Education secretary Michael Gove recently said, ‘there is no part of the national curriculum so likely to prove an ideological battleground for contending armies as history.’ On this at least, Gove and his critics appear to agree. In a survey conducted by the Historical Association, just 4% of history teachers thought Gove’s proposed curriculum a positive change. Celebrity historian after celebrity historian has been wheeled out to champion or lambast the curriculum, with Simon Schama declaring the final draft ‘insulting and offensive’ and Niall Ferguson that it is a ‘major improvement’. But what lies behind this acrimonious ‘ideological battleground’? Why are history teachers so stridently opposed to Gove’s plans?

On one hand the debate on history education appears to rest on content. Michael Gove argues the draft curriculum will the failure over generations to impart to children ‘the story of our islands’, and the historic role Britain has played in the world. His critics accuse him of promoting a ‘little England version of our national past linked to an isolationist view of our national future’. Borrowing Orwell’s oft-quoted words ‘he who controls the past, controls the future. He who controls the present, controls the past’, both sides compare the other’s choice of content to the machinations of a totalitarian regime. But as much as what is taught, the debate around history and the national curriculum is also about how history is taught. For the past twenty or so years, the focus has been on child-centred ‘active’ history teaching, looking at discrete periods, with a thematic approach. Gove and his supporters make the case for a fresh emphasis on chronology, fact learning and periodisation, arguing their neglect has resulted in the historical illiteracy and enforced ignorance of a generation.

The late Eric Hobsbawm observed that the loss of historical memory has meant that most young people now grow up in a ‘a sort of permanent present, lacking any organic relation to the past’. What is particular and special about our relationship to the past? Have children been forced in to a ‘permanent present’ through years of poor history education? And if so, does Gove’s new curriculum offer a way forward?