End the neglect of our own heritage in schools

There is no country in Europe I know of where history is not a central subject in the curriculum, and where this is not accepted by everybody as proper and natural. Only in the dumbed-down, postmodern, politically correct United Kingdom is there a chance that the teaching of history might even vanish before long, or at best be absorbed into modern studies and lessons on citizenship.

That is the way things are going in England, anyhow, but at least in Scotland there is a little resistance to it all. Our minister, Mike Russell, has just declared it "vital that pupils in our schools develop a strong understanding of Scottish history and how it has shaped our lives. For too long Scottish history has been neglected in our schools".

That second sentence tells us why Russell is being anything but bizarre. The neglect makes Scotland different from all other countries, and not in a commendable way. Nor is there anything inevitable about it, however. On the contrary, after the Union of 1707 and right through the Enlightenment, Scots showed an obsessive interest in history. Scotland then stood at the cutting edge of everything from steam engines to philosophy and the study of history was the prime means for the nation to explain itself to itself, when a generation before it had been burning witches.

Yet enlightened Scots were not parochial but cosmopolitan, as interested in the history of Peru or Thailand as in the history of Scotland. In fact, they thought the history of Peru or Thailand threw light on the history of Scotland and vice versa. Underneath all three histories, there were universal forces at work. A good definition of the Enlightenment would be that it was a quest for an understanding of those universal forces.

How did it happen, then, that Scots came to feel their history was a trifling thing, all right for wee kids in primary school or for aged eccentrics in kilts but for any sensible citizen best forgotten? As Scotland got absorbed into the Union, and especially as the prospects of empire opened up, it was really a new nation that arose with a new history – this history being before it, not behind it. So there was no point in studying the old history.

Here is the mentality that Mr Russell, quite rightly, is setting out to combat. For most of the 20th century the teaching of Scottish history in schools was pretty well confined to the primary level. Secondary schools seldom touched it unless there was a teacher with a special enthusiasm who could communicate it to his pupils. In the universities there were small departments of Scottish history yet with a musty, dusty air about them: most never looked at what had happened since 1707, only at what had happened before then when Scots were still Scots and not Brits.

All that has changed today. The British Empire is gone and nobody regrets it. Britain still remains a focus of loyalty, if to a far lesser extent than in the past. Yet Scots are, like all human beings, in needing something bigger than themselves to belong to, indeed to love. Once you love something, you want to know all about it, just as when you love somebody. So the public interest in Scottish history, along with everything else about Scotland, has enormously revived.

It is a great development, yet not problem-free. The interest has burgeoned so fast as to leave behind the means of satisfying it. There are more academic researchers than ever before sneezing their way through dusty archives. They usually write not for the general public but for one another and they still leave large holes in areas where they are unlikely to win the approval of their peers, of those who will review their articles and books in the journals they all read and nobody else has ever heard of.

That was one reason why Scottish history languished so long – because the profession in Britain was totally dominated by English historians, some of them (Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, springs to mind) expressing loud and frequent contempt for Scottish history. But the revival has not really solved the problem because it too is lopsided. To outsiders it can still leave the impression that Scottish history is a stunted and misshapened thing, like a hoary caricature of a Glaswegian.

I call it the School of Devinity, after its foremost practitioner, Professor Tom Devine of Edinburgh. He still writes the kind of socioeconomic history that was being written in English polytechnics of the 1960s (and today in England, to its credit, hopelessly outdated).

This school is interested in people only insofar as statistics can be compiled about them, and has no time for personalities. Again, it has been poor at explaining Scottish politics or integrating it into the nation's general history, precisely because Scotland, like any geographical expression, is relevant only as a locus for generating socioeconomic statistics.

As for the Enlightenment, nothing but nonsense has emerged from the School of Devinity: Devine himself explains what happened in the 18th century by "faith in reason", when it was anything but.

People wanting to understand the Scottish Enlightenment will have to go to British or American or European, not to Scottish, historians.

I have no belief in the kind of absolutely objective history, free of all human bias, that is obviously the goal of the statistical method.

We are each doomed to live inside mental constructs, sometimes our own but more often borrowed from others, and the mental construct of this school is hopeless at accommodating many actual events of Scottish history – not only the Enlightenment but also the rise of nationalism.

Scotland has always been, and I hope will always be, a contested country, with different kinds of history.

The actual history we get at any given time depends on who controls the interpretation – and just now we have the wrong people in charge.

For our young people, the challenge of all this can surely become an exciting aspect of Scottishness in the 21 century, with the aim of redefining what Scotland is and Scotland means.

On those grounds alone, I hope we can succeed in ending the long neglect of the nation's history in its schools.

Michael Fry is a historian and author whose most recent book, Edinburgh: A History of The City, is published by Macmillan