Loughborough University
Browse
YEANDLE_HEROES INTO ZEROES_FINAL-2.pdf (199.39 kB)

‘Heroes into zeroes'? The politics of (not) teaching England's imperial past

Download (199.39 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2017-06-29, 08:56 authored by Peter YeandlePeter Yeandle
© 2014 Taylor & Francis.This article revisits the fiercely contested national curriculum history debates of the 1980s and 1990s. Although these debates have been subject to intense academic scrutiny, from educationists and historians alike, too little attention has been paid to the various assumptions about the inclusion (or exclusion) of hero figures in the curriculum. The article situates debate about heroes in the context of both late twentieth-century educational reform and wider historiographical analyses of Britain's (or, better put, England's) perceptions of itself as a post-imperial power. In the battle to define the content of school history, certain commentators invoked hero figures to help press their cause. What becomes clear from analysis of media intervention, however, is an ambiguity about the place and cultural/political purpose of specifically ‘imperial’ heroes. This ambiguity, I argue, reflects contemporary unease about how to confront the imperial past.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Politics and International Studies

Published in

Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History

Volume

42

Issue

5

Pages

882 - 911

Citation

YEANDLE, P., 2014. ‘Heroes into zeroes'? The politics of (not) teaching England's imperial past. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 42(5), pp. 882-911.

Publisher

© Taylor & Francis

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History on 09 Oct 2014, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2014.959718

ISSN

0308-6534

eISSN

1743-9329

Language

  • en

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC