Schools urged to use history teaching to fight ‘bigotry’ and heal Britain’s post-Brexit divisions Exclusive: Charity leader warns that if schools fail to teach pupils to ‘stand up’ to discrimination, UK could be headed for a ‘scary time’

Schools should use history teaching to fight prejudice and repair Britain’s post-Brexit divisions, a charity has said.

Beki Martin, executive director of Facing History and Ourselves, also said schools should be more willing to teach pupils about controversial issues in Britain’s past, like the British Empire.

Facing History and Ourselves trains schools to give lessons about how ordinary people make choices which affect the course of history, focusing on events like the US civil rights movement and the Holocaust.

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The charity says this encourages young people to reflect on the choices they face today and how they can make a positive difference.

‘Bigotry and hate’

Ms Martin told i: “Our mission is to use the lessons of history to get teachers and their students to stand up to bigotry and hate.

“That’s probably more needed in this country right now than it has been for a very long time, in terms of the polarisation that we’re facing, the rise in hate crime, the discrimination and prejudice that we’re seeing more explicitly displayed in our schools, in our streets, in our politics.”

She warned that if schools failed to “teach the next generation how to stand up against discrimination and prejudice” the country could be headed for a “scary time”.

And she said the charity’s approach could help heal Brexit-related acrimony because history builds empathy by encouraging young people to see an issue from different perspectives.

‘Hate-filled’ rhetoric

“This isn’t about saying Brexit is right or wrong or good or bad,” Ms Martin said. “It’s about saying we are living in an environment in which we have become increasingly polarised.

“What is this debate doing to us, to our families, to our communities, to our society, in terms of dividing people?

“The rhetoric around it is hate-filled on both sides. There was language on both sides that was demeaning, that was polarising, that was harmful to other groups of people and that was ostracising.”

There has been an upward trend in the number of hate crimes recorded by police in England and Wales in recent years, doubling from 42,255 in 2012-13 to 103,379 in 2018-19.

The Home Office said the increase over the last five years has mainly been driven by improvements in crime reporting, but identified spikes following the EU Referendum and the series of terrorist attacks in 2017.

British Empire

On Britain’s colonial legacy, Ms Martin said it was “really important” that young Britons “understand the complexity of the benefit and privilege they have as a result of things we did back in the days of the Empire”.

She said there was a “growing appetite” among young people to learn about the Empire, because many students in multi-cultural Britain are “not seeing themselves reflected in the history they’ve experienced”.

However, she said other parts of society are “less comfortable with that dialogue”.

In teaching about the Empire, she said schools did not have to teach a triumphalist view or teach pupils it was uniformly bad.

“In some ways what does it benefit us, to assign ‘it was great’ or ‘it was evil’ to something that happened however long ago?

“The power is in saying ‘what can we learn from it’ and ‘how can we be better now in the society we’re creating?’”