School history appears to be in crisis. In 2010, more than a hundred state secondary schools entered no students for GCSE history. Internationally renowned historian Niall Ferguson, now advising the government, laments the fact that ‘design and technology’ is more popular. Students in maintained schools are barely half as likely as those in independent schools to study GCSE history. Many state schools allow some pupils to stop studying history at 13, and 30% of comprehensives spend less than an hour a week on history in the years up to that age. And history is often taught as part of ‘humanities’ or ‘general studies’ by teachers with no training in the subject.

Hopes have been raised by education secretary Michael Gove’s personal enthusiasm for the subject. Gove is keen to undo New Labour’s legacy: he suggests they favoured unhelpful historical ‘themes’ and skills over content. This is controversial, however. Gove insists students are entitled to learn the ‘inspiring’ history of the United Kingdom. Critics contend this will mean history is replaced with thinly-veiled national myth-making, typified by the 1905 children’s book Our Island Story, recently re-released to gushing praise by conservatives. Will history lessons now comprise stories about famous dead Englishmen, Kings’n’ Queens, Alfred and the cakes and Drake and the Armada? The coalition protests that New Labour used the national curriculum as ‘a vehicle for imposing political fads on our children’, but is it guilty of a similar crime? ‘Narrative history tsar’ Simon Schama has rejected claims such a curriculum would be ‘the uncritical genealogy of the Wonderfulness of Us’. But when he writes that history is ‘the greatest, least sentimental, least politically correct tutor of tolerance’, and insists it can help overcome social and cultural divisions, maybe he too can be accused of politicising the subject?

Michael Gove wants to reduce ‘unnecessary prescription’, but is this compatible with a focus on ‘essential knowledge that all children should acquire’? Historian Richard J Evans argues the discipline’s strength rests on ‘puncturing myths, demolishing orthodoxies and exposing politically motivated narratives’. So should children be taught to be ‘little historians’, analysing historical sources and picking apart their text books rather than swallowing them whole? Or is this to confuse history as an academic discipline with the particular role of school history? Some argue even a one-sided narrative involving solid facts is better than none, since historical knowledge depends on a sense of coherence and chronology. Is it fanciful to imagine you can teach critical thinking without a basic historical grounding? Or will a return to narrative in the classroom just mean the mindless regurgitation of boring facts? Can school history be expected to overcome the broader division of opinion over what history means? How might history be made an attractive and enlightening subject for study in schools?