[原创] The Wonderfulness of Us 我们的精彩

本帖最后由杜雅萍于 2011-3-30 22:29 编辑

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n06/richard-j-evans/the-wonderfulness-of-us
The Wonderfulness of Us
(the Tory Interpretation of History)
Richard J. Evans
我们的精彩
（保守党人诠释的历史）
理查德 J·埃文斯
‘One of the under-appreciated tragedies of our time has been the sundering of our society from its past,’ Michael Gove announced at the Tory Party Conference last October:
“我们时代令人忽视的悲剧之一便是社会与历史的割裂，”去年十月麦克戈武在保守党会议上如是宣称：
Children are growing up ignorant of one of the most inspiring stories I know – the history of our United Kingdom. Our history has moments of pride, and shame, but unless we fully understand the struggles of the past we will not properly value the liberties of the present. The current approach we have to history denies children the opportunity to hear our island story. Children are given a mix of topics at primary, a cursory run through Henry VIII and Hitler at secondary and many give up the subject at 14, without knowing how the vivid episodes of our past become a connected narrative. Well, this trashing of our past has to stop.
愚见所及最为振奋人心的故事之一即是我们大英帝国的历史，而成长中的孩童却对此茫然无知。我们的历史中闪现过自豪的时刻，耻辱的时刻。但除非充分理解往昔的斗争，我们方能恰如其分的评价今日的自由。现今我们接触历史的方式抹杀了孩子们聆听这个岛国故事的机缘。孩子们在小学被灌输了一团浆糊，在初中则敷衍之从亨利八世至希特勒这段历史跨度的草草涉及。他们中很多人在14岁便放弃了这门课程，无从知晓我们过往历史的生动片段如何串接成连贯叙事。好吧，这种对我们历史的亵渎应该告一段落了。
Simon Schama is the person entrusted with the job of putting things right; Schama, the education secretary announced, ‘has agreed to advise us on how we can put British history at the heart of a revived national curriculum’. (Never mind that he teaches in New York.) Echoing Gove’s enthusiasm for British history in the Guardian a few weeks later, Schama described the story of Henry II and Thomas Becket as ‘riveting’ and ‘thrilling’, and wondered why the execution of Charles I and the rule of Oliver Cromwell, ‘this most thrilling, terrifying epic moment in British history seldom gets classroom time.’
西蒙沙马正是拨乱反正的不二人选；如教育部长所言，沙马“已经同意指引我们如何置英国史于复兴的国民课程之要位”。（无须介怀其人执教于纽约。）与数周后戈武在《卫报》上热情洋溢的宣扬英国史相映成趣，沙马将亨利二世与托马斯·贝克特之间的纠葛描述为“饶有兴味”、“激动人心”。他还纳闷缘何查理一世的处决与奥利弗·克伦威尔的统治，“这最是饶有兴味、激动人心的史诗篇章却在课堂上殊少提及”。
The first task of the curriculum, as Gove and Schama see it, is to foster a sense of British national identity. ‘At a moment fraught with the possibility of social and cultural division,’ Schama writes, we need citizens ‘who grow up with a sense of our shared memory as a living, urgently present body of knowledge’. Or, as the popular historian Dominic Sandbrook puts it, we need to return to ‘the stories that make up a nation’s collective memory, that fire the imagination, that bind the generations’ – ‘Alfred and the cakes’ or ‘Drake and the Armada’. New Labour’s legacy, Gove asserts, has been a history curriculum that favours ‘themes’ over ‘actual content’; what we need is a return to narrative history. ‘Our children,’ Schama says, ‘are being short-changed of the patrimony of their story, which is to say the lineaments of the whole story, for there can be no true history that refuses to span the arc, no coherence without chronology.’
正如戈武与沙马所见，历史课的首要任务便是培养英国人的民族认同感。“在社会与文化分歧几乎必然发生的时刻，”沙马写道，我们需要这样的公民，“他们在成长中将我们的共同记忆视为一个栩栩如生、尤其攸关当今的知识体系的载体”。抑或如通俗史家多米尼克·桑德布鲁克所指，我们需要重拾那些“构建一个民族共同记忆、点燃想象、联结世代的故事”——“阿尔费雷德与蛋糕”或“德雷克与无敌舰队”。戈武断言，工党的新遗产便是“主题旨趣”先于“实际内容”的历史课程；而我们需要的则是对叙事历史的回归。“我们的后代，”沙马声称，“在继承历史遗产的过程中遭到了克扣。换句话说他们接触的只是整个历史的豹之一斑，盖因无全局窥视则无信史，无年代梳爬则无绵延。”
The current curriculum, its critics say, focuses too much on transmitting skills and not enough on teaching facts. The running here has been made by a self-appointed pressure group calling itself Better History, formed in 2006 to advise the Conservative shadow education team. The group, which is led by Seán Lang, a former schoolteacher, seems to have supplied Gove with many of his ideas – chief among them the notion that what most schoolchildren want from history is ‘to find out what happened’. According to the Sunday Times, Gove has said that ‘he wants school history teaching to place far more emphasis on factual knowledge, including the lives of kings and queens.’
批评家称现今的课程过多聚焦于传道而疏于求实。而这场运动是由一个2006年成立，自封为更好的历史的压力团体发起的，该团体旨在为保守党影子教育团队提供咨询参谋。看起来该团体的领袖，前教师郎西恩博士兜售了很多他的想法给戈武——其中主要的想法便是大多数学生想通过历史课程探知“已经发生了什么”。根据《星期日泰晤士报》，戈武说“他希望历史教学能更多着眼于包括国王与王后生平在内的事实知识。”
None of these arguments has so far met with any serious opposition. Not one professional historian employed by a British university has spoken out either in favour of these ideas or against them. The Labour Party has remained silent.
目前为止这些观点均未遭受强烈反对。尚无任何一位受聘于英国大学的专业史家公开赞成或反驳。工党也仍然保持沉默。
The existing national history curriculum, taking children up to the age of 14, aims to give them a grasp of chronology, a ‘knowledge and understanding of events, people and changes in the past’, basic principles of historical interpretation and inquiry, and elementary skills of communication, ‘developed through teaching the content relating to local, national, European and world history’. Study of a variety of topics is intended to assist children’s ‘spiritual development, through helping pupils to appreciate the achievements of past societies, and to understand the motivation of individuals who made sacrifices for a particular cause’. Children have to learn about the social, cultural, religious and ethnic diversity of the societies they study, which include the Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings, two later periods of British history, Ancient Greece and its influence, and one non-European society selected from among Ancient Egypt, Sumer, the Assyrian Empire, the Indus Valley, the Maya, Benin or the Aztecs.
There seems to be plenty of factual content in all this, and plenty of kings and queens too. The examples the curriculum provides for teaching history to children from seven to 11 make mention of (by my count) 36 significant individuals, ranging from Boudicca and Caractacus to Livingstone and Brunel. From 11 to 14, children study the whole sweep of British history from 1066 to 1900 in three courses. These include ‘the development of the monarchy, and significant events and characteristic features of the lives of people living throughout the British Isles’ as well as, for the later period, the history of Parliament and its relation to the people. More than two dozen individuals are mentioned, including Henry II and Becket, Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, Charles II and William III, Nelson and Wellington, Gladstone and Disraeli. In addition to the three British courses, students have to take one period of European history before 1914, and two world history courses, one involving an ancient society such as China or Japan, the other focusing on the world since 1900 (names here include Hitler and Churchill, and possible topics range from the Russian Revolution to European decolonisation).
现行的面向14岁以下学童的国民历史课程致力于“通过传授地方、国家、欧洲以及世界历史的相关内容”使其初登年代学的堂奥，初步掌握历史学诠释与质疑的基本原则及沟通交流的基本技巧。其中年代学是一种“对以往事件、人物、变革的了解与理解”的学问。各种选题的研究旨在“通过欣赏以往社会的成就，理解为特殊原因作出牺牲的个体动机”来帮助学生实现“心灵上的升华”。学生必须学习族群间的社会、文化、宗教、种族多样性。这些学习内容包括罗马人，盎格鲁-撒克逊人，维京人，其后两段英国史，古希腊历史及其影响，以及从古埃及、苏美尔、亚述帝国、印度河流域、玛雅、贝宁或者阿兹特克中选出的一个非欧洲文明。看起来其中似乎有足够的事实知识，也有不虞匮乏的国王与王后们。课程中供以7至11岁孩童历史教学的例子涉及了（据我统计）从布迪卡、卡拉克塔克斯到利文斯顿、布鲁内尔的36位重要人物。11至14岁的学生将在三门课程中概览从1066年到1900年的英国史。这些内容包括“王朝发展、重大事件及整个英伦三岛史上民众的典型特征”，以及其后的议会历史及其对国家的影响。包括亨利二世与贝克特，查理一世与奥利弗·克伦威尔，查理二世与威廉三世，纳尔逊与威灵顿，格莱斯通与迪斯雷利在内的超过24位历史人物辉映其中。在这三门英国史课程之外，学生必须选修一门1914年前的欧洲史课程，两门世界史课程，有关诸如中国或日本这样的一个古文明的课程，以及其他一些关注1900年起世界史的课程（其中涉及的人物包括希特勒与丘吉尔，课题范围很有可能涵盖从俄国革命至欧洲去殖民化）。

So far, so factual, and indeed, the body responsible for overseeing the curriculum requires 70 per cent of assessment to be on content and only 30 per cent on skills. The best students will learn crucial skills of analysis, argument and presentation, but most will fall short of this: the curriculum lists eight levels of attainment altogether. By the time they finish history as a compulsory subject, 14-year-olds will have studied the entire course of British history and learned about a whole variety of key personalities and institutions in it, as well as learning to appreciate the achievements of a number of European and non-European civilisations.
事实上目前为止毋庸讳言，监督这些课程的团体需要百分之七十内容与百分之三十技巧上的评估。最好的学生将学习分析、论证与报告的关键技巧，但大部分学生对此望尘莫及：课程总共列出了八个造诣等级。当学生们在14岁时将历史课程作为必修课修习完时，他们已经学习了整个英国史并了解了其中相当数量的关键人物与制度，同时欣赏到了许多欧洲与非欧洲文明的成就。
Why Gove and his allies should think that facts and names play no part in all this is a mystery. His bizarrely counterfactual complaint that the only names mentioned in the current curriculum are the abolitionists William Wilberforce and Olaudah Equiano was too much even for the people leading the charge against it: Better History’s Seán Lang pointed out that ‘no one would say that because only two names are in the official documentation these are the only two that people teach about.’ Nor is it clear why Gove thinks that the curriculum as it currently exists is a vehicle for the ‘trashing of our past’ when it covers so much of it in such detail. The real problem is not with the curriculum’s content, but with the schools’ failure to deliver it, as history is taught all too frequently as part of ‘humanities’ or ‘general studies’ by teachers with no training in the subject, and key parts of it get neglected in the drive to boost literacy and numeracy rates by schools keen to climb up the league tables.
为何戈武及其同道认为事实与人名在此无足轻重还不得而解。他对于现行课程中仅提到废奴主义者威廉·威伯福斯及阿罗德·爱克伊诺的名字的不满违背事实到荒诞的地步，即便在首先对此发难的人士眼中看来也太过分了：更好的历史的郎西恩指出“没人会因为官方文档上仅有两个名字而声称被教授的只有这两个名字。”当现行的历史课程涵盖了如此多的细节，戈武却为何依旧称其为“对我们历史的亵渎”的手段，这同样令人费解。真正的问题所在并非课程内容，而是学校无力教授这样的课程。因为历史课程作为“人文学科”或“通识课程”的部分而被未受培训不谙此道的老师太多传授。在学校热衷于爬高排名而推动的读写及算数教学评级热潮中，历史课程的核心部分被忽视了。
Perhaps – though he doesn’t say so – Gove’s remarks are meant to apply to the next stage of schooling, ending with the GCSE exam at the age of 15 or 16. Here history is no longer compulsory, but for the third or so of children who decide to take it, there is a change of direction. Out goes British history, out goes the long sweep of the centuries, out go social, economic and cultural history. Students take Modern World History, which is emphatically focused on politics and international relations (Germany 1918-39, Russia/USSR 1905-41, USA 1919-41, Vietnam 1954-75, Northern Ireland 1965-85), or topics from the Schools History Project, such as Medicine through Time or the American West. In this phase there is a continuing focus on ‘education for citizenship’, as the exam boards put it.
尽管没有明说，戈武的评论很可能针对的是下一阶段，即在15或16岁结束中学普通水平考试后的学习。这个时候历史课将不再是必修课，但对于高中或相应阶段愿意选修的学生而言，这是一种变化导向。离开了英国史，离开了数个世纪的概览，离开了社会、经济、文化史，学生将转而选修着力关注政治与外交（德国1918-39，俄国/苏联1905-41，美国1919-41，越南1954-75，北爱尔兰1965-85）的现代世界史，或者诸如医学大事年表或美国西部开发这样来自学校的历史课题项目。如考试委员会所提出，在这个阶段将持续聚焦于“公民教育”。

In the final stage of school education, ending with A level, the curriculum is effectively a more sophisticated version of the GCSE syllabus. A-level history has gone through a number of changes in recent years. From 2000, candidates had to take six courses, one of them drawn from British history – a syllabus the Conservatives complained about. But wide dissatisfaction with its superficiality led to a further reform in 2008, which reduced the number of courses required to four, at least one of which has to be in British history, the others in British, European or world history, meaning that at least a quarter of teaching time is spent on Britain. Nevertheless, critics, far from being silenced by these reforms, have become even more vocal in demanding a still greater focus on this country.
实际上在以中学高级水平考试结束的学校教育的最后阶段，历史课程比中学普通水平考试教学大纲所要求的更为复杂了。近年来中学高级水平考试的历史课程经历了许多改革。从2000年起，投考者必须选修六门课程，其中之一选自英国史——这个大纲也正是保守党人所抱怨的。而由于该大纲的浅薄而引起的广泛不满导致了2008年更进一步的改革。这使得要求的课程数量减至四门，其中至少一门必须为英国史范畴，其他为英国、欧洲或世界史范畴。这意味着至少四分之一的历史课程教学实践花在了英国史上。然而批评家远未因这些改革而沉默，他们反而变本加厉呼吁对于本国历史的进一步关注。
The national curriculum for the primary years has made brilliant use of people’s growing interest in the history of everyday life, from Viking longships to the Home Front during the Second World War. What’s taught at more advanced levels is narrower and more problematical. Yet here it reflects not just the choices made by teachers and schools, but also the preferences of students themselves, who from the age of 14 have a good deal of freedom to choose what to study. At A level, around 40 per cent choose Hitler and the Nazis; the next most popular topic is Stalin. As far as British history is concerned, a large proportion opt for the Tudors and Stuarts. In world history, the Cold War is popular, but topics in modern American history also attract a good many. And modern China’s appeal is growing fast. Is this wrong?
Certainly, it’s wrong for students to be able to repeat the same topics at GCSE and A level. And the time-frame should be longer: not just modern world history but remoter periods too. Yet this doesn’t mean that Nazi Germany should be ditched altogether. It appeals to teenagers for the same reasons that it appeals to adults: the collapse of German democracy in the early 1930s, the misery of the Depression, the rise of Hitler, the racism, sexism and criminality of the Nazi regime, the Holocaust, the drive to war – all of this raises critical questions of politics, morality and human behaviour in a dramatic form that has no parallel in British history. Stalin, Mao and other dictators pose similar challenges to the adolescent mind. The nearest thing British history has to offer in comparison is Henry VIII (‘England’s Stalin’, as the Tudor historian W.G. Hoskins once called him), but otherwise to teenagers it all seems relatively dull.初等教育年代的国民历史课程巧妙利用了人们对于日常生活中遇到的历史渐增的兴趣。这些历史涉及从维京长船到二战期间的国土防线。年级越高，教授的内容越为狭隘与成疑。而这种现象所反映的不仅仅是学校与老师所做的选择，同时也反映了学生们自身的偏好。从14岁起他们对于所学内容便有了很大的自主权。在中学高级水平考试中，大约百分之四十的学生选择了希特勒与纳粹；其次热门的选题为斯大林。就英国史而言，很大比例的选择集中在都铎与斯图亚特王朝。世界史方面，冷战广受欢迎，而现代美国史话题也吸引了很多人。另外现代中国史的吸引力也在激增。这些有问题吗？当然，让学生们能重复选择在中学普通与高级水平考试中已选过的相同话题实为不妥。而且时限也应放宽：不仅仅是现代世界史，更久远些的历史也应允许。而这并不意味着纳粹德国将打包束之高阁。正如它吸引成年人那样，青少年也同样趋之若鹜：1930年代早期德国民主制度的崩溃，大萧条的苦难，希特勒的上台，种族主义，纳粹政权的性别歧视与罪行，大屠杀，以及通往战争之路——所有的这些以一种英国史绝无其俦的戏剧方式提出了政治、伦理、人类行为学的关键问题。斯大林，毛泽东，以及其他独裁者对青少年的心灵冲击不遑多让之于成年人。英国史中最可供一较长短的独裁者要数亨利八世了（都铎史家W.G.霍斯金斯曾称其为“英格兰斯大林”）。而此外的英国史对青少年而言似乎相对乏趣可陈。
The choice of Schama to serve as the government’s chief adviser largely derives from his successful multi-part television history of Britain, broadcast 11 years ago. It presented history as narrative, in a way brilliantly suited to the medium. But what makes good TV doesn’t necessarily make for good teaching. A return to narrative in the classroom – to passive consumption instead of active critical engagement – is more likely to be a recipe for boredom and disaffection. Aware of the possibility that some might object to his overwhelming focus on British history, Schama has declared that ‘history’s long look at our national make-up’ is ‘not an insular proposal’ because it involves studying ‘the way Britain has conducted itself in the world beyond the shores of Albion’ and asking how Americanised or European British national identity is. But that still doesn’t shift Britain from the centre of the picture.
沙马之所以选择担任政府的主要参谋很大程度上要追溯到其在11年前播出的英国史电视纪录片中成功分任多个角色。该片以叙事的方式展现历史，对于媒体而言这是种很讨巧的方式。然而做纪录片得心应手不代表必然能教课左右逢源。在课堂上对于叙事的回归——以消极被动的接受替代积极深入的参与——更像是无聊与厌倦的催化剂。意识到有人可能会反对他对于英国史一边倒的聚焦，沙马声称“对于我们民族结构的长远历史观察”并非“一种褊狭的提议”，因为其中包含了对“英国在阿尔比恩（译者注：即英格兰古称）的海岸线之外的世界自我运作的方式”的研究，也追问了英国的民族认同感美国化或欧洲化到何种程度。但这依然不会动摇英国在沙马眼中的舞台中央位置。
Gove, Schama and other advocates of the new Britain-centred narrative are all essentially proponents of the Whig interpretation of history, a theory exploded by professional historians more than half a century ago under the influence of Herbert Butterfield. Gove’s vision of ‘our island story’ is about examining the ‘struggles of the past’ to see how they brought about ‘the liberties of the present’. Similarly, Schama wants younger generations to ‘pass on the memory of our disputatious liberty’ to their descendants.
戈武，沙马以及其他新英国中心论的拥趸本质上说都是辉格党（译者注：即保守党前身）派史观的支持者。半个多世纪前，职业史家在赫伯特·巴特菲尔德的影响下抛出了这种史观。戈武的“我们岛国历史”的观点正是要通过检视“以往的斗争”来探知这些斗争如何产生“今日的自由”。类似地，沙马希望年轻一代能“传承关于我们引发争论的自由的记忆”给他们的后代。
The demand, really, is for a celebratory history: how otherwise could it serve as the cement of national identity? Sample exam questions proposed by the Better History group for the new curriculum have included: ‘Why did Nelson and Wellington become national heroes?’; ‘What liberties did English people enjoy by the end of the 17th century that they hadn’t had at the start?’; and ‘How dangerous was the Spanish Armada?’ – the examinee, it’s presumed, isn’t going to answer from the point of view of the Spanish. Schama has rejected the claim that such a curriculum would be a vehicle of ‘national self-congratulation’; British history, he says, should be taught not as ‘the uncritical genealogy of the Wonderfulness of Us’ but in all its ‘rich and rowdy discord’ in order to achieve ‘an understanding of the identity of us’. But ‘rich and rowdy discord’ still ends up with winners and losers, and if we have a single national identity, then it will be that of the winners.
这样的要求实际上是在呼唤一种满是庆祝的历史：否则它如何能成为民族认同感的基石？更好的历史团体为新课程设计的考试样题包括如下：“为何纳尔逊与威灵顿成为民族英雄？”；“到17世纪末为止，英国人享受到了哪些他们起初未得的自由？”以及“西班牙的无敌舰队有多危险？”——这些试题设定的应试者将不会从西班牙的视角来答题。沙马驳斥了此类课程将成为“民族自满感”的温床的言论；他认为英国史不应被教授为“不加批评的体现我们的精彩的族谱”，而应通过其“丰富且喧闹的冲突”来实现“一种对于我们身份认同感的理解”。然后“丰富且喧闹的冲突”终将以胜败者告终，如果我们只允许拥有一种民族认同感，无疑将贴上胜者的标签。
What lies at the root of all this is a profound division of opinion over what constitutes, or should constitute, national identity. The present curriculum for children from five to 14 offers an image of Britishness that pays at least some attention to the multiethnic composition of British society. Its critics want to replace this with a narrowly nationalistic identity built on myths about the ‘British’ past, as if there was such a thing before the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707 – or, indeed, as many Scots (or for that matter Welsh) would argue, after it. It makes far more sense to teach British children of South Asian or Afro-Caribbean background about the parts of the world where their families originated – the history of the Mughal Empire, or of Benin or Oyo, for example – than to teach them about Alfred and the cakes or Drake and the Armada.
所有这些问题的根源是一种意义深远的关于民族认同感由何组成或者应该由何组成的意见分歧。现行的面向5至14岁孩子的历史课程至少提供了一些体现英国社会多民族特性的剪影。对于这些特性，课程的批评家们希望取而代之以一种构建于“英国”过往的神话的基础之上的狭隘民族身份认同感。在他们口中，似乎英国在1707年英格兰与苏格兰之间签订合并法之前，或者确如许多苏格兰人（就此而言或为威尔士人）所主张的那样是在之后，便早已有了此种认同感。相较之教授英国的南亚裔或加勒比裔学生关于阿尔弗雷度与蛋糕或德雷克与无敌舰队之类掌故而言，显然更有意义的是教授他们家族起源之地的历史——比如说莫卧儿帝国，或贝宁、奥约帝国的历史。
Similarly, the present curriculum takes due account of the undeniable fact (undeniable to everyone apart from the Europhobes in the Tory Party) that Britain is part of Europe and, beyond that, is connected to the rest of the world in an age of globalisation. Undergraduates I’ve spoken to would like less Hitler and Stalin on the curriculum, but they don’t want them to be replaced by British history: they want more world history. ‘Everyone’s talking about the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya,’ one of them said to me recently, ‘but we can’t talk sensibly about them because we don’t know anything about their history: it’s embarrassing.’ National identity is a complex, many-layered thing, and to treat it as if it were simply and exclusively the culmination of a centuries-long march of events within the narrow confines of the British Isles is a radically ignorant form of dumbing down.
类似地，现行的历史课程恰如其分的采纳了英国史欧洲的一部分，在全球化的时代更与世界其余地区相联系这样一个不可否认（保守党的恐欧党人除外）的观点。我课堂中的大学生们相对并不喜欢课程中的希特勒与斯大林，但他们并不会因此希望代之以英国史：他们期盼更多的世界史。“每个人都在谈论发生在突尼西亚、埃及、利比亚的革命，”最近我的一位学生告诉我，“但我们无法理智的剖析这些话题，因为我们对他们的历史一无所知：这太尴尬了。”民族认同感是一种复杂，多层的事物，若简单武断地将之视为岛国狭窄边疆内百年征途的顶点，这种方式根本上来说就显得“没有最笨，只有更笨”了。
Even more calamitous is the prospect of history teaching in the schools confining itself to the transmission and regurgitation of ‘facts’. According to the critics, facts have all but disappeared from the classroom, and the inclusion in the curriculum of exercises in source-criticism are useless. Yet source-criticism teaches students not to accept passively every fact and argument they are presented with. When I started teaching history at university in the 1970s, many first-year students were incapable of critical reading of this kind. (I ran into trouble with one class when I began to point out the problems in the arguments put forward by one of the books I had set them to read. ‘Why did you make us read it,’ one of them complained, ‘if you don’t agree with it?’) Better history teaching in schools changed all that, but now Gove wants to abandon these skills all over again. Better History declares that ‘it is by the acquisition and use of historical knowledge that historians are primarily judged’ – but in reality that only makes a Mastermind contestant.
而学校的历史教学若局限于自身“事实知识”传递与回流的窠臼，则其前景将更显黯淡。根据批评家所言，事实知识唯独在课堂中缺席，而课程中源本批判考试所涉及的事实知识则几无价值。而源本批判课还教导学生不要被动接受每个遇到的事实与论点。当我在1970年代开始执教大学历史时，许多一年级学生对于这类批判阅读无能为力。（我曾遇到过困难，有一次当我指出我预先指定学生阅读的参考书中的问题时他们中有人抱怨道，“如果你不同意这本书的观点，为什么要让我们读呢？”）更好的历史团体的学校教学改变了这一切，但现在戈武想重新丢弃这些方法。更好的历史团体声称“评价历史学家的主要标准便是他对历史知识的获取与利用”——但现实中这只会使得足智多谋者胜出。
It is possible to teach actual skills only if history is taught in depth, and that means a focus on a limited number of specialised topics. Of course, students need to know at least in outline the longer-term context of what they study. But if you make this context the core element in the curriculum, you are sacrificing depth for breadth, and you will end up with a superficial gallop through the centuries. At Oxford, when I was an undergraduate, we all nominally studied English history from the Anglo-Saxons to the 20th century, from Alfred the Great to Winston Churchill, or to put it in somewhat less heroic terms, Ethelred the Unready to Neville Chamberlain (we didn’t bother in those days with the Welsh or the Scots). But in practice, if we were going to learn how to do any thinking of our own, we had time only to study discrete and often unrelated topics: the rise of the gentry and their role in the outbreak of the English Civil War (not the course of events in the 1640s), the role of party in the time of Queen Anne (not the chronology of her reign), the reasons for the failure of the 1848 Revolutions (not the actual course of the revolutions).
只要历史教学有足够深度，实用技巧的传授也并非遥不可及。而这意味着可以仅聚焦于有限数量的特定话题。当然，学生至少需要了解他们要长期学习的内容的大致纲要。但如果你将所有这些内容作为课程的核心，那么你是在为了课程的广度牺牲其深度，并且你只会走马观花的扫过这几个世纪的历史。当我还在牛津大学求学时，名义上我们都要学习从盎格鲁-撒克逊跨至20世纪，从阿尔弗雷德大王跨至温斯顿·丘吉尔，或者换个不那么英雄主义的说法，从邋遢王艾思尔莱二世跨至内维尔·张伯伦（当时我们就此与威尔士人与苏格兰人并无分歧）的英国史。但在实践中，每当我们想学习如何自己思考时，我们总是耗时在往往无关的琐事与枝蔓上：乡绅阶级的崛起与他们在英国内战中扮演的角色（而非1640年代的那些重要事件），政党在安妮女王时期的作用（而非女王的年表），1848年革命失败的原因（而非革命的确切过程）。
History is by its nature a critical, sceptical discipline. Historians commonly see one of their main tasks as puncturing myths, demolishing orthodoxies and exposing politically motivated narratives that advance spurious claims to objectivity. Schama advocates the return of ‘storytelling in the classroom’ as the ‘necessary condition’ of debate and analysis. He is confident that a narrative approach doesn’t have to rule out analysis, since distinctions can be made ‘between just and unjust conflicts’ and students can develop ‘analytical knowledge of the nature of power’. But simply telling children that British history has been full of conflict doesn’t tell them anything about the distortions of power; what they need to learn is scepticism about the narratives presented by historians, including of course Schama’s own account of British history.
历史学就其本质而言是一门批判与怀疑的学科。历史学家常常视刺穿神话、推翻定论及揭露因政治动机而罔顾事实的煽动性叙事为一己重任。沙马主张“历史课堂内说书式叙事”的回归为争论与分析的“必要条件”。他有信心认为叙事方法不必排除分析，因为“正确与错误的争论”自有其区别且学生可以从中掌握“关于国家本质的分析性知识”。但简单的告知学生英国史中充斥着争论并不能使他们了解任何关于国家的曲解。他们需要学习的是一种对于历史学家叙事的怀疑论。当然在这些叙事中沙马自己关于英国史的解读也不能例外。
Better History has proposed that students should be tested on how they construct a narrative. But in the time since it advanced this proposal it has done nothing to flesh it out. Perhaps it should have paid more attention to Sellar and Yeatman’s imperishable 1066 and All That, with its spoof exam questions: ‘Arrange in this order: (a) Henry I; (b) Henry II; (c) Henry III. Do not attempt to answer more than once.’ More than a century ago Lord Acton advised his students at Cambridge to ‘study problems, not periods’. Some years ago, Eric Hobsbawm, referring to two history textbooks that presented old-fashioned narratives without interpretation, noted that they made ‘the systematic consideration’ of historical problems ‘virtually impossible’. Gove, Schama and their allies are confusing history with memory. History is a critical academic discipline whose aims include precisely the interrogation of memory and the myths it generates. It really does matter to historians that there isn’t any evidence that Alfred burned the cakes, or that Nelson and Wellington weren’t national heroes to everyone. For those in power, this makes history as a discipline not only useless but dangerous too.
更好的历史团体曾提议应当测试学生如何形成他们自己对于历史的叙事。但从提出这个建议以来，该团体一度对其付诸实践无所作为。也许他们该花更多精力关注塞勒与耶曼的不朽名著《诸如1066》上的讽刺试题：“按此排序：（a）亨利一世；（b）亨利二世；（a）亨利三世。不要试图多次答题。”一个多世纪前阿克顿勋爵建议他在剑桥的学生“研究问题，而非年代。”多年之后，艾瑞克·霍布斯保姆谈及两本代表老派无甚演绎的叙事史观的课本，他说它们试图对历史问题作“系统的考量”，而这“实际上不可能”。戈武，沙马以及他们的同盟者正在用记忆混淆历史。历史恰恰是一门批判性的学术学科，其目的正包括对于其从中发轫的记忆作精确的问讯。对大众而言不存在任何阿尔弗雷德烧了蛋糕或纳尔逊与威灵顿不是民族英雄的证据，这才确实是关系到历史学家的话题。对于那些掌权者而言，这样的历史作为一门学科不仅是无用的，同时也是危险的。

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