curriculum was "an outrage" and the story of western domination "a misrepresentation of history". Brotton said: "It's an ideology. It is typical of him. It's another revision of empire – getting empire back in by the back door."

Ferguson's an appalling right wing pseudohistorian and iirc was quite a fan of Bush. One of the alarming things about Britain is how power has just fallen into the hands of a bunch of people whose political views are consciously neoconservative - people who came to political prominence during the Bush administration, and whose foreign policy is largely modeled on that of Bush.