Nicolas Kinloch's blog

There’s much excitement in my school. It used to be split-site, with two buildings separated by a main road and some playing-fields.

Now, following a building project that seems to have taken longer than the construction of Versailles, one of the buildings has been abandoned and a vast new block has arisen adjacent to the surviving one.

We took possession at the start of term. It looks very splendid. And my only response is to hope I don’t have to create another time capsule.

I’ve been helping to interview prospective history teachers, and as ever the process is both exhilarating and difficult. The candidates were mostly young men and women who had just finished their degree. One or two made me want to misquote Edith Cavell and say, ‘Enthusiasm is not enough’. It was reasonably certain that they were never going to make it.

What do ‘Chinese’ Gordon, Bill Clinton and yours truly have in common? I’ll try to avoid any unduly intrusive attempts to answer by telling you at once. Colour-blindness.

Let’s come straight to the point. What is history in schools for? I ask because the answer, though currently widely debated, seems to be far from obvious to our rulers, or even to some who teach the subject. I’m not wholly surprised: I myself don’t believe most of the reasons that are usually produced.

A historical controversy touched my school last term, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. It generated several column inches in the local paper. It also resulted in letters, including one from someone who claimed to hesitate – but not for very long, I imagine - to describe himself as ‘disgusted’.

It’s 2010, and we’re still waiting for school history’s next big idea.

I don’t think there’s been one for forty years. It isn’t that the subject hasn’t changed in all sorts of ways: it has. Most people will think instantly of computers. But information technology hasn’t really changed what’s done; it’s just changed how we do it.

I don’t know about you, but I’m fed up with conspiracy theories. They’re everywhere. If they continue to metastasise throughout the curriculum, it may become impossible to teach history at all. No one will need to know much about the past, or provide evidence for what they do know. No explanation will need to be even faintly plausible. Everything will be explained by referring to ‘Them’.

A student has just asked me an unexpectedly difficult question. They’re always doing this: it’s one of the reasons I do what I do. This one asked me who my hero was in history.

It’s a reasonable question. It ought to have a simple answer. BBC History Magazine has a feature every month on this or that well-known person’s historical hero. When interviewed, these people presumably don’t stand about saying ‘Um’, as I did. After all, everyone has a hero. Except me, apparently.

October, not April, is the cruellest month, at least in schools. The gloss has well and truly worn off the new school year, whilst ahead stretch long hours of darkness, bad weather and the League of Nations.