If, in recent weeks, you have been shocked at protestors targeting statues of historical figures such as Winston Churchill and Edward Colston, then I would urge you to consider how far your understanding of history has been formed by what we learn in school. I have been a qualified history teacher since 2017, and I have something to tell you. The U.K. history curriculum is constructed: it does not tell the full story of our past. In our classrooms and lecture theatres, we learn a cherry-picked selection of historical events that have, whether consciously or unconsciously, been chosen because they represent the “best of British”. Unlike in other countries, we don’t face up to the atrocities that we have committed in our history. Instead, we sweep them under the carpet. This leads people to vigorously defend individuals such as Churchill as the “hero who saved us during the war” rather than considering him as the full, complex character that he was in reality.
The problem with our history curriculum is twofold: we teach our students a narrative of history that is overwhelmingly British-focused and nowhere near global enough, and when it does mention Britain, it does so without acknowledging the problematic parts of our own past. If you’ve been to school in the U.K., you are probably familiar with the Tudors and the English Reformation, and maybe the English Civil War and the Victorians. Obviously you’ll know about the trenches of WWI and the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. But did you learn about the Mau Mau Rebellion? How about the Bengal Famine, or that the British used concentration camps decades before the Nazis?
Almost exactly four years ago, in June 2016, I was completing my final examinations as a history undergraduate at the University of Oxford. It wasn’t until the second year of my history degree that I was actually able to take a non-European history module. It felt like a revelation: there was actually stuff that happened in the past that didn’t involve the British! One of my history tutors at Oxford told me that when he was an undergraduate there in the 1960s, he simply studied British history from roughly 1066-present, so I do recognise that Oxford has come some way in teaching a wider range of topics. But trust me, it still has a long, long way to go to ensure that its history students receive a full picture of the history of Britain, and the world.
My point is that if the majority of history that we teach in our schools and universities is overwhelmingly British and European, then this creates the impression that this is the only part of history worth learning about. It tells students of history that nothing important was happening in areas of the world not populated by white people, that American history is certainly not worth learning about until after Columbus “discovered” the continent in 1492, and African history is irrelevant before colonisation in the 19th century.
Whilst I was at Oxford, the Rhodes Must Fall protests were a dominant feature of debate across campus. Students and academics alike were (and still are) campaigning for the removal of the Cecil Rhodes statue from the exterior of Oriel, one of the University’s constituent colleges. Situated in a prominent position above Oxford High Street, the continued presence of the statue, without any contextual acknowledgement of Rhodes’s central role in the expansion of British colonialism across southern Africa, felt like a reminder that Oxford had profited and built upon money received from the subjugation of peoples across the globe - without taking the time to seriously face up to its colonial past. As the author of an article explaining the origin of the movement at the time stated: “Part of reckoning with that past, and reckoning with ongoing racism, must in my view involve serious reflection about symbols of colonisation and racism.”
Due to my role as a member of the History Faculty’s undergraduate student executive, I participated in the discussions around curriculum reform that emerged in response to the Rhodes Must Fall campaign. I attended a day of talks arranged by the Faculty on “decolonizing the curriculum”, and gave feedback to the board of external academics who had been tasked with making recommendations on how to update the history curriculum. What resulted from these discussions was, for me, underwhelming. It became compulsory for undergraduate students to study one non-European module during their three years of study. However, this included the several papers on colonial America (from the colonial perspective), so was hardly a revolutionary decolonising of the history curriculum in favour of non-white voices. The result showed that the University lacked any real appetite for genuine reform.
The fact that so little in terms of substantial change emerged from the peaceful protests associated with Rhodes Must Fall helped me to understand why campaigners can get to the point of frustration where a statue can be pulled down, such as that of Edward Colston in Bristol. People had been asking for the statue to be taken down for years, but it seemed that nobody was listening. I’m not suggesting that the removal or desecration of a statue is the ideal way to make a statement regarding the crimes we have committed in our past, however there are examples throughout history of protest movements turning to direct action, and even violence, due to the impression that campaigning through legitimate means will bring no success because the government of the day does not want to listen: think of Malcolm X during the U.S. Civil Rights Movements, or Nelson Mandela in 1960s Apartheid South Africa.
When I look back through history, I see that it is when dialogue between protestors and government collapses so completely that civil war can erupt. To stop society breaking down to this irreversible level, everyone must be willing to engage in difficult conversations around our past and present society. Also, like it nor not, look at how effective the pulling down of Colston’s statue has been for opening up a global conversation around how we remember historical figures. Likewise, it is no coincidence that in the last few days Oriel College has said that it finally wants to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes.
Ask yourself this: do we face up to the reality of how every one of us in the U.K. has benefitted from slavery when we learn about it in school? Major cities such as Bristol, Glasgow, and Liverpool, would not exist in the same way today had it not been for the huge profits slave owners made from their trade, which they then ploughed back into these cities. Money which, in simple terms, was generated from the forced removal of people from their home nations, and their transportation thousands of miles across the globe for forced labour.
Avoiding these difficult conversations about our own history, and how we teach it in our schools and universities, has been far too easy. When I was teaching at my first school in south London, we taught one lesson on the British Empire out of a five year curriculum. One lesson! I would argue that if we are to create a more tolerant, accepting and inclusive society, we must begin with widening the scope of our history curriculum in schools and universities, and making a concerted effort to teach, and face up to, the less complimentary aspects of our past, such as slavery and empire. A recent report from The Black Curriculum, explains this in greater detail, stating: “During this particularly factious time within our societal history, the need for a curriculum that redefines conceptions of ‘Britishness’ and how this aligns to our values and identities is integral.”
Lastly, let’s talk about Churchill, and the issues around how we remember figures from our past. When we teach history we place an unrealistic value on single individuals for their role in causing change. Do you really think that it was Churchill alone that “won” the war? What about the millions of soldiers who were fighting on the frontlines, including millions from the British Empire? We need to change the way that we think about our past.
We won’t be able to move forward as a society until we look backwards and properly engage with our history. There really is no time like the present to do so.
You can read more about the activities and campaigns of the Black Curriculum here.