A confederacy of dunces: Magna Carta in History 8 textbooks

The only book to actually attempt to outline the content of chapters of the Charter 1215 is the Pearson History that summarizes six of the Chapters (it calls them clauses), but oddly omits the very important Chapter 39.

Second, the original document was not called Magna Carta at all. The first use of the name only appeared in 1218. The spelling for many centuries was Magna Charta, something only officially changed in 1946 to Magna Carta.

Third, although most of the Charter has disappeared from the statute book, especially after 1863 when much was repealed by the British Parliament, Magna Carta was used in the centuries after 1215 as an idea to argue for various rights. This is not the same as claiming that the 1215 charter was the origin of modern ideas; after all the barons in the meadow at Runnymede did not propose ideas such as parliamentary democracy, the universal franchise, the secret ballot or a bill of rights. It is rather a claim that later generations used the Charter to bolster arguments in favor of new ideas.

Magna Cartawas frequently invoked in the nineteenth century in Australia as representing the rights of Englishmen and deployed in favor of greater colonial autonomy, especially in the 1830s and 1840s when arguments were made in favor of responsible government. This is easily researched thanks to the wonderful digital newspaper collection available via the Trove portal at the National Library of Australia. A quick search reveals that there were 10,500 hits for the term Magna Carta (or Charta) between 1824 and 1989.

Now while it is important that Magna Carta is included in the history curriculum that only makes sense if students are actually given accurate information about it. The current textbooks, presumably used in Australian schools, are full of rubbish and they also leave out important information. This raises questions about the competence of the authors of these books and the judgment of the publishers in allowing this information to appear. Whether the material on Magna Carta in these textbooks is actually covered in the class room and whether Magna Carta is the subject of assessment is another question that only history teachers themselves can answer.

As the students who take History 8 are young it is important that accuracy is inculcated not as a virtue but as a duty. Given the availability of the internet it would be easy, for example, to test the proposition that the Charter was published by asking students to Google "Guttenberg", Caxton", and "printing" to ascertain whether printing existed in 1215 or during the thirteenth century at all. Given the resources available from reliable sites on the internet many historical subjects could easily be researched in class. After all, modern students are computer literate so why not use this as a tool for guided discovery? One obvious thing to do is to actually read a copy of the Charter online.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries students studied constitutional history usually by examining Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, Habeas Corpus, and the Act of Settlement amongst the main constitutional landmarks. On the occasion of the 720^th anniversary of Magna Carta in 1935, for example, special lessons were given in West Australian state schools on the significance of the charter. A very useful article entitled "Magna Charta" appeared in the local press at the same time that debunked many of the commonly held myths about 1215. Whether what was taught during that era was properly learned is another matter. According to a list of schoolboy howlers from the examination papers, published in 1905, one student actually wrote: "The chief clause of Magna Charta was that no free man should be put to death or imprisoned without his own consent".

Avoiding Educational Nonsense

Since the textbooks are misleading where, to ask Jacques Barzun's question, does such educational nonsense come from? Barzun thought that it derived from education fads that aimed not at education or the removal of ignorance but from the notion that schools exist for wider social purposes. These he identified as teaching about "life","problems" and "attitudes". Evidence of this nonsense is everywhere. The website of the Victorian Department of Education states that it exists "to support Victorians to build prosperous, socially engaged, happy and healthy lives". Really? Why not end poverty and institute world peace while they are at it.

We might say that a school is meant to be a place of learning, not a therapeutic community run by social workers to make students feel good about themselves, though of course teachers and schools should inspire and not be the "enemies of promise". Schools, if they are any good, will impart many things besides a knowledge of the main branches of learning, but these other qualities emerge indirectly as a by-product of learning the content of a recognized subject. Barzun thought that "The all-important thing is mastery of a subject matter" by the teacher and that this was only possible if they had learned the subject as a major in college (or in our case in a University).

All students should through observation and example learn from their teachers the virtues of patience, concentration, attention to detail, the ability to frame a question about any sentence they read, an appreciation of language and, in the case of history, a realization that the past was often different. People who lived in the past, especially the distant past, had different values, a different outlook, as well as different institutions from those that exist in the present.

Students should also be encouraged to realize that the historical record is the only evidence we have of the past, that it is often incomplete, and that, in consequence, some questions cannot be answered. In the case of the transactions at Runnymede there is no verbatim record of what was said, merely the resulting document. Notwithstanding these limitations history is based on evidence not wild speculation for, as Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, historians investigate what is real and they cannot invent their facts.They must, as he put it, respect "the supremacy of the evidence".

The discipline also should guard against the sin of anachronism (sometimes called presentism or hindsight) by reading the past as if it were the present or reading into the past present attitudes that could not have existed in the past. It is no good, as a colleague once noted, criticizing Julius Caesar for not advocating votes for women. The men, and there were only men, in the meadow at Runnymede in June 1215, did not know what came next, though we do. Moreover it is wrong to assume that because later writers, especially that great myth maker Sir Edward Coke, sourced seventeenth century ideas in the Charter that they were right. Coke was a lawyer not a professional historian and sometimes good law can be very bad history.