A proposed new history syllabus for South Africa is causing some of the usual palpitations. While I’m sure it has its merits, I can’t help feeling that learning about the past is a little bit pointless if we don’t first get some very important things right in the here and now.
To be clear, I’m a big fan of history, even if it is, in the words of Rudge from The History Boys, “just one f***ing thing after another”.
Reading about the lives and times of other people, even the grimmest lives and the worst times, can provide all sorts of perspectives and consolations: you cannot put down a history of the 13th century in Europe, for example, and still believe the popular modern complaint that things have never been worse. Compared to that hell on earth, this world is a paradise.
Still, I have to concede that quite a lot nonsensical claims are made about history. For example, the often-misquoted thing about how those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. After all, if history has taught us anything it’s that nobody has ever learnt anything from history, which makes this warning very silly. You might as well warn people that if they don’t levitate properly they’re doomed to stay beholden to the laws of gravity.
Of course, we could learn from history if we wanted to. The information is all there, neatly laid out by historians — fascism ends bloodily, oligarchs and rapists and media barons are generally not good custodians of society, experts are useful — but for some reason we’ve made a collective decision to go with feelings over facts, or, if we’re feeling very intellectual, to watch two minutes of AI slop manufactured in a warehouse in Serbia.
All of which brings me back to the proposed history syllabus here at home, and my creeping suspicion that it is almost entirely pointless to teach children anything about history if you’re not simultaneously equipping them to understand and push back against the onslaught that’s coming at them in their online existence.
How is it that such gigantic educational access has seen the meteoric rise of holocaust denial or the downplaying of slavery or colonialism or apartheid?
By all means, let’s have a less Eurocentric view of things. Yes, let’s pull back from received knowledge and poke it from new and different angles. But with all due respect to our education experts, unless you’re simultaneously teaching children that they are the targets of extremely bad people using extremely sophisticated mind-altering technologies, or at least about how social media is being used to undermine trust in democracy, or that historical facts are currently being reinvented by far-right populists paid by Russian and Western oligarchs, backed by the sociopaths who own Big Tech and slavishly lapped up by religious fanatics who want to trigger the End Times, you are wasting your breath.
If you think I’m exaggerating, just ask yourself this: why, at a moment when more people have received a formal education than at any time in history, and every single person with a phone can access almost all human knowledge, are so many historical facts being denied? How is it that such gigantic educational access has seen the meteoric rise of holocaust denial or the downplaying of slavery or colonialism or apartheid?
The answer is simple. Modernity and its corresponding history are under attack because modernity, with all its knowledge and expertise and liberalism, is antithetical to the medieval aims of the 0.1% who now rule us.
And until educators foreground that, every other fact they teach can and will be overwhelmed by the manufactured feelings pumped into children’s eyeballs every single day.
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