DadTalk

Education secretary warned history lessons could be history.

English secondary schools are dumbing down history lessons or doing away with the subject altogether, a group of teachers has warned the education secretary, Michael Gove.

English secondary  schools are dumbing down history lessons or doing away with the subject altogether, a group of teachers has warned the education secretary, Michael Gove.

Representatives of the Better History campaign group met Gove this month to express "serious concerns about the steady decline of history's status in schools and the weakening quality of pupils' historical knowledge".

Sean Lang, a former history teacher who is now senior history lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University and leader of the campaign group, warned Gove that history lessons were increasingly being replaced by general humanities classes.

The Historical Association found in 2009 that as many as 1 in 10 secondary schools had adopted this practice.

In a report sent to Gove, the group states: "A-level students are increasingly coming through to university with incomplete, often rather superficial, knowledge of a range of periods, but without an identifiable period which they can claim to know in depth."

The group attacks the "Hitlerisation" of school history teaching, with some pupils taught about the dictator at the age of 14, 16 and again at A-level.

"Over-concentration on Nazi Germany and also on the Soviet Union under Stalin ... remains a major inhibiting factor in trying to broaden students' historical horizons."

In October, Gove announced a major review of the history curriculum would take place this year, led by historian Simon Schama.

Gove said he wanted to ensure no pupil left school without learning narrative British history. He attacked the current approach to history teaching, which he said denied children the chance to learn "our island story" in favour of a mix of topics at primary school and a study of Henry VIII and Hitler at secondary.

Gove hopes to encourage more pupils to take history at GCSE by issuing a special certificates to teenagers who gain five C grades or more in a humanity, science, a foreign language, English and maths. This will be known as the English Bac.

But the Better History group said pupils should not have to choose between history and geography. It wants history to be a compulsory subject up to the age of 16, as it is in France.

Read more about this story at the Guardian.