THE GUARDIAN

LEADER

Friday January 28, 2005

It is popularly supposed that Britons in general, and school pupils in particular, are miserably unschooled in recent history. One newspaper last weekend reported an ignorance of the Holocaust that, if true, would have been shocking in this week of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In fact, knowledge of and interest in this unparalleled act of considered and deliberate murder is impressive even among secondary school pupils not yet old enough to have studied it at school. The recent BBC2 series on Auschwitz drew a bigger audience than competing instalments of Celebrity Big Brother. History matters.

This makes it all the stranger that yesterday the Conservative education spokesman, Tim Collins, called for history to be made a compulsory subject throughout secondary school. "Nothing is more important to the survival of the British nation than an understanding among its young of our shared heritage and the nature of the struggles, foreign and domestic, which have secured our freedoms," he told the National Catholic Heads' conference.

Yet, far from losing touch with its past, Britain appears addicted to it; with a whole new generation of TV dons, history is the new cooking. And, although history is still much less popular than it was 10 years ago, there has recently been a slight increase in the number of pupils taking it as a GCSE subject. (The Historical Association is expected to produce a report critical of the exam shortly).

When the Conservatives talk about history in the same week that they talk about immigration, and in the same tone of voice, the message is about as subtle as the waving of the tic-tac man from the silver ring. The Britain made great by past great Britons is supposedly at risk from what Tories want voters to see as a burgeoning population of first-generation immigrants with alien cultures that stifle the teaching of the traditional narrative of liberal history.

Away from the part of the speech pre-released to the press, Mr Collins actually had sensible things to say about the value of the skills of analysis and perspective gained from studying history. He was also right that an understanding of a shared history is part of the glue of social cohesion. Professor Bernard Crick's committee on life in the United Kingdom acknowledged as much - but, Mr Collins might note, it added that a new history was only meaningful in the context of the pride and security that come from being a citizen. Interest in British history is a consequence of a sense of Britishness, not a precondition.

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