Listening to the voices of the past: the importance of polyvocality in school history curricula
By Will Banks
Word processors have been pummelled, ink stores plundered, and voice boxes obliterated in the debate over history curricula, and history itself, in recent times. This current of opinion has been supercharged over past weeks by an increasing recognition of the urgent necessity to understand and eliminate systemic racism. Toppled statues have exposed the deadly limits of public knowledge about the past and led naturally into questions about the history that we are taught in schools.
Current consensus holds that the span of this history is blinkered and biased. Petitions, like the one at my old school,[1] have rightfully demanded the inclusion of black history in new historical syllabi that expose the visceral reality of topics such as the slave trade and colonialism. They echo David Olusoga’s exhortation in the Guardian to implement a fresh curriculum ‘that makes sense of our history, with all its dark chapters included.’
Cris-de-coeur such as these must be heeded.The traditional diet of national history is saturated by triumphant exceptionalism and seasoned with white heroes elevated on shining pedestals. Upon ingestion this is a diet that secretes the twin poisons of ignorance and prejudice. Although recent focus has emphasised the harmful deficiency of black history in schools - studied by no more than 11% of GCSE students - different marginalised voices and subaltern stories of all stripes are therefore also excluded from the menu.[2]
Therein lies a cardinal problem with the study of history in school. Whilst it is vital that the ‘dark chapters’ of marginalised groups be compulsorily illuminated, reality dictates that all but a minute fraction of these chapters will remain unread. Only so much of the vast swathes of history can be tracked down, reduced to a text book, taught, learnt, revised, examined, and remembered – or forgot. Even if the curriculum is diversified, as it must be, the number of topics that can actually be studied by any individual will remain the same, and it is misleading to assume that a change of historical content alone will provide a panacea to prejudice.
Accompanying the imperative to learn about (a necessarily limited number of) diverse things must therefore be a way of thinking which recognises the diversity in everything. A cognitive framework to challenge the pernicious assumption that the loudest voice is the only voice. If such a method could be developed and taught, each one of us would be equipped with the ability to uproot stale narratives, to sympathise with multiple points of view, to understand our complex heritage, and to continually question the world around us. Instead of being fed answers at school, we must be reared with the capacity to question.
But, as the old adage goes, we have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen twice as much as we speak. To question the past requires us to open our ears to, and amplify, those voices lost and ignored amidst the collective cacophony of history. In her recent acclaimed reworking of the Iliad, The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker has demonstrated the startling power of this approach in action.
A foundational text of European literature, the Iliad and its tale of the Trojan War has been rehashed countless times - but has always remained an archetypal male story. Achilles’ anger provides the narrative engine, triggered when Agamemnon robs him of his slave-girl Briseis, a mute victim of masculine braggadocio. ‘War is men’s business’, Hector tells his lachrymose wife, as the Iliad reduces women to objects and mourners, side-lined and silenced.
That is how they remained for two and a half millennia, until Barker had other ideas. Confronting the narrative from Briseis’ perspective, she powerfully counteracts ‘the silence of the girls.’ Barker’s Briseis voices the terrible reality of slavery, transforming Homer’s encampments of glorious warriors into ‘rape camps’, where the human conquests of war are abused and oppressed. While the Greeks derived great glory from sacking cities, Briseis’ laconic confession exposes the enslaved victims’ awful lot: ‘I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and brothers.’ Meanwhile, Barker demonstrates that the romanticism of feminine beauty is nothing more than thinly-veiled objectification, quoting the Trojan ranks as they sing of Helen as ‘the eyes, the hair, the tits, the lips/ that launched a thousand battleships.’ Recognising, in short, that the death of men in battle was not the only or ‘the worst fate’, Briseis concludes that ‘we need a new song.’
It is in this impulse to understand the polyvocality that exists within every historical tale, no matter how old or entrenched it may be, that the value of Barker’s approach lies. Transferring it to the regurgitated narratives of the British history curriculum – including, for example, the ‘glory’ of Empire – will surely reveal voices marginalised by history and power. Anyone who considers history to be the study of univocal stories will do well to reconsider. Dancing upon the thin dividing line between conjecture and conviction, imagination and reality, the study of history deals in multitudes. When we conjure up the past in schools, and in our minds, we must remember this diversity. However quiet, however oppressed they may seem, many voices lurk in the past. We should seek them out, and listen to them.