Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No100
Themes: Robert Burns and good literature, learning from the past
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This week we are celebrating two things. First, a modest but not unimportant win: this is our 100th Substack newsletter. So many thanks to all those who have researched, written, proofread and published the newsletter, and most importantly, those who have supported us financially.
Second, along with most of Scotland, we are celebrating the glorious work of our country’s most important poet, Robert Burns. I say most of Scotland, because as reported in many articles in the press last week, the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) is removing Burns’ status as a standalone poet and downgrading him to one among many in an anthology. As Magnus Linklater wrote in the Times this month, its deeply ironic that when Burns is more relevant than ever, the SQA should decide that his relevance is on the wane. As we reported last year, the decision to change the English curriculum for National 5 and Highers by replacing Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic novel Sunset Song with more ‘inclusive’ contemporary texts such as Duck Feet by Ely Percy was made following a consultation with some teachers and children (or ‘learners’, as the SQA likes to call them). According to the SQA, ‘learners wanted texts which were “easy to remember and to write about”’.
Fortunately, it seems that in primary education the schools have not yet benefitted from the SQA’s insight. It seems that schools up and down the country are getting ready to recite To a mouse and other poems. No doubt parents are sharing their children’s grief and excitement as they attempt to commit a Burns poem to memory. I didn’t grow up in Scotland, but when I think about my own children, I am conscious how important learning a Scottish poem by heart was both to them and to me. I am also struck by the fact that we use the expression by heart to describe the process of learning a poem. I imagine it’s because the learning of poetry engages with the soul; it is not merely a mechanical exercise, because in the process of remembering we also get caught up in the meaning of the poem. Perhaps it’s unfair, but I secretly suspect that the joy, the insight, the sense of connection provided by Burns is a bit of a slap in the face for the SQA and the educationalists who think that old educational traditions can be dismissed as rote learning and national indoctrination.
When we ask children to commit Burns to memory, it is not to perform a weary tradition that is sitting on the border of an island of relevance, on the verge of dropping off the literary map. We are telling them that this writing is excellent, these words are important, they reflect our values, and it is something we have in common, wherever we may be. Introducing children to this common world of great literature is something in which teachers, parents, grandparents, and the wider community can play a role.
If you are in any doubt about the relevance of Burns’ work today, take a look at the Glasgow University website on Burns suppers. Burns societies, schools, golf clubs, Guide and Scout groups, sailing clubs, university societies, churches, tennis clubs and army barracks will be sharing the poet’s work this week. And it’s not just in Scotland and across the UK but in Havana, Shanghai, Johannesburg, Tokyo, Qatar, the Falkland Islands and Buenos Aires.
In truth, the literature that the SQA plans to put in the place of Burns, Grassic Gibbon and even Shakespeare is often not very good. As Linklater says, ‘This is not a golden period for literature in Scotland […] [At] a time when we are witnessing a sea change in contemporary debate […] none of this is reflected in the SQA’s recommended young writers, who may at some stage emerge as serious contributors, but are as yet relatively untested’. Quality should be the basis on which we judge what we teach in English classes, not relevance or diversity or identity. This point should, of course, be obvious, and fortunately it remains obvious to many English teachers across Scotland.
I was happy to read that Fenwick Primary school’s website reports that P7 have been writing their own Toast to the Lassies and the Laddies, while one girl will read her version of the Immortal Memory. However, I was a bit perturbed to see that the teacher felt the need to tell us that reading a poem is an activity that ticks four boxes related to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). SUE members have been saying for months that through the Rights Respecting School Award scheme, the UNCRC is everywhere in schools, but I hadn’t quite appreciated that it has become a means by which to measure educational value. Apparently reciting Burns meets Article 7, Article 8, Article 29 and Article 31 of the UNCRC.
Is the spread of this kind of social justice metric useful, or is it clouding our judgement about what is important and valuable? The new Education Bill will change the name of the SQA and create a schools inspectorate. It would be good to see local authorities and headteachers held to account, but we need to ask how this new inspectorate intends to judge the quality of education. If it’s using the UNCRC articles as its starting point, then we are in serious trouble.
Penny Lewis, Editor
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Part 2: Why should children learn about the past?
Nicholas Tate is a historian who taught at the former Moray House College of Education in Edinburgh for 15 years, was seconded to work on the development of the old Standard Grade and CSYS Scottish History syllabuses, and edited for three years History Teaching Review, the journal of the Scottish Association of the Teachers of History. He has since been Chief Adviser on Curriculum and Assessment to both Conservative and Labour Secretaries of State for Education in England, a member of the French Minister of National Education’s Haut Conseil de l’évaluation de l’École, and Director-General of the International School of Geneva.
Part 1 of this article looked at why it is important for children to learn about the past. Part 2 looks at some of the obstacles that can get in the way of doing this, and ends with a short discussion about how some of these might be tackled.
Why the past is ‘dead and silent’
In 2008 a group of French academics published a book about what they called the ‘conditions of education’, the wider social, cultural and ideological world within which schooling in France took place. Their main concern was the difficulty they had found in convincing both pupils and parents of the importance of studying French classic texts and of the past more generally. They identified many reasons for this, one of which was that for most people the past, which had once been respected, even venerated, and had provided society with models of all kinds, was now ‘dead and silent’. I was reminded of this the other day when reading an article about civil servants in the Land Registry voting in favour of a walkout in protest about a demand from what they called their ‘Victorian bosses’ that they return to the office for three days a week. Why ‘Victorian’? Because it is now associated with things that are ‘outdated’ and ‘stuffy’. The same negative assumptions about the past are also implicit when people, as they often do, denounce anything that is ‘cruel’, ‘violent’ or ‘squalid’ as ‘medieval’. The message again is that the past is over and done with, that we have moved on to a better place, and that those who support things as they used to be are ‘on the wrong side of history’ (as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama sanctimoniously kept on telling us, Obama on 13 public occasions). Forgotten entirely are the medieval cathedrals, the holy lives of Christian saints, the poetry of Dunbar and Chaucer, the great Victorian novelists, the coming of railways, the benefits of the Industrial Revolution, the Reform Acts, the widening of educational opportunities. How is it that we have we come to acquire such a negative view of the past?
Much of it has to do with living in a world that has been changing so rapidly and so radically. The lives of many people living and working in the countryside as recently as the 1920s were in many ways closer to the Middle Ages than to us in the 2020s. The IT and communications revolution of recent decades has also covered our lives with a superficial veneer of technological modernity which divides us from the past and makes us underestimate the many continuing similarities between us and other human beings in past ages.
Some of the negativity about the past also still comes from a residual sense – which had its origins in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and was at its height in the nineteenth century – that history has been a story of progress and that the past therefore represents a more primitive state of being. This is in marked contrast to the previous 1500 years during which educated people looked back to the Greeks and Romans as the greatest civilisation the world had ever known and one that gave them models to be copied. We are a society today that is constantly seeking innovation. If you aren’t ‘innovative’ it is assumed that there is something wrong with you. We are always therefore looking forward to the future and no longer backwards to the past.
In addition, we are a society that has been encouraged to think in solely utilitarian ways. Politicians are always telling us that what we care about are economic matters, the state of the ‘pound in our pocket’. We are encouraged to see schools as just about ‘getting on’ in life, not about stretching our minds or making us better people. Everything we learn from this point of view needs to be ‘relevant’ and the past is not immediately relevant to most people. Schools used to be what philosopher Michael Oakeshott called ‘a place apart’, passing on knowledge that was special, a place that was different and exciting. The idea now is that the barriers between school and community should be broken down and everything made relevant to children’s everyday lives, hence the preoccupation with sexuality education, emotional learning and contemporary issues, hence also the abuse of schools as sites of mass indoctrination into all the progressive causes of the day.
Finally, we have lost the public models of what it is like to be an educated person, someone who is well read, interested in history, committed to a lifetime of reading good literature and interested in the arts. The old aristocracy and upper middle class that had sometimes aspired to be such models have long lost their cultural power and have not been replaced in this role. It isn’t that there aren’t lots of humble people living ordinary lives who are fascinated by the history and culture of the past and keep on learning long after they have left school or university insofar as they can find the time in their busy lives to do so. It is just that they are overshadowed in the contemporary public arena by all the stars of our current world of mass entertainment, many of whom have little to teach us by way of self-improvement, by politicians who tell us only which football teams they support and which pop songs are their favourites, not what they read, and by a succession of culture ministers who are anything but ‘cultured’.
The new ‘War Against the Past’
Even more threatening to the place of history in our societies, however, is what the sociologist Frank Furedi, in a recent book, has called the ‘War Against the Past’. This is a phenomenon of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century Western societies and goes way beyond just feeling that the past is ‘outdated’ and no longer speaks to us. It is about attacking the past and rewriting its history so that it fits into the theories of the progressive (a.k.a. woke) elites who currently dominate most Western universities and cultural institutions. In their eyes the history of mankind is one long story of oppression and victimhood in which whites oppress other races, heterosexuals oppress gay and trans people, and men oppress women. This oppression, and especially the racism of white people, is structurally inbuilt within all societies, we are told, wherever white people are to be found, including in the present day. The purpose of learning about the past is to see how this has always been the nature of the world so that a new generation of activists can be formed to continue the fight against this oppression, whether as members of one of the victim groups or as ‘allies’ from within the oppressor communities.
Given that the past was already unattractive for all the other reasons I have mentioned, this ‘war against the past’ is potentially the final nail in the coffin of any attempt to make the past interesting for young people. If the present is ‘Year Zero’ and everything before it was bad, history lessons become classes of indoctrination in critical race theory (i.e. anti-white racism) and gender ideology. As parents of children attending top US schools that have experienced a complete makeover of their curriculum along these lines pointed out to the journalist Bari Weiss in 2021, why on earth should their children want to go to school if either, when they are ‘people of colour’, they are constantly told that each is a ‘victim’, although they have never felt like one, or, when they are ‘white’, each is labelled as an ‘oppressor’ despite having never done anything that could conceivably merit such a label? Fortunately, the very worst excesses of this ‘war against the past’ have not yet reached UK schools, although the many initiatives to ‘decolonise’ not just the history curriculum within schools but all subjects (that is, to rewrite the past so that it supports the new ideologies) – as well as the plans for ‘decolonisation’ within wider society among our museum, art gallery and theatre directors – are pushing further and further in this direction. The current school curriculum review in England, judging by its terms of reference and submissions from teacher unions and public bodies, looks set to move significantly in the same direction.
‘Decolonisation’ isn’t just a question of making sure that the colonial history of certain European powers is taught, warts and all, which is a perfectly reasonable aim. It is about showing how whites always and everywhere have done damaging things to non-whites. Even cultural institutions in Switzerland, which was never a colonial power and where I used to teach, are embracing it big time, so Swiss friends tell me.
Ways forward
Despite the threats to the study of the past I have mentioned, all is not lost. History remains a popular examination subject for 14- to 18-year-olds (although less popular in England than it used to be), and it is one of the top 10 undergraduate subjects in UK universities. History graduates often go on to get good jobs that have nothing to do with history. Some become good history teachers. Some, one hopes, will become historians and join a body such as History Reclaimed, which is committed to combatting the activist rewriting of history in support of contemporary political causes, whatever these might be.
What is particularly needed is pressure on governments not to merge history with other ‘social subjects’, as in Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence and has happened, with negative consequences, in some progressive secondary schools in England before the introduction of its national curriculum. Ideally, history should also be mandatory up to the end of compulsory schooling. This was discussed when the national curriculum was introduced in England but rejected. Above all, history needs to be kept out of the hands of the ideologues, which is where parental pressures and an association such as SUE – a body that England lacks but desperately needs – have a key role to play.
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/15/how-dare-they-decolonise-of-mice-and-men/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3Gg8SKSx6wStDZ1N1i2uMvC1dbRy-o_MrIql3DbegvfrhYfZdq95ZePMo_aem_2zDRpAw7L_kUfYglta3AYA Lisa McKenzie, How dare they ‘decolonise’ Of Mice and Men? Steinbeck’s Depression-era novel may grate with woke puritans, but it still speaks to working-class struggles. 15/01/25
https://archive.is/Qckfn Kristina Murkett, The problem with ‘diversifying’ the curriculum. 01/01/25
Peter Gray, More on Moral Panics and Thoughts About When to Ban Smartphones. Here I address some of the thoughts and questions raised by readers of Letter #62. 17/01/25
https://archive.is/pOen2 Katharine Birbalsingh, What problem is the Education Secretary trying to solve? An open letter to Bridget Phillipson. 17/01/25
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/17/you-dont-have-adhd-youre-just-annoying/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR37V1r_igbwxOQ3wt4O7dmfYgJdWyXYpBs6DewAMEQZjsyt5R1Zz6JlWi0_aem_4OjV44KDekbIhaVqwKEFYQ Brendan O’Neil, You don’t have ADHD – you’re just annoying. How ADHD became the luxury malady of the anxious upper classes. 17/01/25
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-right-not-to-use-government-schools-is-under-threat/ Jessica Turpin, Labour’s ‘home-educated child register’ is an interference too far. 18/01/25
Joanna Williams, Academic freedom can’t exist alongside DEI. Universities that prioritise ‘inclusion’ will never defend free speech. 19/01/25
Andrew Doyle, The liberal case for a conservative education. Reforming our schools should be a priority. 20/01/25
https://freespeechunion.org/banished-from-history-scottish-education-chiefs-axe-the-word-slave-from-exams-to-decolonise-curriculum/ Frederick Attenborough, Banished from history! Scottish education chiefs axe the word ‘slave’ from exams to ‘decolonise’ curriculum. 19/01/25
https://unherd.com/2025/01/will-our-universities-ever-recover-from-covid/ Jenny Bristow, Will our universities ever recover from Covid? The cult of safetyism is still rampant. 16/01/25
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