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Michael Gove’s war on professional historical expertise : conservative curriculum reform, extreme Whig history and the place of imperial heroes in modern multicultural Britain
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Watson, Matthew (2020) Michael Gove’s war on professional historical expertise : conservative curriculum reform, extreme Whig history and the place of imperial heroes in modern multicultural Britain. British Politics, 15 . pp. 271-290. doi:10.1057/s41293-019-00118-3 ISSN 1746-918X.
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-019-00118-3
Abstract
Six years of continuously baiting his opponents within the history profession eventually amounted to little where it mattered most. UK Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, finally backtracked in 2013 on his plans to impose a curriculum for English schools based on a linear chronology of the achievements of British national heroes. His ‘history as celebration’ curriculum was designed to instil pride amongst students in a supposedly shared national past, but would merely have accentuated how many students in modern multicultural Britain fail to recognise themselves in what is taught in school history lessons. Now that the dust has settled on Gove’s tenure as Secretary of State, the time is right for retrospective analysis of how his plans for the history curriculum made it quite so far. How did he construct an ‘ideological’ conception of expertise which allowed him to go toe-to-toe for so long with the ‘professional’ expertise of academic historians and history teachers? What does the content of this ideological expertise tell us about the politics of race within Conservative Party curriculum reforms? This article answers these questions to characterise Gove as a ‘whig historian’ of a wilfully extreme nature in his attachment to imperial heroes as the best way to teach national history in modern multicultural Britain.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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Subjects: | L Education > LB Theory and practice of education | ||||||||
Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Politics and International Studies | ||||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Education and state -- Great Britain, Racism -- Great Britain -- History, History -- Study and teaching -- Great Britain, Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 21st century, Educational change -- Great Britain -- History -- 21st century, Education ministers -- Great Britain | ||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | British Politics | ||||||||
Publisher: | Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. | ||||||||
ISSN: | 1746-918X | ||||||||
Official Date: | September 2020 | ||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 15 | ||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 271-290 | ||||||||
DOI: | 10.1057/s41293-019-00118-3 | ||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
Reuse Statement (publisher, data, author rights): | This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in British Politics. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-019-00118-3 | ||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 8 May 2019 | ||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 16 May 2020 | ||||||||
RIOXX Funder/Project Grant: |
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