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Lord Parekh: My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Luke, for initiating this very important debate, and for talking about it with great conviction and learning.

No subject could be more important than this one. History is a record of society's collective memories, and a story of the formation of its identity. How history is taught is therefore vital in helping us to understand and define ourselves, and in shaping our future actions. The noble Lord rightly concentrated on national history, so I should like to concentrate on the international dimension of the way in which history is taught in our schools. I shall make four or five points for a response from the Minister.

I am not entirely sure whether we are clear in our minds about the purpose of history teaching. By and large, it seems to be thought that the job of history teaching, apart from giving certain basic facts and figures, is ultimately to foster some kind of love of the country or patriotism. That was one of the major reasons why Mrs Thatcher disapproved of the findings of the national curriculum working party on the teaching of British history. That working party wanted to concentrate on the slave trade, opium wars and the British conquest of India, among other subjects, and Mrs Thatcher was not entirely happy about that. She unfortunately was not the only one. I can think of many people in other political parties who more or less shared the same view. That is deeply troubling.

The attempt to link history teaching with the cultivation of patriotism is fraught with all kinds of dangers. It inevitably falsifies history and leads to much myth-making and even lies. It also ill-equips future citizens to see their country as it is, and makes them unduly defensive and frightened when the darker side of the country's history is pointed out to them. It also politicises history because it implies that those who foster patriotism, or the great figures in our history, will vary from one political party to another and so make history into a political football.

History is an academic discipline; it is not a morality tale in which good always triumphs over evil and we find ourselves always on the side of good. Its purpose is to tell us who we were, how we came to be what we
 
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are, and what options are open to us as we plan our future. In other words, the purpose of history is to facilitate self-understanding and to give us self-knowledge. It cannot be the vehicle of moral values or political ideologies, or a belief in national or racial superiority, or a kind of collective psychotherapy that is intended to make us feel good about ourselves. I cannot emphasise the academic character of history enough. The purpose of history is to force us to see ourselves as we are, warts and all. That is its highest and only gift. We should not try to turn it into a vehicle for cultivating a certain body of what we like to call British values.

My second point is that our history teaching generally, though not always, tends to have a Eurocentric thrust. All the great values of our civilisation are supposed to be our own creation, and others have contributed very little to it. We ignore the great contributions of China, India, the Arabs and Islam, as well as the fact that many of the values of our civilisation had long been known to others. Tolerance, for example, was practised in India in the 4th century BC under King Ashoka. That is also true of the spirit of critical inquiry and scientific rationalism. Unless we highlight all this to our youth and get them to appreciate that all the great human achievements are the product of contributions drawn from all parts of the world, we shall be unable to equip them to live in our diverse world.

Thirdly, I refer to the place of black and ethnic minorities in our society, and how their history is handled. By and large, the discussion is either limited to black history month or to topics on slavery or post-war immigration. That implies that their arrival is recent, or that they were passive victims of our history. In fact, blacks and ethnic minorities have been here since Roman times. They were a significant presence in the 16th and 17th centuries. They fought in the Napoleonic wars, not to mention the First and Second World Wars of the 20th century. They do not, therefore, operate on the margins of society. They are central to our composition and to our understanding of who we are. It is about time that we mainstreamed their presence in the understanding of our history.

It is in this context that we might be a little more at ease in how we handle the history of the British Empire. There has been much discussion among politicians and others about whether the empire was a good or a bad thing, but that is not the way in which to approach the matter. The empire arose at a certain point in history as a result of certain forces in our society, and produced certain good and bad consequences. If these consequences were bad, we should not be ashamed to admit them. After all, we did not commit these acts ourselves. If our forebears did them, we can say that they acted according to the light and that in retrospect we think they could have acted differently. I simply cannot understand why we feel slightly uncomfortable or nervous in dealing with the history of the British Empire.
 
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My fourth point has to do with the teaching of European history. I feel strongly that Germany generally tends to suffer the most in that teaching. Germany is reduced, by and large, to Hitler and the Nazis. As a result, the great past and the great post-war achievements of that country tend to be ignored. Even more important, a myth is created that Germany has always been our enemy. In fact, for centuries Germany has been integral to our self-understanding. In the 19th century, Germany's influence was very much present in the creation of our language, our history, our self-understanding, our culture, our philosophy and music. I cannot think of any part of our culture which is not traceable to an enormous contribution from Germany. In a sense, our failure to come to terms with Germany says more about ourselves than about the country.

The last point, on which I would like to end, has to do with how history teaching has increasingly become modularised and therefore reduced to isolated periods. Pupils in our schools concentrate on this or that period, and that is just about the end of it. As a result, there is no sense of narrative. There is no time for wider reading, and even less time to reflect on the significance of great events and on the human stupidities and heroic qualities that are on display in history. In other words, in modularising history in this way, human beings tend to fall out of the view and history becomes a mass of inert and meaningless data.

7.41 pm

Lord Addington: My Lords, I have a certain feeling about this debate as the first time that I received a letter of complaint from one of my own political party was after a debate on the teaching of history. That was about 17 years ago. It was the first time that I have inspired such a thing from my own party, although it will probably not be the last.

Everyone has an opinion on history and the way we use it. The degree of informed opinion depends on who you are talking to because it is impossible to be an expert on all of history. We tend to go to the bits we like, remember them, stand on them and forget about the rest. I have a little saying that all nations worth their salt can drown in their own sins. We can all choose the example of the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, who did not like to be reminded that we fought a war against the most populous nation on earth, which was militarily badly organised, to sell it hard drugs. That is probably something which the rest of us could do without having in our historical bag, but it is there.

What brought me to this debate was the idea of citizenship and what we are going to do with history now. The guidelines on the teaching of citizenship, for example, deal with human rights and responsibilities underpinning society and the basic aspects of the criminal justice system, and how they both relate to young people using history. You can go through selecting which bit of history you want and of course come up with examples.
 
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If one assumes that we should be where we are now if there was not a better alternative, the Marxists, the Whig historians and so forth will say that it was part of the process or that we would have got here; others will say, "No, it is chance". Lord Russell, one of the great revisionist historians of recent times, would probably have had a considerable amount to say about what did happen. There is no inevitability about it happening. Why should we be here? The minute we start to look for moral justification about the present and what has gone on before we are on very shaky ground. Where do we go from here? Why does this have to happen? I do not know.

The noble Lord, Lord Luke, mentioned Magna Carta. One interpretation of Magna Carta is of a group of armoured heavies with hereditary backing demanding their rights under the existing system, which were being infringed by a monarch who was getting a bit above himself. Simon de Montfort carried on that argument. Such people started parliamentary democracy. It is fanciful to think that some of these great Anglo-French nobles who were fighting with other Anglo-French nobles over recently conquered territory would be interested in the outcome of elections. They had recently taken over from the Danes as the rulers of the English territory—another way of looking at us. Yet, people will justify that line of logic. We must always be very careful about how we use the past to justify the present.

The noble Lord, Lord Parekh, talked about Germany. We had the German royal family, and still do. Just because Germany has one blip in its history does not omit everything else, but people think that.

On the teaching of history, World War II was the first great war conflict to have large quantities of film and sound made of it, so we have a better record. We are only just coming to the end of personal recollections of what went on in that conflict. So we all have an over-emphasis. You will always have over-emphasis in periods of history that will colour the perception of what is important for the historians writing at a given moment. They will always think that their experience is probably the most important—the culmination. So, if we use history in education, first, the accuracy of what we say is totally subjective; secondly, if we state that we are going to look at history, we must of course look at everything that has gone on, which means that you will always have questions; and, thirdly, there are no right answers to historical questions as you are talking about the interpretation of events and about the record that is currently accepted.

The interpretation will go on and on. When I was doing a history degree Lawrence Stone and Hugh Trevor-Roper were arguing bitterly on what was seen to be the establishment argument. New arguments will be brewing now, and so it will carry on. We should always be very careful about how we look at this subject because tomorrow's truth may not be one we recognise.
 
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7.47 pm

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