Can a teacher who is committed to a particular political point of view teach political history objectively? I’m pretty sure the answer is yes.

In my own career (long ago now) as a lecturer and professor at a number of universities in England, the USA and Australia, I delivered courses in modern British history, some of them going up to very recent times, which I believe were politically balanced and objective. In case they were not, I prefaced them with warnings of my own political views, usually with a little joke: waving my left arm up and down to indicate my ‘left-wing tendencies’; and with nary a complaint from any of them. One of my British students went on to become a Conservative MP; he was always very friendly. (He did have one gripe, which was that when we came on to the First World War I had said almost nothing about the fighting. He thought he must have missed a lecture between ‘causes’ and ‘effects’. He later published books about the war itself; and incidentally married into the Army. I think she was a Major.) He kept in touch occasionally, and resigned before the last general election, partly in protest against ‘Boris’. Maybe my caustic treatment of the ‘Public’ schools in one lecture rubbed off on him here. But not my views of the parliamentary politics of the period.

This was because I always tried to be fair to all sides, including the ‘other side’ of any question; not simply in an effort to appear ‘balanced’, but because I felt I could usually understand those sides, and indeed had often been half-seduced by them myself. I could (and can still) see virtues in the Public school system, for example; and was even half-convinced – well, a quarter, and only temporarily – by one lecture I gave on the anti (women’s) suffrage movement in the early 1900s. The same is true of the historical topic I’m mainly associated with today, which is British imperialism. My first book in this field was on the opponents of colonialism; but while researching it I developed an appreciation of the ‘pro’ side too. In all these cases I believe this was necessary: to myself in order to truly understand ‘my’ side of these questions, on the good old principle of  ‘know your enemy’; but also to encourage students to think about them. That after all is what education – certainly at this level – should be about: not imposing one’s own views on students, but encouraging them to think. A lot of right-wing politicians in Britain and (especially) the USA seem not to understand or credit this.

It’s really quite easy, so long as you aren’t cowed by criticism and threats from the other side; of the kinds that are emanating from the White House today –  demanding that only ‘heroic’ and ‘patriotic’ versions of American history are taught. Are there similar pressures on British university history courses? I’ve been too long away from the front line to know.