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Ranty thread about why the culture war stuff about history is bugging me more than I know it should. I'm not interested in demonstrating my woke credentials or promoting the BLM organisation. I'm interested in teaching good history and I don't like threats to it. This is one.
Earlier @BBradley_Mans tried to argue that @nationaltrust is sanitising history by providing more information about the connections between its properties and slavery. Thankfully Dalia Gabriel pointed out repeatedly that the opposite is the case. https://twitter.com/BBCPolitics/status/1326492504783527937?s=20
He was made to look poorly-informed, but it's still dangerous. Here was an MP claiming that researching history more fully is not acceptable because it doesn't suit his patriotic view of the past. That should ring alarm bells for anyone who cares about the credibility of history.
He's not the only one who does this. Here's a tweet from some time back from @SimonClarkeMP, claiming that we should all embrace a particular interpretation of the past and suggesting that those who don't are self-haters. This is offensive and ahistorical. https://twitter.com/SimonClarkeMP/status/1270327639799214087?s=20
They need to learn that they can't dictate what's on and off limits about history. But what really bothers me is that what gets lost in all of this is the truth. Being truthful about the past should be the first duty of anyone who studies it, but they make a mockery of that.
This does damage. If they throw enough accusations that those who disagree with them are woke, Britain-hating, PC members of a liberal elite, they turn what should be a truth-seeking discipline into a mud-wrestling match and the aim becomes merely to throw the best insult.
The academic credibility of history, and the duty of those who study it to seek the truth diligently, is lost without trace. Who cares that the @nationaltrust report revealed important information about the past when all that matters is that it was written by snowflakes?
The answer is that I care, and so should anyone else who thinks it is important for young people to learn about Britain's past comprehensively and accurately. If it makes me a snowflake to value historical research, regardless of whether I like what it reveals, then so be it.
And how dare they suggest that somehow this makes me anti-British! I value the history of our country sufficiently to think it deserves some rigour, and I reckon our national self-esteem is robust enough to cope with the truth. They are afraid it will collapse under the strain.
So to any MP or anyone else who thinks history teachers should feed kids a diet of comforting stories about an imagined past, especially one simultaneously telling us not to indoctrinate kids, I say you are stopping us doing our job and need to get out of the way.
And before I'm accused of being partisan, to any history teachers who want to present a one-sided version of the past in order to promote a left-wing agenda, firstly I've never met you in a 20 year career, and secondly cut it out, because it's not your job to be an activist.
Truthfulness means history will be messy, complicated and resistant to easy compartmentalisation. That is both the inconvenience and the beauty of truth. If we abandon our commitment to being open and honest about the past, we might as well give up on history now.
So anyone who wants to treat history as their plaything needs to get lost and find something else to inflict your fantasies on, because some of us have important work to do. Rant over.
