History teaching has changed radically throughout Britain and Northern Ireland in the past thirty years, not just in what is taught, but in the way in which history education is conceived. Therefore when the Conservative Government phased in the history National Curriculum from 1991 onwards, it was imposed on already rapidly developing approaches to teaching and assessing history. However, both history teaching and the National Curriculum itself differ between the constituent parts of the UK, so I must begin with a disclaimer. I have no direct experience either of history teaching or the impact of the National Curriculum outside England. I will therefore confine my remarks to English history education.

Before the National Curriculum

The changes in history education in England in the past three decades have been profound and complex. There is space here only for a schematic commentary, not a history, and in attempting to give a coherent picture, my comments will focus on the positive. I hope that this does not give the impression that all is well in history education in England. In the period of innovation and rethinking from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, there were, of course, confusions and mistakes. But the gains were enormous, and when they were threatened, teachers fought to hold on to them.

The fundamental change in history education in England from the late 1960s was a shift from arguments about what content should be taught, to questions about what learning history should mean. Put crudely, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, teachers and examiners began to move away from arguing about issues such as British versus World history, and instead began to ask what students understood about the discipline of history. (I mention examiners, as well as teachers, because before the advent of the National Curriculum the key syllabuses for national examinations for students at the age of sixteen were set, as well as marked, by independent examination boards closely linked with universities.) Of course, many have argued that students simply needed to remember the "key facts" and accounts produced by historians, and be able to reproduce them. But in practice, this was proving disastrous in four simple ways. First, the students didn't appear to be making much sense of the facts. Second, they quickly forgot them anyway. Third, they encountered different stories outside school, and often preferred those to the approved versions handed out in school. Fourth, they had no guides for thinking about history, or coping with competing stories about the past. Students thought history was easy, but useless and boring. And to cap it all, if anyone tried to get historians to agree on the `key facts', they tended to go for each other's throats.

Teachers, examiners, and researchers discovered that many students were working with assumptions that tended to make the whole enterprise of history impossible. If a student believes, for example, that nothing can really be known about the past because "no one was there in those days", then history can scarcely begin. To a student thinking like this, history is just a matter of opinion, and there is nothing more to be said. What had been assumed to be a common-sense matter_that students simply learned whatever historians had discovered about the past_began to look much more complicated. It began to be clear that history was counter-intuitive. For young children and many adolescents, for example, the touchstone of "telling the truth" is a known past. In explaining why you got home late, you can say what really happened, or you can lie: either way, Mum seems to know. From this perspective, the past happened the way it did, we know it, and the truth is fixed by it. But, of course, history is not like that. The past is not a given, and is not available to act as a touchstone. Anything we say about the past is a construction more or less justified on the basis of whatever evidence we have. So, students learning history have to abandon their commonsense understandings (which work fine in everyday life) to make any sense of the discipline.

The same applies to other key ideas. Historians believe that people in the past were as smart as us, but had different ideas. For many students this assumption is reversed: people in the past had the same beliefs and values as we do, but were more stupid. If you think like this, then history becomes a catalogue of stupid actions carried out by mental defectives. For reasons of this kind, attention shifted to students' second-order ideas: their notions of evidence, of historical explanation, of change and of historical accounts. These procedural or structural ideas were the basis of students' understanding of the discipline. It is important not to misunderstand this shift of emphasis. Popular polarities tended to pit "skills" against "knowledge," and assumed that changes in ideas about history teaching meant that "skills" were to be taught at the expense of historical knowledge. But this was a misconception: if students have no commitment to knowledge, they have not even begun to grasp what history is. Far from being downgraded, the acquisition of "knowledge" was treated seriously, it had to be grounded in an understanding of the kind of knowledge history is. As well as knowing facts about passages of the past, students needed to know about the different sorts of claims made by historians (for example, that explanations must be tested from singular statements of fact, or that the acceptability of a narrative is not guaranteed by the truth of its component statements). This was not a matter of learning "skills," and especially not generic skills like "analysis" or "critical thinking," but of beginning to understand how the particular discipline of history worked. Without such understanding, students could have no historical knowledge, merely beliefs.

A common complaint made by a vociferous minority of historians_without classroom experience or knowledge of research_was that students could not properly understand the terms monarchy or peasant, let alone grasp what historians do with evidence. So why was time being wasted on this kind of pretentious claptrap? Such complaints failed on two counts. First, they made the assumption (a strange one for historians) that it was easy to understand a trifling little phenomenon like Magna Carta, but impossibly difficult to understand that historical claims were related to evidence. Second, they forgot that understanding is seldom "all or nothing". No doubt many historians learned some physics at school, but it is unlikely that they managed to grasp the ideas of physics at the same level as an Einstein or a Feynman. This presumably does not mean that their understanding of physics is no better than that of a five year-old. In any case, there is a growing body of research evidence (not least in the USA) tracking the development of student ideas about history. In England, for some history courses, those ideas began to be directly addressed in teaching and assessment.

The goal of the changes in English history education was not to produce mini professional historians. Rather, it was to equip students with an intellectual toolkit that gave them strategies for dealing with conflicting accounts of the past, instead of leaving them helplessly trying to make sense of what they otherwise would construe as opinions. (Replacing "opinions" with "interpretations" is not in itself enlightening, even if it sounds more impressive.)

This new goal also meant thinking about content in a different way. Content had to be organized so that students could understand how the discipline of history worked. For example, if they were to understand that the "same" events can have a different significance when historians are working on different time-scales, and not just because historians had "opinions" or "biases", then they had to study at least one long-running passage of history. An overview with a few clear organizing themes would replace an "outline history", which left students with pools of light in a tunnel of darkness. Depth studies would counter the danger of superficiality, but to do this they had to nest in the overview. Ideally, they would be organized by questions, not just titles. They would give room for detailed evidence work, and serious attempts to both give and test explanations.

A similar nesting structure, expanding from local, through national, to wider history (perhaps as far as world history) would allow students to understand how events can change in importance when there are shifts in the spatial dimension. Teachers did not object to British history, provided that it fit into a wider overview, and provided they were able to explore whatever was appropriate to the questions under consideration. In short it had to be history, not some package selected and designed to engineer what politicians thought best. The legitimate outcome of history in the schools is that students know and understand something of history as the past, and as a discipline. History teachers cannot simultaneously guarantee legitimate history and particular social outcomes, ensuring students become patriots or democrats. To do that, they would have to promise_should the outcome not be achieved_to "fix" the history in such a way as to achieve it.

Assessment would also have to change. Historical knowledge could not be construed as a sedimentary process in which later passages of the past were laid down on earlier ones from one school year to the next. Instead, it would have to be thought of as metamorphic: as students' ideas about the discipline changed, so would the way they saw their knowledge of the past. This means it would be possible to think in terms of a progression of ideas in history, and to assess students in terms of their increasing understanding of the discipline.

The changes I've so crudely set out here were a result of teachers' reactions to a decline in the status of school history. Led by the Schools History Project (SHP), a combination of grass-roots teacher involvement and the powerful engine of national public examinations for sixteen year- olds, ensured the rapid spread of the new ideas. Between the early 1970s and late 1980s, SHP spread like a pyramid scheme through cluster-groups of teachers who tried its suggestions, found that they worked, built on them, and spread the word. Plenty of teachers resisted, others were worried by some aspects of SHP; but most of those who actually tried teaching the Project for themselves found that it had dramatic effects on student learning. Moreover, its flexibility and the interchange of teacher ideas it encouraged led to rapid development, abandoning some of the weaker elements, and sharpening the stronger ones.

As a result of the changes, students' judgement of school history changed. Strong research evidence showed that instead of being regarded as easy, but boring and useless, it was considered hard, but personally relevant.

After the National Curriculum

By the time the National Curriculum was introduced, teachers were unwilling to abandon what they had learned. The committee, carefully chosen by the Thatcher government, was put under strong pressure to reverse the impact of SHP, but instead more or less "went native". Although the new history curriculum laid down new programs of content, with strong emphasis on British history, everything was driven by an assessment system that set out a progression of students' ideas about the discipline. Progress would be measured by the way students marshaled content to give historical explanations, made sense of patterns of change, or assessed the validity of historical claims.

Americans following the English debate over the history curriculum in the media would recognize many of the arguments, even if they were fought out in a less democratic arena than in the U. S. "History Wars". The similarity is in some respects misleading, however, because the public debate in England failed to recognize what had happened to history in the schools. The public confrontations between historians, politicians and journalists assumed that there were two central issues. One was that there was a clash between "knowledge based" and "skills based" history in schools. The other was that there was a battle between "heritage" history, emphasizing the glories of Britain's past, and "bottom-up", women's or minority history, which did not. Pundits in the media spoke in authoritative tones about teaching methods of which they knew little, in classrooms they had never visited, adopting as tools for debate simplistic categories like "child centered" and "progressive". These terms are roughly equivalent to history students working with categories like "the middle class", or "the people". For most teachers such thinking was simple- minded. The issue was not whether students should know some history, of course they should; nor was it which version of the past students should learn (however noble or inclusive). The issue was whether they were to be taught history, so that whatever versions of the past they encountered, in school or out, they would have the understandings required to make sense of them.

It is still too soon to judge the full effects of the National Curriculum. In its first version, history was compulsory for ages five through fourteen. Subsequent changes have weakened the position of history (along with other subjects like geography and technology). Unlike English, mathematics and science, history is not compulsorily tested at eleven or fourteen. The content laid down in the programs of study for five to eleven year-olds does not have to be met. However, a possible outcome of the consultation exercise now under way for the next round of revisions may be a reduction of content, coupled with a more formal requirement that the stipulated content is covered. A more damaging possibility is that current "reforms" may, through the introduction of compulsory "citizenship" courses, inadvertently threaten the survival of history in schools as a recognizable subject. Whatever decisions are made, it seems fair to say that the introduction of the National Curriculum has blunted the sense of purpose and excitement that earlier attempts to revitalize history had generated.

The danger is that the fundamental principle behind the changes in history education in England_that history is more important than any particular story or version of the past_may be eroded. While acquiring knowledge of the passages of the past, students must also be equipped with increasingly powerful ideas for understanding what kind of knowledge they are learning. This is not accomplished simply by critiquing multiple versions of the past. Students must be given a mental apparatus for doing this. There is now a considerable body of research mapping student ideas about history. It indicates that some fourteen year-olds have a better grasp of the nature of historical accounts than some politicians and journalists. Research evidence shows that by age fourteen there are students (admittedly still a minority at this age) who already know that historical accounts are not just copies of the past, and understand that in choosing themes, time-scales, and questions, accounts carry appropriate criteria with them. These are powerful ideas, which do not leave their owners helplessly shrugging their shoulders in the face of alternative accounts. Political commentators who treat history stories as given, or alternatively insist that they be judged in terms of ownership rather than validity, are actually demanding that history education should stop at early adolescent conceptions. History and students both deserve better.

Peter J. Lee is professor at the History Education Unit, Curriculum Studies Group, at the University of London's Institute of Education.