David Cannadine tells Michael Gove to keep syllabus intact and make subject compulsory to age of 16

Towards the end of a typically barnstorming performance at the Hay Festival in May last year, during which Niall Ferguson had rubbished the way history was taught in this country, the spotlight was turned towards the audience to reveal that the new education secretary, Michael Gove, had snuck into the event and was sitting somewhere near the back. And after a few not entirely convincing exchanges of surprise along the lines of "Fancy seeing you here!", "You're marvellous", "No, you're marvellous", Gove offered Ferguson a job on the spot to help reform the history curriculum.

The message from both men was clear. The country had gone to the dogs, and the teaching of history was partly to blame. Under 13 years of a Labour government, the nation's schoolchildren had learned little more than a few episodic soundbites about the Nazis, and consequently had no real understanding of, or pride in, the country's past achievements. Put the Great back into Britain, celebrate the past, forget the post-colonial apologias, and the little blighters will stop stabbing one another and get off their butts and start looking for a job. Here was a post-election narrative for the new coalition government looking to reassure the Tory heartlands that a back-to-basics, common-sense approach to education was firmly in hand.

Wisely, perhaps, Gove chose to consult not just Ferguson. Instead, using the contacts book that mysteriously opens up for new ministers, he also invited several other well-known historians, including Simon Schama and Richard Evans, to contribute their suggestions for the wholesale reform of history teaching. Somewhere not far into the process, he also asked David Cannadine, Dodge Professor of History at Princeton – and, with Ferguson and Schama, yet another of the UK's top academic exports to the US – for his thoughts. Eighteen months down the line, Gove might rather be wishing he hadn't.

Like Gove and Ferguson, Cannadine has also taken a profound interest in how history is taught in state schools; unlike them, he didn't think that relying on hearsay and ideology was the best way to decide public policy. "There had been a great many theories about how history had been taught over time," Cannadine says, "but no one had done any detailed research to provide the evidence to back them up." So about two and a half years ago Cannadine, along with two research fellows, Jenny Keating and Nicola Sheldon, funded by the Linbury Trust and the Institute of Historical Research, set out to find the empirical data, and this week their findings are published in The Right Kind of History.

What emerges clearly is that there never was a golden, sentimental age of history education in which everyone came out of school knowing the names and dates of every king and queen or marvelling in a triumphalist past. "If you go through the records," says Cannadine, "it's clear that up until the second world war, history was only ever taught to a very small elite, and even thereafter, it's hardly been a mainstream subject. Along with Albania, we're one of the few countries in which history hasn't been compulsory beyond 14. And with only two or three hours a week timetabled up until that age, the chances of pupils acquiring a comprehensive grounding in the subject are slim."

Nor does Cannadine believe the fault lies with the national curriculum, which was introduced under the Thatcher government in 1988 in response to similar concerns that standards of teaching had dropped and something needed to be done. "It's become fashionable to knock the history curriculum for being too episodic and for pupils not learning enough about how the past interconnects, but the real problem is that there is not enough time to teach everything," Cannadine says. "If you examine the history curriculum carefully, it does actually cover pretty much everything you might want students to know; the problem is there isn't enough time to teach it. So inevitably there are going to be gaps in people's learning. And it was always like this, even before the national curriculum. Back in the 1930s, the Tudors were the equivalent of the modern-day Nazis, with everyone complaining that pupils spent far too much time on the Tudors at the expense of other periods."

Furthermore, history has incorporated many more areas of study in schools over the last 50 years; where once it was mainly restricted to wars, diplomacy and a bit of economics, it now incorporates race, gender and social issues. So a further dilution of a subject kept within a fixed time-frame was almost unavoidable.

If the history curriculum isn't fit for purpose, then Cannadine believes we should be looking no further than the politicians and Whitehall for the culprits, as when Kenneth Baker et al were drafting the original curriculum in the 80s it was always intended that history should become compulsory until the age of 16. At the last minute, though, Kenneth Clarke, then education secretary, decided to retain the status quo, and ever since history teachers have been forced to cram a syllabus originally intended to be learned over five years into three. As a direct consequence, those students who did choose to continue history to GCSE were frequently forced to cover much the same syllabus in key stage 4 as they had in key stage 3 – only in rather greater depth. It doesn't take a lot of working out to realise why so many students complain that history is repetitive and boring.

Cannadine thinks the answer is quite straightforward. Leave the curriculum alone and go back to teaching it the way it was always intended to be taught, by making it compulsory to 16. "I'm not naïve," he says. "I'm quite sure that in some schools history isn't always taught as well it should be. One should never be complacent about standards. But the same is almost certainly true of every other subject you care to mention and no one is proposing a wholesale reform of the curriculum in those areas."

Which raises an interesting question. Why is it that some subjects, such as maths and physics, are seen as objectively neutral – their syllabus a matter for academic discussion alone – while others, such as history, are considered so important to the national psyche that so many people feel the need to have an opinion about it? Part of the answer is that many of us know – or think we know – more history than science and therefore have some kind of entitlement, but it's also true that our culture loads history, more than any other subject, with a moral narrative. It has become one of the means through which we tell stories about ourselves and shape our national identity.

For those of the Ferguson school, this bending of history to a narrative, interpretative arc presents few problems. And if confined to a few university lecture halls, it probably serves a purpose. Ferguson has built his career on counterfactual history and championing unfashionable rightwing causes, and if he has forced other liberal academics to rethink and defend their positions more carefully, then all well and good. Yet Cannadine believes it should have no role in how history is taught in school.

"History should never be used merely as a means of relaying a desired national narrative," he says. "Putin is doing just that in Russia at the moment by insisting that some aspects of the Soviet regime should be taught in a more sympathetic light. There are also calls in some American states to rewrite their teaching of slavery. This can't be right. If a country has cause to feel awkward about its past, then so be it. We should be grown-up enough to deal with it. Which isn't to say we should wallow in guilt; rather that we should accept the good and bad equally without giving either greater emphasis."

Outsiders to the current history curriculum consultation might also be curious about why it is that three of Gove's most high-profile advisers – Ferguson, Schama and Cannadine – are spending most of their time working in the US. Cannadine insists there's nothing that odd about it. "Just one of those things. A coincidence." But of course, it isn't really, as it highlights problems Gove might also want to address rather higher up the education food chain. The reason top British academics end up overseas is not just because they get paid so much more there, but because they are left on their own to teach what they want, how they want to, without constant interference or being forced to churn out a designated number of papers every four years for the research assessment exercise or its replacement.

Looked at another way, though, what Ferguson, Schama and Cannadine also highlight is that Britain has managed to turn out historians of international stature despite never having had a Govian age of rose-tinted national identity in the classroom. What's more, while Britain has produced historians of many other countries, who are recognised as experts in those countries, there are very few – if any – overseas historians who are recognised as of the same rank as our own custodians of British history. And if that were to change in the future, it would be more likely due to the decline in language teaching – and the consequent inability to work from original sources – than to a fall in the standards of history teaching.

All of which, as Cannadine admits, leaves Gove with a dilemma. "I suspect he might find it politically difficult not to change the national curriculum," he says, "as it's the easiest thing to do and also what many people want him to do. But there's really no need. The biggest and most necessary change is to make history compulsory to 16, but doing that will create other pressures on the timetable. Still, he's had a copy of the book on his desk since September, and if he needs any help writing the speech explaining what really needs to be done, he only has to call me."

So the ball is in Gove's court. To learn from history, or be condemned to repeat its mistakes.

• The Right Kind of History by David Cannadine, Jenny Keating and Nicola Sheldon is available from Guardian Books. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p, call 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop

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