Geoffrey Alderman agreed.  He argued that pupils lack a grasp of the broad sweep of British history, as teaching has moved away from a survey approach to one focused on skills.  Proponents of the latter regard history’s major importance as lying in the discipline’s development of critical and evaluative faculties and the ability to construct a sound argument.  History does indeed develop these skills, Alderman argues, but that is not its purpose: ‘History is the collective memory of society. It is that memory which informs society’s attitude to itself and to the world around it.’

What’s particularly interesting from my point of view as a researcher looking at history and policy is the parallels between this debate and those about public history and ‘usable pasts’ (Jordanova’s phrase).  Both have a central concern with whether the transmission of history is fundamentally about transmission of knowledge of the past or of the intellectual skills needed to interpret the past and critique historical accounts.  Holger Hoock reports in the introduction to the latest issue of The Public Historian – which focuses on professional practices in Britain – the argument being made by Jordanova and Tosh in particular that ‘modes of historical thinking and critical skills’ need to be modelled and conveyed as much as ‘knowledge and content’.

While the direction of travel in the UK academic discipline seems to be towards greater commitment to sharing the reasoning processes and practices that historians use to interpret the past with their audiences, skills are in far less favour when it comes to Government’s view of school history.  Knowledge must take primacy, according to Gove: ‘It is critical that we ensure that every child has a proper spine of knowledge-the narrative of the history of these islands. Without that, the skills of comparison and of examining primary and secondary sources and drawing the appropriate conclusions, are meaningless.’

In this account, which seems to have wider resonance, (if comments left by readers to online newspaper articles are anything to go by) skills have no intrinsic value: they are merely tools.  To focus teaching on skills is to devalue history, as the narrative is modularised into thematic chunks for ready application of the required techniques.

I don’t dispute the need for historical knowledge, nor that specialist knowledge of a particular period or phenomenon may be best supported by exposure to the “broad sweep” that survey history gives.  But I would argue that drawing out the thinking processes on which the discipline depends enhances rather than devalues engagement with history.  In fact, I’m wondering whether it does more than that.  My current research is exploring whether “thinking with history” can enhance policy development and decision-making processes, not so much through the provision of “accessible” reflections on the policy implications of historical scholarship (as per the aims of the History & Policy network) but by being embedded in those processes.  If skills are dead in our children’s classrooms, can they live long in the corridors of power?

The author is a part-time Ph.D. student and would welcome views and contributions either on activehistory.ca or directly by email (a.r.green@herts.ac.uk) as part of ongoing research

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In my role as an adviser on policy for a university Vice-Chancellor, the UK equivalent of President, perhaps my most important job is to ask our leader to ‘tell me the story’ when he’s consulting me on some issue or another.  It seems to me that universities, along with many public sector institutions, are not always able, or inclined, to ‘think with history’ when they’re making the major policy decisions that shape their future.  That’s not to say that universities don’t have a powerful sense of history; they do.  But so often it seems a burden.  History weighs heavy on the shoulders of university leaders, who feel their capacity for action limited by the accumulation of previous decisions that have kept their institutions on a steady course to the present time.  Even at a new university like mine, which gained its status as a result of 1992 Further and Higher Education Act, history can be problematic for leaders.  As a former Polytechnic, my institution had a history to overcome – or at least to integrate into a new future  – as it strived to find its place in an expanded HE sector.

I was interested to discover a literature about thinking with history in political decision-making in the US, which seems to be largely absent in the UK.  I was particularly struck by Neustadt and May’s’ Thinking in Time: the uses of history for decision-makers, which focuses on critical moments where administrations did, and did not, conform to ‘usual practice’  – plunging towards action, depending on fuzzy analogies, paying insufficient attention to the issue’s own past, failing to think a second time about key presumptions, adopting stereotyped suppositions about other parties and putting too little effort into seeing choices as part of any historical sequence.   Asking ‘tell me the story’ – rather than ‘what’s the problem’ – is one of their most important principles.  They call it the Goldberg Rule, after Avram Goldberg, the CEO of Stop and Shop, a chain of grocery and discount department stores. It was Goldberg’s way of getting to the heart of the real issue when one of his managers came to see him.

I’d like to see university leaders – and Ministers of Government Departments – invoke the Goldberg rule with their advisory teams.  As a historian working in a policy role, it can be difficult to have your case heard for the importance of history in decision-making.  I’ve seen in politics the power of the present, and the need to deal, and be seen to deal, with its apparently pressing problems.  Academic leaders are not so driven by the imperative for action that modern politics seems to demand, but that doesn’t mean they are any less focused on the future and how they will shape it for their institution.  Our Vice-Chancellor, preparing for a successor later this year, has found himself writing the stories behind his decisions, recognising now the value of ‘thinking with history’.  We now have our first peacetime coalition Government in the UK since the 1920s, which will face a number of significant decisions, not least on the economy and engagement in Afghanistan.  Let’s hope Cameron, Clegg and Co don’t need too much convincing to adopt the Goldberg Rule.

Alix Green is Head of Policy at the University of Hertfordshire, providing strategic advice to the Vice-Chancellor and helping to influence HE policy development. She holds a B.A. and M.Phil. in History from Clare College, Cambridge and is currently engaged in doctoral research on ‘thinking with history’ in university and HE policy futures.

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