Reading and writing fill in the blanks
What history books tell us about the past is not everything that happened, but what historians have . They cannot put in everything: choices to be made. Choices must similarly be made about which aspects of the past should be formally taught to the next generation in the shape of school history lessons. So, for example, when a national school curriculum for England and Wales was first discussed at the end of the 1980s, the history curriculum was the subject of considerable public and media . Politicians argued about it; people wrote letters to the press about it; the Prime Minister of the time, Margaret Thatcher, in the debate. Let us think about the question of content. There were two main camps on the issue – those who thought the history of Britain should take of place, and those who favoured what was referred to as ‘world history’.