Text and topic books are not enough
Gilbert Pleuger suggests post-2000 texts and topic books need to be supplemented

The core of Advanced History teachers’ work is the study of change. Advanced History teachers, themselves, have endured considerable change in their professional life over the last years, notably with the introduction of the new AS and A2 exam from September 2000. The current specifications are noteworthy, compared to earlier syllabuses, for the detailed description of content, key issues and assessment objectives. The major schools’ publishers have responded and provided texts written for the new specifications. Texts now, compared with those, say, 20 years ago, seek to provide for all aspects of unit study and have complicated and integrated formats. It is easily understood that heads of departments, confronted with the need to allocate expenditure with care from circumscribed budgets, are attracted by these would-be do-it-all texts. Without seeking to diminish the sense of emotional warmth generated by the possession of a hoped-for panacea text, a little reflection is timely.

The devil entered with the detail

It would be careless and incautious for a teacher not to study and follow the exact requirements with thoroughness, as also Examiners’ reports. This is a point made with emphasis in our Grade Buster’s guide on ‘Liberals and Labour 1899-1918’, OCR AS English History Period Study 2584. The guide will be available on our website shortly, before publication in the March issue of the journal. In these columns the place of technique in the new specifications was soon recognised (Vol 7, No 1, page 23). Our roving reporter commented: ‘Some [students who had just completed the first year of the AS course] considered that the exams seemed designed to test their mastery of answer technique as much as their mastery of History and too much of the course had been spent on this.’

Texts’ would-be sufficiency

The new textbook series, written almost exclusively by classroom teachers, have responded to the specifications. This is an attraction and strength, as publishers forcefully remind teachers in their advertising and promotions and it is readily understood why teachers are drawn to them. However, while they have focus, they are heavily derived from secondary sources and the mix of analysis and narrative can be readily obscured by fragmented, heavily sub-sectioned, presentation. This trend is even more marked because texts tend to incorporate most or all the study skills articulated in detail in exam specifications. When text or topic books are directed to the whole ability range, including pedestrian, poorly motivated, students bound for grades D and E, as they increasingly do, this characteristic is still more marked. While it would be wrong to say contemporary texts do not have strengths, there are those who characterise, or should we say caricature, some modern texts as akin to technical manuals. It should be unsurprising that, by a kind of dialectic, exams that give such importance to technique engender technical-style texts.

In the spectrum of historical writing, contemporary textbooks are, some would say, necessarily bland journey-men’s offerings. They are a sea-change away from the book this writer used, England under the Tudors by the late Sir Geoffrey Elton, when he started to teach early-modern English History, a book that provoked assent or dissent from readers by its sharp and robust depiction of the Tudor period.

Articles that foster debate

The challenge, and the excitement, of the historical enterprise is no more and no less than the search for what happened in the past (the events) and the connections between events (that is, why events happened and their consequences). It is in this search that the smell of gun smoke or Crimean amputation table chlorine will be sensed. Historians’ accounts of the past engender debate as one depiction of the past is challenged by another and step by step a fuller and more accurate picture is achieved. That is the place and importance of discussion and debate in the study of the past and light years away from the application of technique in the construction of an exam answer.

Articles in new perspective are not dumbed-down narratives of the past and, with the exception of the Skills Supplement, they do not focus on technique. They are genuine contributions to the historical enterprise written in carefully selected vocabulary, yet presented in a student-friendly format by our gifted subeditor, by accomplished authors who are research-based historians. In this issue, for example, Professor Christopher Duggan contributes an article on Italy 1815-1922 just 16 months after the publication of his magisterial, 790 page, Francesco Crispi 1818-1901: From nation to nationalism, the culmination of years’ work. The articles are usually fashioned round a debate, discussion or argument and encourage readers to find answers to what, why, the consequences and the importance questions, the formation of their own judgements and their participation the debate that is true History. Where there are clusters of articles on a theme, for example appeasement, their utility for discussion is even greater. Our articles are concise summaries, tasters so to say, of many historians’ work. As such, they provide a rich array of approach and style, an awareness of which can be used to develop high-grade essay writing by students.

Gilbert Pleuger is the author of a short study, based on primary and secondary sources, John Howard and The Prisons, 1992.