What Do They Teach Them In These Schools – History is People

 You know, I never used to pay that much attention to history. It seems odd to say it now sitting in my house crammed with history books and my medieval re-enactment kit piled up in crates just to my left. And the odd thing was – it wasn’t that I wasn’t interested. The problem, much as I hate to say it as an undisputed Hermione Grangeresque swot, was school.

I’m not sure exactly how things stand in school these days, but I know that back in ancient times when I was being educated, the problem with history was that no one was interested in teaching you the interesting bits.  We rushed through Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome in primary school, cantered through the Dark Ages to the English Civil War before I even hit my teens and then, just as I was of an age to start appreciating history, what did we stick on?

The Industrial Revolution.

Oh God. We stayed there. For years, all through high school. We never even made it to the World Wars. And I can say hand on heart that there is nothing on this earth more likely to kill any kind of interest in history in a child or young person than studying the Industrial Revolution the way I studied it. Enclosure. Crop Rotation. Jethro Tull’s Seed Drill. The difference between the Spinning Jenny and the Water Frame. Workhouses. Factory Conditions. Humphrey Davy’s mining lamp. The endless, endless parade of dates to learn, Acts of Parliament to study, technical facts to keep in mind. It was so dull.

And so I moved on as soon as GCSE was done, leaving history behind except for a few childhood books I owned and focused on Geography and English for the furtherance of my academic study. And I didn’t think much more about it. Until...

A number of years ago now, I went with my family to a nearby open air museum which was holding a medieval festival. It was great fun and in the course of it, I acquired the card of a re-enactment society taking part. I girded my courage, I rang them and I was invited to come along and try it out for myself at a re-enactment of the Battle of Bosworth. Except... I had absolutely no idea what the Battle of Bosworth was about. I had a vague idea of when and sort of knew who had fought but I hadn’t the foggiest why or about any of the context. I had found a period in history my school had not even skimmed but had completely skipped. I knew nothing of the Wars of the Roses.

Such is the kind of thing public libraries were invented for. In search of background on my possible new hobby, I raided mine.

And that was when history changed for me. That was when I learned. Because the history taught in schools – dates, facts, technical information, a person’s name attached to a thing with no other context – that isn’t real history. That’s just information. History is people.

Some folks may be aware that George RR Martin based his Game of Thrones novels on the shenanigans of the Wars of the Roses. He picked his material well. In researching the Battle of Bosworth and the events leading up to it, I had found a fascinating period of history about which I had never been told. An astonishing well of characters, treachery, unbelievable events that all hinged not on facts and figures or dates and times but on people, on the decisions they made, the actions they took and how those decisions and actions shaped everything that followed. And from exploring that unknown period of past time, I ventured forward and backward to ancient times and Tudor palaces, hidden wars and forgotten people, to the history of my nation and of others too. I’d finally discovered the side of history that fascinated me. I’d found the characters. I’d found the story.

Because there is no history without the story. And we all know history is written by the winners, that every source has its own agenda to push and axe to grind and that none of them can really be trusted for the whole story – can you imagine if you were trying to interpret the history of the early twenty-first century and all you had to do it was a tabloid newspaper? I dread to think what the future would think of us! And I also know it’s out of fashion to take an interest in just royal or noble history and not the conditions of the ordinary folk and that’s fair enough – but historical sources are written about the big names at the end of the day. As Fodder can tell you, nobody much bothers to record what’s going on with the little people. Tough as it is, the big names are where the characters are. I would love to know the worries and concerns of the average peasant but sadly for us all, they so rarely wrote things down.

I love the psychology of history. I love trying to get into the heads of people in the past, to study their motives, their motivations and their characters, as far as they can be ascertained. And it helps teach us a different way to look at things, a different cultural and emotional perspective. You can’t judge the people of the past by the standards of the present. These are people who believed in different things to us, looked at the world in a totally different way and had an utterly alien concept of ordinary and acceptable and yet they are part of us. They made us. And that matters.

We are the sum of our history and history is the sum of those who lived through it. Because at heart, be they a famous king or a soldier in the ditch, people are what history should be about.  People who were just like us - living their lives in different times to different rules but fundamentally just human. That’s where the interest lies, not in seed drills or the date of an Act of Parliament. It’s about who we were, who we are and who we might have been. It’s about seeing the mistakes made by those who went before us and trying not to repeat them. It’s about how the world then has made the world now. It’s about everyone.

History is everyone’s story. And knowing it can only make us richer.