TEACHING HISTORY
SIR,—Mr. Henschel may teach history, I examine it. As an historian he will, I presume, believe in evidence, and it is an incontrovertible fact that the majority of schoolmasters avoid teaching eighteenth-century English history in the sixth form. Furthermore, of those that do teach it the majority still teach those absolutes on which I was bred and which Sir Lewis Namier and others have shattered. These statements are not based on spleen, condescension or ignorance, but on observation. Each year for the last thirteen years I have read at the December scholarship exam- ination the essays of schoolboys from a hundred different schools, public and grammar. This may be insufferable; it may be risible; it is, however, true.— Yours faithfully, J. H. PLUMB Christ's College, Cambridge
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