This made me cross; Talk to insiders in the so-called “new Labour project” and you realise the importance to the whole strategy of getting the middle-classes to use the public services. As one former Downing Street adviser put it: “we have to persuade the critical mass of people to switch from private to public...
Read more →Teaching history is a maddening blur. From class to class, keystage to keystage, year to year, through assessment and skills, to content, final levels and added value; the day to day concerns of a history teacher can often obscure the bigger picture. This bigger picture consists partly of why we teach history at all...
Read more →Simon Ross (of www.ilovehistory.co.uk) and I have been doing some revision “to-go” for today’s ipod generation. If you’re a student doing GCSE Modern World History, then you could do worse than pop over to Simon’s site and subscribe to the RSS feed.
Read more →As we have already seen, for Peter Lee “The reason for teaching history is not that it changes society, but that it changes pupils” (Lee 1991: 43). Lee’s school history “changes what see and how they see it” (Lee 1991:43) This much could be said of any form of schooling and any form...
Read more →My server was obviously so suprised at me making no posts recently that it fell down – do stay tuned though – there’s one coming… By the way, my old theme doesn’t seem to like wp. 2.01, and this one is nice, but I hate the dog. Anyone willing to offer free consultancy to...
Read more →One of the most crystalline of all the purposes of school history is that of “for its own sake”. History for its own sake calls up a vision, or spectre, of a monkish student combing through an archive, or navigating piles of books, absorbed, transcended by the study of history. In school this implies...
Read more →The grand tradition has at is heart the notion that a culture can be transmitted from one generation from the next, as a kind of patrimony. In that sense the grand tradition is essentially a culturally conservative tradition, which seeks to ensure the continuation of a dominant ideology which has at its heart a...
Read more →I have set myself the task of really thinking about and coming up with a model of what it means for learners to progress in history – more specifically what it means for them to progress in their understanding of “historical interpretations” in history. However, before the question of progression is approached, we should...
Read more →The BBC is reporting a story that “Political Correctness” is harming society in Britain. Doug Belshaw and I have been having a good natured debate about this on his blog.This is so transparent that it almost makes me laugh. I’m no post-modernist, but this is an obvious attempt to bolster dominant ideologies that...
Read more →What a totally unproductive holiday season it has been, though great fun (apart from dash to hospital with the middles). Anyhoo – owing to being prematurely aged by childrearing I’m off to bed. Might make some resolutions – but it will be tomorrow!
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