A few years ago a friend of mine reached out to me with a question about her daughter's recent history class work. I was her daughter's godfather and she knew I was a specialist in history and medicine. She related to me what her daughter had been taught, and where she thought she remembered something I had once said which contradicted the class. I asked whether the assertion came from the teacher or the textbook. She said it came from the textbook. I told her I would look at it when I visited them for tea a few days later. When that day I found myself confronted with something which to me made no sense. In the intervening time I had checked my own knowledge of the incident in question against the generally accepted authoritative studies, and the primary sources available. I found myself reading the same page several times to make sure I wasn't the one who was misunderstanding things. I wasn't. The textbook, which was a standard school textbook - was wrong. This left me puzzled. There is, of course, a necessity to fit the teaching materials to the age and level of the pupils and students. But the key distinction is that simplifying something does not automatically excuse the introduction of erroneous information nor the reinforcement of common misconceptions. A comparison would be with the natural sciences - one would hope that we would not allow science textbooks which contain errors in basic principles and facts to continue in usage, and yet - we seem less keen to assert the same principle in terms of history. It is a useful line - which I first came across in stated by a fictional professor of logic - that a correct answer is one which meets the examiners expectations. The point being that this does not necessarily make it the 'correct answer'. This blog had the original working title of 'Correct Answers' but to avoid confusion I decided to change it to being 'Historically Accurate Answers'. Each entry deals with a question or series of questions from either a history textbook used in schools in the British Isles - and presents the historically accurate answer based on current information, evidence, and theory alongside the desired answer - to allow for comparison but also to hopefully express the correct information in a way which is equally as understandable by the target audience as that which appears in the textbooks.
