Spotting the Adult Agendas: Investigating Children’s Historical Awareness Using Stories Written for Children in the Past
Pat Hoodless, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK
Abstract This paper summarises an investigation of primary children’s understanding of the changing attitudes and values revealed in historical stories written at different times in the twentieth century. The investigation was a small scale case study, which used ethnographic methods, and produced qualitative data from small group discussions with children aged ten and eleven in two English primary schools. The choice of texts, drawn from a specifically English context, was intended to enable primary age children to understand familiar periods from the History National Curriculum. Findings suggest that children of this age were capable of identifying changing styles of presentation and different attitudes within historical accounts and stories written in different periods. Some children were aware how adult authors writing for children transmitted their attitudes and values through historical stories. The paper argues that such historical texts are excellent sources from which children can learn about the less tangible aspects of the past. It also argues that there are wider implications for the study of children’s conceptual awareness: children revealed very subtle understanding of chronology and change, as well as a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of how texts written for children are not only a product of the age in which they were written, but also a medium for the transmission of adult values and beliefs. It is suggested that further study of the use of such sources would enable a deeper understanding of how children acquire an awareness of these very important but less tangible aspects of the past.
Keywords: Childhood, Chronology, Values, Attitudes
Introduction: the research focus
This paper investigates how reading and talking about historical stories dating from different periods can reveal children’s understanding of the past. Young primary school1 children often work with artefacts, historic architecture and sites to enable them visualise what the past was like in practical, concrete terms. They learn from visual and tactile sources and by first hand experiences such as reconstructions and re-enactments. However, these sources do not necessarily reveal the thoughts, attitudes and values of past ages. It is in this aspect of learning about the past that texts perhaps have their most important role. Recent research has raised questions about the suitability of dated reading material for young children and whether they would be able or motivated to read it (Hicks & Martin, 1997). Hannabuss (1999) and Evans (2000) have identified the potential of historical fiction as a means of entering into the social and cultural values and practices of the time of its writing. Evans argues that the literature published for children is ‘an untapped and rich vein of data’ (Evans, 2000, p.26) that provides insights into the real experiences of childhood in the past. They also provide a source of information about how childhood itself was perceived by adults within contemporary agendas in relation to children and their learning. Both the teaching of history in English primary schools and the style of writing about history for children have changed considerably over the course of the last century. I therefore set out to use texts about British history written at different times in the twentieth century as a tool for studying children’s awareness about the times in which the texts were written, a form of ‘unwitting testimony’. The texts provided a window through which the children might be able to ‘spot the agendas’ of authors of historical stories and how these agendas have changed over time. There were two aspects to the inquiry. Firstly, how would the children deal with texts from earlier times as historical sources? Secondly, how would they respond to them as a source of evidence about the less tangible aspects of the age in which they were written, such as contemporary attitudes and values, especially in relation to children’s historical education?
It is widely acknowledged that academic histories are a product of the age in which they are written (Marwick, 2001). Adult purposes in writing history for children have also changed significantly over time, reflecting changing views about what was deemed appropriate for children. For example, compare these two short extracts in terms of their approach to teaching about history. The first is an extract from a story about Boadicea, queen of a tribe of Ancient Britons at the time of the Roman invasion. This appeared in a book written for young children in 1930, ‘Stories from Greek, Roman and Old English History’,
Nearly a hundred years after Julius Caesar came to Britain, there lived a young British Queen called Boadicea. Boadicea’s husband Prasutagus was king of his tribe, and he and his people all lived together in and around a little town which they had built for themselves upon a tiny hill. …Not far away there were other tribes of Britons, each with its own king or chief; and the different tribes were constantly quarrelling and fighting with one another; so Boadicea’s life was not a peaceful one. But she did not mind this at all, for she loved nothing better than fighting.
(Sarson & Paine 1930, p.61)
The second extract is about the same queen, now called Boudicca, from a children’s book written in 1994, ‘The Rotten Romans’,
But the boldest of British women – maybe the bravest ever – was Queen Boudicca. That was what the Britons called her. Later generations changed her name to Boadicea. Some people say this change was made because Boadicea sounded nicer. Another story is that a mediaeval monk made a spelling mistake when he was copying an old history and his mistake was copied by later historians! Let’s call her Boudicca…
Boudicca, This is Your Life’ (Deary 1994, pp.40-41)
The purposes of the two stories are clear. The first is told in great detail, in a didactic, slightly patronising style deemed suitable for children at that time. The main purpose of the first story is the simple transmission of factual information, while the second is a humorous discussion of Boudicca’s activities, which raises the issue of different accounts of the events that took place, and the mistakes and further mistakes made over the years in writing about these. The version written in 1994 deals with history in a way that would have been quite alien to the writers of historical stories for young children during the first half of the twentieth century. At this time, the Victorian style of storytelling, moralising and hero-worship appears to have persisted in children’s historical tales. By the end of the century, it is clearly being replaced by a very different style, which invites the child reader to engage in independent, critical thought. I was interested to see whether primary school children (aged 10 – 11) were able to point out the social influences of different ages in stories written for children and whether they noticed the accompanying contemporary adult agendas, an issue eloquently discussed by Elwyn Jenkins in his work on the publication of indigenous folktales (Jenkins, 2002).
Background to the research
Two areas of interest prompted the enquiry. Firstly, there has been a resurgence of interest in the use of literature as a means of teaching history through the growing popularity of historical texts (Hicks & Martin, 1997) as part of the Literacy Hour at Key Stages 1 and 2 in England 2, and the extension of the Literacy Strategy into Key Stage 3 in England. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, interest has grown in the discussion about the real value of using literature and story to engage children’s interest in the past. Following the rise of the ‘new history’ in Britain, in which learning was based mainly on the analysis of historical sources of evidence, teachers and academics have questioned the demise of story. Hake and Haydn (1995) argued that history consists of both sources and stories. The case for the use of narrative in establishing a meaningful context for children learning about the past was re-established over a period of time (Self 1991, Levstik & Barton 1997; Bage, 1999, Nelson & Nelson, 1999). These authors and historians argue that children need a narrative in learning history, and that deep understandings can be achieved if children are carefully guided by a teacher, who can help contextualise their understanding of events. I set out, therefore, to explore what these qualitatively superior, deeper understandings might entail.
The focus of the study arose from the comments of a ten-year-old child who had been reading a story by Rosemary Sutcliff, from the ‘Capricorn Bracelet’ (Sutcliff, 1973). The story was about a British soldier working in the Roman army, who is sent to fight in Rome itself, prior to the fall of the Empire. News is eventually brought back about the soldier’s death, and is received in an almost detached manner by his family. A friend returns from Rome and gives back the family bracelet to the narrator of the story, explaining that his father is dead. The child narrator comments:
I waited a little, outside in the dark; then I went in, and showed the bracelet to my mother. And we both knew that it was time to stop pretending.
(p.147)
The child who had read the story commented,
It’s too boring, and too predictable. You wouldn’t just go ‘OK then’ if you heard that your father had been killed. You’d scream and cry – all the family. Children nowadays’, he went on to argue, ‘want blood and gore, not writing that won’t upset anybody!
What this child had recognised, from his comment, ‘Children nowadays’, was that the writing of historical stories is rooted not in the time that the story is about, but in the time when it is written. Layers of contemporary values and attitudes about literature and about what is appropriate for children shroud historical stories and texts, and here was a 10 year-old who was beginning to articulate an understanding of this. This ten-year-old had indicated the ability to go unaided and spontaneously ‘Beyond the Information Given’ (Bruner, 1973). He could see beyond the Roman time in which the story was set, and identify the writer’s attitude towards her readership, an attitude influenced by the values of the mid-twentieth century. This somewhat hardheaded response is from a late twentieth-century child, who has grown up in a media age exposed to all the harsh realities of life. His critical comments resonate with those of an American child who had just listened to a traditional telling of a fairy story. Her response, described in the findings from research by Ann Trousdale and Sally McMillan (2003) into children’s views of patriarchal fairy tales in the USA, was:
Cinderella was a Wuss… She could have run away, you know.
(p.14)
The realisation that children of this age were capable of such insights prompted me to look more closely at how children make sense of the past as it is represented in story, and how much they understand about attitudes at the time in which they were written.
Methodology
The research was ethnographic and produced qualitative data; it was based on participant observation in group discussions and made use of methods encompassed by grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). The quality of children’s involvement, the tone of their responses and the level of their engagement with the texts formed part of the data. Once the children had been introduced to the topic, and had examined and talked about the books and their relative ages, they each chose one story to read. I then prompted the children with open-ended questions to find out what they thought about the stories, their style, differences between them and what they had learned from them. The group discussions were tape-recorded and transcribed in order to analyse the children’s comments and, by inference, their understandings and perceptions. Illustrative examples of the different perceptions held by the children are quoted below. I used stories about Queen Boudicca, drawn from national schemes of work in England (DfEE & QCA, 1998), and familiar to children from their history lessons by Year 6.3 The research, however, focused on the way the story was written and what this told them, rather than on its content. My own analysis of the texts was left until after the children had talked about them since I did not want my questioning to be influenced by my own perceptions, and wanted the children themselves to make their own comments.
The stories
There is a huge variety of types within the genre of historical fiction, as well as a very wide range of content areas that historical fiction might cover and a second consideration in the selection of the texts was their appropriateness for the task and for the children reading them. Aiken (1985), and Hicks and Martin (1997) have analysed the genres within this wide category, noting their complexity. I eventually decided to use different short historical stories about the same personality in the past. This would not be as exciting as pure fiction, perhaps, as I had used in earlier research, (Hoodless, 2002) but I thought it probably more appropriate for the primary children who would be reading short stories with familiar content. The selection of texts was an important part of the methodology. For purposes of comparison, I selected texts commonly used by school children aged between 8 and 10 years of age during different periods in the twentieth century.
The stories were about Queen Boudicca, a popular figure in the distant past of British history. Boudicca was Queen of an Ancient British tribe, the Iceni, and had fought several battles in an attempt to repel the invading Romans, inflicting severe damage, such as in the burning of Londinium (London). The story of Boudicca required considerable awareness of chronology and also the texts that I had collected were themselves set in a number of different historical periods. For my modern text, I chose a chapter about Boudicca from the fairly recent ‘The Rotten Romans’ (Deary, 1994) because of its popularity with children and, although not a textbook as such, its increasing use as part of history lessons in England. I had a version of the story of Boudicca from 1957, written by a well-known writer of school history texts (Unstead, 1957), and a post-war version, in a volume called ‘Our Island Story’, dating from about 1948 (Marshall, c.1948), and finally a version from 1930, from the ‘Piers Plowman’ series (Sarson & Paine, 1930). I hoped books taken from these different periods in time would give the children sufficient contrast to be able to make some useful comparative comments. A final decision was to use the original books rather than photocopied pages. The children would then be able to evaluate them as artefacts as well as texts.
Schoolbooks for the typical elementary school 4 pupil would have been written in the serious style of ‘Piers Ploughman’. During the 1930s in England, children would have been expected to develop a deferential attitude towards their rulers. The style of the ‘Piers Ploughman’ book underlines this view and embodies the philosophy and social attitudes of the time. By contrast, in the last decades of the twentieth century, a truly irreverent attitude towards all things linked to the upper classes and the monarchy had developed. It was becoming appropriate in society to mock great rulers of the past. ‘The Rotten Romans’ has an element of this attitude embedded within its style, particularly in the use of the popular television theme, ‘This is Your Life’, to illustrate the famous defeat of an Ancient British Queen. ‘The Rotten Romans’ has become a popular best seller at the turn of the century, and is commonly used in classrooms as part of a new, enquiry based approach to the teaching history to young children. Comments mainly based on these two texts have been selected for analysis in this paper, therefore, on the basis that they provide a clear contrast between the two periods in which they were written.
The children
Hicks and Martin (1997) refer to the constraints of asking young children to work with out-dated texts. On the assumption, therefore, that the books, particularly the older ones, would provide a significant challenge for young children, I decided to work with the more able readers in the final year of primary school and to analyse their comments on a variety of texts. The children were 10 and 11 year-olds, all above average or very able readers for their age. They were organised for the discussions in four groups of four, for clear communication and recording purposes, and matched for gender and reading abilities. The groups were drawn from two very different schools. School A was situated in a predominantly working class estate, with high numbers of children on free school meals and with behavioural and learning difficulties. School B was in a fairly wealthy, middle class area consisting mostly of professional families living in expensive private accommodation. However, both schools placed great emphasis on the children achieving high standards in literacy. I used schools in these very different kinds of areas to ascertain any marked differences in the children’s responses and approach to the texts and also to obtain a small, but contrasting sample on which to base my conclusions. Despite the different social contexts, however, all the children in the groups were highly competent, well-motivated readers, who experienced no difficulties in reading the texts, although the children in school B were more adept at interpreting and commenting on them, since their skills in discussing the texts appeared to be more highly developed.
Findings
An extensive range of different understandings emerged from an analysis of what the children said, from which some tentative theoretical hypotheses can be drawn. The responses ranged from an initial appraisal of the books as artefacts, with children commenting on their surface appearance and detailing changes in style, to some very perceptive comments, which revealed considerable understanding of the past and of the skills and hidden agendas, or unwitting testimony of the authors.
Selections of fact
The group in school B noticed the different selections of fact in the stories from 1930 and 1994. For example, in discussing Boudicca’s death, the ‘The Rotten Romans’ clearly explains what the historical sources say, and asks children to make up their own minds,
Big Boud faced another flogging. The Roman historian, Tacitus, said she took poison and died. The Roman Historian, Dio, said she died of a disease. Believe whichever one you like … or neither. Perhaps she just died of a broken heart. Boudicca, that was your life.
(Deary 1994, p.44)
On the other hand, the version from 1930 does not mention the way she died at all:
She fought bravely and died gladly, rejoicing to think that she would be a slave no
more.
(Sarson & Paine, 1930, p.66)
McGeorge, writing about the content of Victorian school reading books, comments how sensitive issues, such as death, were often dealt with in great detail in Victorian books, when a moral purpose underlay the story. Modern children’s literature seems to be returning to this, he argues, after a period when such issues were considered unsuitable (McGeorge, 1998). This argument is certainly borne out by the stories cited here. While the version from 1930 carefully avoids even a mention of her death, the version from 1994 explains a variety of ways she could have died and asks the child to make their own mind up about it. With some prompting, the children discussed the possible reasons for these different ways of writing about Boudicca’s death. Most of the children noted that the oldest version tended to skim over the facts and not really give useful detail, while issues like death or suicide were openly discussed in the most modern text.
Some children also pointed out that if you wanted to know how Boudicca looked, then the 1930 version told you nothing or very little, merely commenting how ‘she had a husband’, or ‘she was a queen’, while ‘The Rotten Romans’ gave great detail:
She was very tall. Her eyes seemed to stab you. Her voice was harsh and loud. Her thick, reddish-brown hair hung down below her waist. She always wore a great golden torc [band] around her neck and a flowing tartan cloak fastened with a brooch.
(Cassius Dio [trans E.Cary], 1917 in Deary, 1994)
The influence of the time
All the children were aware of the style of the texts and the changing devices used to appeal to the child reader, pointing out how ‘The Rotten Romans’ was ‘done like a TV show’, ‘Boudicca, this is your life’, comparing this to the romanticised story-telling style of the post war period and 1930s text. They thought that the term, ‘Big Boud’, used frequently to describe Boudicca in ‘The Rotten Romans’, sounded like slang. They thought this style would not have been acceptable in earlier times, because of the disrespect it showed to a queen. They were also aware that older versions of the story would not have used words like this or like ‘wimp’, used to describe Boudicca’s husband, the king. They compared this with the description in the oldest text from 1930, which described Boudicca as, ‘a young British Queen’. They thought the 1930 version was written ‘like a basic story’ and they found the old story more respectful to her. Whereas in ‘The Rotten Romans’, Boudicca’s husband is portrayed as a ‘wimpy king’, in the older version they noted that it says he ‘did the right thing’. They felt that the treatment of the subject in ‘The Rotten Romans’ was harsh, while Boudicca was ‘worshipped almost’ in the 1930 book – she was ‘the best’, and ‘did nothing wrong’. Some children thought that the style of the older texts was ‘more mature’, the author writes as if she was there, whereas in ‘The Rotten Romans’ the author just uses facts from other books. Some preferred the older version, because they thought the style was better and they thought it ‘told the history better’. They liked phrases such as ‘O brothers and sisters’.
Others understood that the writer of ‘The Rotten Romans’ had used slang expressions and humorous words to make the text easier to read and to aim it at children’s interest level, ‘in a way that we can understand it’. These children, thought that the use of speech bubbles to show that it was Boudicca speaking, made it much easier to follow for the reader. Several children commented how they thought the reading was harder in the past,
There was, like, different words that we don’t use now. There was words that mean different from what they mean now.
They were conscious of the writer’s purpose and how the style had been designed to suit the intended child audience.
Because the children had been able to analyse surface features, such as changing font and illustrative styles, they had little difficulty in ordering the stories chronologically. They were not able to place them in specific historical periods, or give accurate dates, but were easily able to place them accurately in the correct sequence in terms of publication, and were able to see how old they were in relation to each other. They were aware that in the past they would not have had books written or illustrated in the style of the ‘The Rotten Romans’:
Child: There wouldn’t have been ‘The Rotten Romans’ in the 1960s would there?
Researcher: Why not?
Child: … well things like ‘Rotten Romans’, I don’t think they would have really appreciated that.
The children were aware that not only would such a book not have appeared at that time, but also that its style would not have been acceptable in an earlier age.
Viv Little (1986) points out how contemporary influences affect the writing of historical stories and comments how the heroes of G. A. Henty, whether cast in his novels as Ancient Greeks or Tudor adventurers, are always the same modern young gentlemen from English public 5 schools. Little recommends discussing with children how historical fiction is written, and the findings of this study appear to confirm the notion that some young children are able to understand contemporary influences on writers of history. One child in school B noted the way the stories were influenced by the prevailing spirit of the time in which they were written, ‘it seems to come out of the time’. He commented of ‘Our Island History’:
This reads like it was just written after the war, all proud about how we defend ourselves.
The group in school B entered into an interesting debate about which text provided the most useful image of Boudicca. One child argued that:
You don’t know when you read a description of Boudicca in the older stories, whether this was really what she was like, or just the image they had of her at the time it was written.
Another commented:
You have an image of what other people thought of her, how she was very brave. The problem with that is, that because of the time it was based in, you don’t know if that’s what she was actually like …
The first child replied,
I think it’s like based on the time. Stories change in the time they’re told. If at that time you don’t think much of people, you kill people, you’d be writing about them
in a horrible way. It can completely change the image of someone.
Phrases such as ‘because of the time it was based in’ and ‘stories change in the time they’re told’ clearly demonstrate the awareness of the children in school B that the attitudes and values held at the time of writing can be more significant than the content of an historical story.
Adult agendas
During the discussion, the most able readers were able to see how the teaching of history itself has changed depending on the view of childhood held by the authors. The story telling changed from ‘here is a story that I think will be suitable for you’, in 1930, to ‘here is the gist of two sources that contradict each other. Make up your own mind’ in 1994. The children in school B noticed how ‘different books missed different bits out’ and began to think about possible reasons for this. In talking about the way the earlier story explained Boudicca’s death, they commented,
In there it (suicide) was something they were ashamed about…not many people did it and it was kind of like a weird thing to do…if they put it down, and they probably thought it was a bad thing to do.
Also, they wanted somebody like Boudicca to set an example.
They argued it was ‘…so bad that children might think it was the right thing to do.’ They were aware of the moral purpose of the author of the 1930 version, whereas the modern version set out recorded facts, not avoiding the unpleasant details or aiming to show Boudicca in a heroic light.
Children in both schools commented how they preferred making their own decisions to just hearing ‘they did this, they did that.’ They argued that if they were constantly taught in this way, ‘children might think that everything was just a story.’ They were aware of the fact that learners can use different sources and versions to create their own image of the past. One child even suggested that they might be disadvantaged in later education by writing history in a story-like style themselves. They seemed to be beginning to grasp the quite sophisticated point that some fiction obscures and distorts the truth. At the same time they recognised that although ‘The Rotten Romans’ was written in a ‘jokey way’, there were more facts in it, for example:
The 10,000 Romans were well organised. The 100,000 Britons charged around the way they always did. The result was a great victory for the Romans.
(Deary, 1994, p.44)
While some enjoyed the romantic tales of the past, most of the children in the discussion groups thought it was better to allow children to make their own minds up, and one child in school B pointed out that people’s opinions, written up as stories, might be wrong, a highly perceptive comment for a ten-year-old.
Discussion
‘History stories’ from the past are an immense resource already used in teaching literacy skills in England. Children in both sample groups were able to analyse them as artefacts, noting the subtle differences in style and presentation of books published in different eras. They enabled the children to reveal sophisticated understandings of chronology and change, as well as their developing inferential skills. Some children in the sample were able to go beyond the surface features of the stories and analyse their authors’ preconceptions and also the prevalent social attitudes of the times of writing. Several children in School B related their readings of the stories to their knowledge and understanding of different historical periods, demonstrating inferential skill in distinguishing between authors’ perceptions of what was appropriate for their child readership at different points in the past. The children then began to appreciate the values and attitudes of those different times about sensitive issues such as death, war and suicide and to understand how the telling of history changes with each re-telling according to the attitudes and agendas prevailing at the time. Possibly, because of well-developed skills in source analysis, the children in School B were able to treat the stories primarily as sources and apply considerable evaluative skill to their discussion of them.
There are also wider implications of this type of learning for children in other countries in Europe and other parts of the world. Changes in values and attitudes have been very gradual in Britain and are often difficult to identify. However, in societies where there has been considerable, rapid political and social change, and where democratic values are now promoted, such as in Eastern Europe, learning about how and why life has changed can be significant at a number of levels. Children can not only learn about the material changes in their country’s past, but also the changes in values, attitudes and beliefs that underlay shifts in policy. Reading earlier history text books and stories can, for example, reveal a great deal about the values that underpinned the choice of curriculum content and the style in which it was taught.
These seem very sophisticated ideas for young children. However, it was clear from the comments they made during these informal conversations, that some are quite capable of these insights and understandings. Indeed, one child brought to the discussions considerable prior knowledge and understanding of the values and attitudes of the early twentieth century. Knowing about different attitudes towards children at different times in the past is a valid area of study for able child readers and further research to identify suitable texts would enrich the resources available to develop these important skills. Knowledge about such texts at an international level would be useful for developing subject knowledge and with it, a deeper understanding of chronology in the form of contemporary attitudes and values. Spotting the adult agendas is another way of children ‘doing history’ and learning to appreciate and analyse the texts which transmit not only the history itself, but also the unwitting testimony of the time in which the texts were written.
Notes:
1. Primary schools in England include children between 3 and 11 years.
2. In the English education system, Key Stage 1 refers to children aged from 5 to 7, Key Stage 2 to those from 7 to 11, and Key Stage 3, to those aged 11 to 14.
3. Year 6 refers to children in the final year of primary school, aged 10 to 11.
4. Elementary School: A term used in the first half of the twentieth century in Britain to denote schools run by the State.
5. English ‘public’ schools: private, or fee-paying schools used by the wealthy upper classes.
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