One of the mysteries of British politics is why the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, should be regarded as a man of mighty intellect. He is a journalist of crude, populist instincts, as demonstrated by his Daily Mail article on how the First World War should be commemorated. Schoolchildren, he argues, should learn about it “in the right way”, honouring “the heroism and sacrifice of our great-grandparents” and rejecting the supposedly left-wing view, propagated by fictional TV programmes such as Blackadder, that the war was “a misbegotten shambles”. In other words, he wants to replace one oversimplified account with another.
The point of studying history is neither to honour nor to denigrate our ancestors but to understand how it shaped our world. That understanding changes as our world changes. For example, it is impossible to comprehend the resilience of the project for European unity, even after the near-collapse of the euro, without some grasp of the effects of the continent’s two 20th-century wars. Gove, a Eurosceptic, doesn’t want teachers to dwell on that. He prefers them to present the 1914-18 war as an old-fashioned tale of goodies and baddies.
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