history Archives - annabel smith

What motivates young people to learn?

Fun? Imagination? Fear of the future without a college education?
If you ask them, they will tell you that you can teach them anything if you make it matter to them.

The easiest way is to make it about them. Nearly 20 years ago, when I took over the History Department of a Nairobi School, the most successful thing I did was to introduce a family tree project.

I had Kikuyu students in my classroom, and Luo and Kalenjin and several born in Britain as well as five or six born in Nairobi but with parents or grandparents born in the Indian Subcontinent. Computers barely existed, so all information was gathered by talking to family members, either in person or on the phone, waiting for visits or even writing letters. Everyone had to keep notes and start drawing their tree – and as they grew, the trees became collages, with stories and even artefacts stuck on: a coin, a bead, a piece of cloth, a photograph.

My students held court, sharing their research and findings, feeling the thrill of an attentive audience. They were the experts on their own lives, and they loved it (a lot more than Napoleon, who they’d done the previous term).

Of course you can’t design thirteen or fourteen years of curriculum around ‘Me’ – at least not without creating a generation of narcissistic monsters. But taking time to relate distant or abstract material to those in the room, and finding ways to engage heart and emotions as well as head, makes excellent educational sense.

This is one area where education can learn from the non-profit sector which has long understood that you engage people by creating proximity. It’s hard to care about people of whom we know nothing in a faraway country; the trick is to tell stories to bring them closer, to show the similarities between their lives and ours, to help us understand how it might feel to be them. To make it more real.

Carl Jung wrote that people cannot stand too much reality, but I disagree: in my experience, teenagers gobble it up. It brings out the best in them, differentiating them as individuals with both abilities and passions.

2 years ago Mayor of London Boris Johnson and I both hit on the idea of a London Curriculum (although I’m pretty sure I thought of it first.) I based mine on an experimental class I’d taught a few years before in the US that used our local city as a classroom. Part of my inspiration also came from CITYTerm, a brilliant programme run out of the Masters School, which uses New York City as a classroom and laboratory. In both cases the approach was project-based and relied on collaboration with experts from the city – architects, engineers, poets, social workers and entrepreneurs.

It can come as something of a shock to learn what’s on your doorstep: the things that are closest to us exert huge influence, yet we seldom look at them carefully, let alone understand them.

The nearly 4 million people who have seen Chimamanda Adichie’s TED Talk on the danger of a single story will also have heard her descriptions of growing up on a Nigerian university campus reading British and American children’s books. She loved those books, but because of them, the first stories she wrote featured characters with white skin and blue eyes, who played in the snow and ate apples. Only later did she realise that people who looked and thought like her could be in books too.

In January I met Deborah Ahenkorah, Ghanaian Echoing Green Fellow and founder of the Golden Baobab Prize for African literature for children and young adults. She created the prize because

“the tremendous lack of good quality African children’s literature dawned on me. A continent so large and richly diverse has tons of wonderful stories to share with young people everywhere: where were these stories?”

Last year they had more than 400 entries from 25 African countries. They also run workshops for writers and illustrators, and have plans to establish distribution channels across the continent to ensure that African books reach African children in their schools and, at last, in their own homes.

And it’s not just African children on the continent who need stories about themselves. There are millions of children of African heritage in the diaspora who never read stories that connect them with their own identities either. For stories cross continents too. Last month in Ghana I visited the slave castles of the Gold Coast and saw the door of no return through which millions of men, women and children left, many of whom ended their days in Jamaica. With over 200,000 Ghanaians and 250,000 Jamaicans in London, shouldn’t these stories be told in British schools too?

Who else is in our classrooms? Are we telling their stories?

Growing up is an identity project, and if we want to engage young people, we need to show them that school is the place to learn about the things they care about. We do that best by nurturing schools’ most valuable secret weapons – infectiously enthusiastic teachers. They are an endangered species now, killed by the growing exam culture and an obsession with cookie-cutter, lockstep learning, but they are still there. Let’s hope that those who have been taught by them will realise that it is loving learning that matters most, and the freedom to explore who you are and how you will take your place in the world.

School trips are often memorable for the wrong reasons, but sometimes chance encounters bring lessons that could never be learned in a classroom.

History is full of wars. Sometimes I felt that I dispatched thousands to their deaths before break, then thousands more after lunch. I used poetry, photographs, music and diaries to try to bring soldiers to life, but as my students continued to write sentences such as “unfortunately 6 million people died” I knew I’d failed.

I had no experience of war, but I had studied many. The first World War always seemed different. My grandfather fought first to last but never spoke of it, instead bringing home a puppy from one of the smashed French farms, a tiny creature forced to stand symbol for all that could not be said. My father used to tell me about walking past the Star and Garter Home in Richmond as a boy, and seeing the old soldiers, many of them in their twenties and thirties, staring and gently rocking.

When my father died, it was the First World War I couldn’t teach: weeks later I was unable to speak of the futile deaths and wasted lives without facing the window, tears running down my face. There was something utter about the loss of humanity that allowed that pointless war to continue. I am not saying that it was a worse war than the Second World War, or any subsequent or previous wars, but for me, blessed with the infinite privilege of not having lived through one in my country, it was the war that taught me about war.

In fact it was a school trip to the war graves that taught me what even the best book could not, and taught my students too.

July, skylarks, a perfect, timeless summer day. We set off from London early, by bus and channel tunnel, my mind on lunches, lists and toilets. We took all of Year 11 who had ‘done’ the war, but were mostly excited by a day off school. Our first stop was the cemetery at Tyne Cot, Belgium, close to where the three battles of Ypres had been fought.

The visitor centre was yet to be built, so once everyone was off the bus I was suddenly able to take in my surroundings: more than 10,000 identical white headstones, row on row, each planted with a single rose, framed by manicured grass and an unbroken blue sky. It was impossibly beautiful.

My students walked round solemnly, reading inscriptions – thousands ‘known only to God’ – and talking in whispers. The air was still and heavy; there was something of church about it.

Suddenly a bus pulled up and tens of tiny Belgian children tumbled out and started zooming around across the grass. They shouted and screamed, ran around, pushed one another, and pretended to be airplanes. My students were horrified. They rushed to me, begging me to do something – I didn’t need to be told twice! I too was appalled that this sacred place had been so violated and was ready to give the children’s teachers a piece of my mind.

Before I had the chance they approached, smiling, and said, in perfect English: “We hope you will understand: these children live in the villages and we bring them here so they aren’t afraid of all the graves and dead people.

So many of the men buried here were so young that they died before they were married; we think they would like to hear the children’s voices.”

Later in the day we saw the small piles in the corners of the fields where the farmers place the unexploded ordinance they still turn up. Here, where Passchendaele’s mud devoured more men than both sides’ bullets, bodies still sometimes rise to the surface.

The German cemeteries tell their own story. No flowers, few individual gravestones, dark, shady trees providing cover. How much courage it must have taken to visit your son or husband buried deep in enemy soil.

There may be no more important work a teacher can do than help their students understand the reality of war, whether by letting those with first hand experience tell their stories, or by going to the places where wars are not History yet.

So don’t lock down the curriculum, force everyone through assessment hoops and slash budgets: make space and time for us to stand back, so war can teach itself.

A few years ago, while I was living and working in the US, I devised a new optional ‘elective’ course for my teenage students. I began the first lesson by presenting them with a passage describing a community wracked by hunger, unemployment and epidemic sexually transmitted disease. I asked them what they thought and not surprisingly they talked of AIDS and poverty in Africa.

In fact the passage described Gaston County North Carolina, and was written by Martha Gellhorn as part of her work chronicling the impact of the Depression and syphilis epidemic on ordinary American men and women. Your grandparents, I said to my students. My point was not to embarrass them, but to make them think of life as a continuum. So many of the keys to understanding human experience lie on our own kitchen tables, yet too often we send young people into the world believing the world to be an alien place that they simply don’t understand.

To make my American students feel better about their country I drew a few parallels with mine. In 1910 life expectancy in London was 45 (the same as Sierra Leone today). The poor routinely died of malnutrition. One in seven children died before their fifth birthday.

My course was called Contemporary Africa, and was less about summarising the vital statistics of fifty-two countries than about a way of thinking. I explained the value of seeing things from other points of view, and used first-hand accounts and witness statements, personal stories and case studies to illuminate and humanise the big picture. I introduced my students to the rational actor framework and suggested that people generally do the things that make sense to them in a given time and context. Of course a factual framework helps too, so Colonialism, the Cold War and the Arms Trade made regular appearances.

As a more traditional History teacher, my aim had always been to bring the past to life, to cross the divide of decades or centuries and find points of contact. I wanted to make the dead real for my students, to make the ‘deadness’ unimportant, and to concentrate on the personalities and the situations. I wanted them to like or dislike historical figures for a reason, to get into their heads and to understand why they did what they did. My students were required to take on roles, defend positions and find the way in to often unappealing or alien points of view. We studied ordinary people, not just kings and queens. We looked at their houses and clothes, and at statistics on health, life expectancy and infant mortality. We tried, above all, to connect.

But I didn’t provide the missing link. I didn’t give my students of Nineteenth century economics recent newspaper articles about the coltan mines in the Congo from where the vital ingredients of their cell phones came. Nor did I show them photographs I’d taken in Ethiopia and Madagascar of farmers tilling the earth with wooden ploughs and oxen. I didn’t tell them my stories of former commercial sex workers in India and my visit to a brothel, any more than I reminded my current events students that London used to be a seething hell of child prostitution, dead babies and filth – in my grandmother’s lifetime.

So why don’t we put our study of the past and present together? Why don’t we take the hard-earned skills of analysis, imagination and empathy and use them to help decode the urgent issues of the day? Why not use those approaches and that understanding to make the world we live in more comprehensible, familiar and human? Perhaps then Africans would stop being crazy and frustrating, and start making sense. Kenyan street kids sniffing glue would seem as logical a response to hunger and cold as drinking gin in Edwardian London; and the traffic of women and children for domestic slavery and the sex industry not something new, but the continuation of an abominable and heartbreaking trade.

While we’re at it, why don’t we also take a rather more global perspective? A few years ago a black South African friend pointed out that it is strange that Europeans consider Africa a dark, savage continent. Looking from Cape Town, Europe was the instigator and venue for two savage world wars and a genocide that incinerated millions of people in purpose-built ovens. Selecting a particular lense, and then looking at the whole world through it is not only more fair, but also far more interesting.

If we want to create a big, compassionate society filled not with incomprehensible strangers but with ordinary people, then we need to fix the missing link: going round the world and going back in time are not as different as we might think. And in case that sounds like a case for progress and the superiority of the global north, it’s worth noting that London is currently experiencing a new epidemic of that ‘Victorian’ condition, rickets.

Making It Matter

Teaching War

The Missing Link