YEANDLE_HEROES INTO ZEROES_FINAL-2.pdf (199.39 kB)
‘Heroes into zeroes'? The politics of (not) teaching England's imperial past
© 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 HistoryVolume
42Issue
5Pages
882 - 911Citation
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 & FrancisVersion
- 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
2014Notes
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/10.1080/03086534.2014.959718ISSN
0308-6534eISSN
1743-9329Publisher version
Language
- en