Niall Ferguson aims to shake up history curriculum with TV and war games
Controversial academic – invited by the government to revitalise history's popularity in schools – shares his ideas
History should be fun. More TV should be watched in the classroom, and children should learn through playing war games. The Harvard academicNiall Ferguson, who has been invited by the government to revitalise the curriculum, today sets set out a vision of "doing for history what Jamie Oliver has done for school food – make it healthy, and so they actually want to eat it".
In an interview with the Guardian, Ferguson says he hopes to explain in British schools how the nations of western Europe became the world's dominant powers for centuries. But he wants to do so in a way that is stimulating – and does nothing to encourage racist notions that the west is simply best.
Ferguson is to work with the Conservatives to overhaul the subject in schools. The education secretary, Michael Gove – who invited him to design a new curriculum at the Guardian Hay festival this year – has described Ferguson as a "modern Macaulay", the formidable 19th-century war secretary, poet and historian, and in a blog post praised him for approaching "the legacy of the British empire with a balanced mind, accepting its manifold evils, but also ready to acknowledge its progressive side".
Ferguson outlines some of his teaching aids: "We need to use television. The reason I do TV is because I think it's a more accessible way of teaching," he says. "I think we also need to use games."
He has collaborated with a US software developer to create a second world war-based video game for use as a classroom aid, and believes role-playing would help students understand the choices that shaped history.
"History is more like a game than it is a novel, because you don't know, when you're in it, what the end is going to be.
"You can re-run world war two, you can explore strategy, you can come up with a plausible alternative past." It's exciting for young people – my teenage son and his younger brother have been my consultants on this." He admits, however, that his second child, a daughter, has little interest in war games.
Ferguson, who has collaborated with a US software developer to create a world war two-based video game designed for use as a classroom aid, said roleplaying would help students understand the choices that shaped history.
"Make Churchill prime minister in 1938 and you probably end up with a war in 1938. But this individual couldn't be prime minister in 1938, he was totally unpopular," Ferguson said.The game, entitled The War of the World, claims to bring "true grand strategy gaming to World War II". The developer describes it as a chance for players to lead a nation and remake history "from the factories and shipyards on the home front, to epic battles across the globe".
For instance, Ferguson says: "Make Churchill prime minister in 1938 and you probably end up with a war in 1938. But this individual couldn't be prime minister in 1938, he was totally unpopular."
Ferguson would also shake up school trips, rejecting visits to stately homes in favour of places where children were central to history. Battlefields, for example. "What, really, do you get out of going to Windsor Castle? Wouldn't it be better to go and see something where the experience of young people was historically interesting?
"History books make the mistake of teaching about old men, often with a beard. Most of history is made by young people. I'm an old guy by historical standards, at 46. Child soldiers in Africa? There were lots of child soldiers in the Napoleonic wars. It's all about making history young."
Ferguson is concerned by the declining popularity of history in schools – last year about 219,000 pupils took history at GCSE, compared with more than 300,000 who took design and technology. He is keen to restore an overarching narrative, based on western ascendancy.
This, he insists, does not mean he is interested in offering a Eurocentric version. "I'm as interested in the stagnation of China, the underachievement of Mughal India, and why the Ottoman empire – despite its good mathematics and good-ish astronomy – ultimately failed. It just failed to be part of the scientific revolution."
Rejecting criticism that he is an apologist for empire, Ferguson says he dislikes "the notion that the west was superior in some mystical way". Instead, he says, the west's dominance might have been a case of good fortune. He refers to Jared Diamond, whose bestselling book Guns, Germs and Steel argued that Europe's dominance was a result of geographical happenstance; its east-west axis gave it advantages in trading and exchanging innovations, while its mountains and rivers prevented the rise of monolithic autocracies that might have stifled progress.
Ferguson says: "The 'ghost acres' the Caribbean contributed solved the agricultural problem, and having relatively accessible coal mines that didn't blow up. It might just be geographic."
His approach would disarm racists rather than encourage them. "The superiority thing produced the whole pseudo-science of race; teaching this stuff in a scholarly way is about exploding those notions." He has piloted some of his ideas with schoolchildren in London's East End. "They were very open about theorising about it."
The academic claims the empire was based on collusion rather than the dominance of one race over another. "Anybody who thinks empire is based on white people ruling non-white people is mistaken. The Raj was based on collaboration between a tiny British elite and Indian elites."
His teaching style is influenced by the conventions of television. If, for example, he were teaching the Atlantic slave trade, he would "tell the big picture: Brazil was more important than anywhere else [in the slave trade]. Get the big picture, then let's zoom in – what is it like to be a slave, what was it like to be a slave trader? That is the way to make history live – you constantly try to zoom in, the human face on a story, then I think you connect. Try to recapture past truth, try to reconstruct from the remains that the dead leave behind – that is the true aim of the historian, to make the past experience live again."But Ferguson may be in for a bumpy ride: when his role was announced at Hay, he faced criticism from the audience that his project sounded uninterested in the fates of the oppressed.
Fellow historian Antony Beevor was sceptical about Ferguson's notion of teaching history through gaming.
"Playing counterfactual? To be perfectly honest there's more than enough you need to learn about the basic structure before you start playing counterfactual," he said. However, he was supportive of Ferguson's approach to history's grand narrative. "I think the basic idea is right. It's fascinating to study the rise of the west because then you get to study the decline of the west in the course of the next few years. It's fascinating to look at why China and India, with their own very advanced cultures, did not flourish."
Colin Jones, president of the Royal Historical Society, warned that Ferguson risked slipping into a Samuel Huntingdon-style clash of civilisations.
"The history that he has in mind has the risk of making the distinctions between different groups appear more real than they are.
"It homogenises culture, so French culture is characterised by shrugging and having revolutions and the British by being phlegmatic and not having revolutions."
Niall Ferguson controversies
1998 In The Pity of War Ferguson said the first world war was caused as much by Britain's reluctance to accommodate Germany's expansionist ambitions as by German militarism.
2003 In a New York Times article, he called for the long-term US occupation of Iraq.
2004 In Colossus, he suggests the US is "an empire in denial".
2006 The War of the World cites the decline of empires as one reason for the violence of the 20th century
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