Sir: I was a member of the History Working Group
of the National Curriculum Council in 1989 and 1990. Our task was to set up a new curriculum. Though the Group was accused of being Thatcherite, it was melan- choly to see its members promoting nation- al sackcloth and ashes. Some of the teach- ers we interviewed also had a very real con- tempt for facts.
Romantic Whigs were, of course, philo- sophically guilty of treason over the French Revolution ('Bliss was, it in that dawn to be alive'). This type of bogus thinking later induced Gladstonian Liberals to claim that even savages had the right to rule, kill and eat each other. To this fallacy was added Marxism, which did British imperialism such damage that few will now defend it, despite the conspicuous success of the United States and other ex-British colonies.
The final nail in history's coffin came when the teaching profession was largely socialised, a process complete in state schools and in many Oxbridge colleges by the middle 1950s. The post-1960s disorder (or distemper) was to treat history as a way of empathising and no longer as a discipline that can help to make the world more understandable.
Finally, television and film, media good for sound-bites and impression and bad for argument, are more powerful than all but the very finest teachers. Nor has there ever been a television history programme or a film without an anachronism or two or more, usually inapt visuals or facts deformed to meet producers' arguments. All in all, history has been perverted into a handmaiden of political correctness, and it is not surprising that the young are large- ly Europhile. Europhiles are usually igno- rant of European history. Probably they have to be.
Henry Hobhouse
Bottom Barn Farmhouse, Castle Cary, Somerset
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