A number of my academic books are stored in L’s bedroom, both because they were there first and because there’s nowhere else to put then. As she learns to read, this leads to increasingly complex conversations. While she’s not yet trying to read the books, she is already able to read some or all of the title of some of them and ask what the book is about. The first was one she thought was called ‘Medieval history’, but was actually Malcolm Lambert’s ‘Medieval heresy’. (I hadn’t taught her to read the word ‘medieval’, she has obviously just absorbed it by osmosis). Since she’s being brought up as a Christian, it was reasonably easy to explain that heresy was ‘believing wrong things about God’, and I even had as the follow-up answer (since she’s asked this before), that, for example, some people didn’t believe that Jesus was really God’s son. (I have not yet got onto the far trickier topic of what separates non-believers from heretics, but that theological point will doubtless come along a bit later).

Today, she had moved on, to Mary Douglas’ ‘Purity and danger’. I attempted to gloss purity as meaning ‘very clean and beautiful’, while L pointed out that she knew what danger meant. She then asked whether the book was telling you about what things were dangerous and what you needed to do about them (on the analogy of a first-aid booklet). I said no, it was about the different things that people all round the world thought was dangerous. L wanted me to explain exactly who thought what was dangerous, but I replied that the book was full of complicated ideas. Undeterred, she wanted me to tell her one of the ideas.

I then had some inspiration and started telling her Mary Douglas’ idea of dirt as being things out of place, and how dirt could be thought of as dangerous. An example from her recent gardening experience (horse manure on the pavement though of as dirty and nasty and possibly full of germs, manure on the garden thought of as a good thing for the plants), and there we were. ‘Purity and danger’ at least partially explained for a five-year old.

Of course, there is a lot more to the book than that and some of the concepts I don’t think I could get across. But it did get me looking round my academic collection with new eyes. What books were they that I could explain at least vaguely to L at the moment? And, perhaps even more importantly, were there any I really didn’t want to have to?

It is quite revealing to suddenly see books in this light. Michael Clanchy’s ‘From memory to written record’? Straightforward. Marcel Mauss’ ‘The Gift?’ A doddle. L’s been to enough birthday parties to know all about reciprocity and obligation, even is she doesn’t realise it yet. Freud’s ‘Introduction to Psychoanalysis’? I would probably stick to saying that was about how people’s minds work. And, shorn of their sexualised details, the basic idea of the ‘Freudian slip’ and dreams having meanings are quite comprehensible to a bright five-year old.

What about Gerda Lerner’s ‘The creation of patriarchy’? The concept of ‘patriarchy’ can certainly be simplified down enough (why men are in charge of things and boss women around), but I’m not sure that she would yet realise that patriarchal societies exist. (After all, she is living in a primary-school world where most authority is held by women). Although I haven’t yet tried it (and I’m not planning to at the moment), I think it would be possible, if time-consuming, to explain to L at least the concept of gender, by getting her thinking about say, ‘what boys/girls/men/women can do’, as against ‘what boys/girls/men/women should do’.

There remain some books, however, which would stump me. I’m not sure there is anything in the ‘Introducing Lacan’ book I have that I really understand myself, let alone can explain to L. And I can’t explain Marc Bloch’s ‘Feudal society’, without feeling an imagined Susan Reynolds at my shoulder giving me dirty looks. (For that matter, I’m not sure I could explain ‘Fiefs and vassals’). I also have Aline Rouselle’s ‘Porneia’, which I hope is on a shelf sufficiently far up that L won’t notice it for a long time (and is also in the decent obscurity of a foreign language). Fortunately, I don’t have a copy of my own of Mark Jordan’s ‘The invention of sodomy in Christian theology’. Still, at the current rate of progress, I may well end up as one the few scholars potentially able to write ‘Foucault for the Primary School Child’.

I’ve recently read a couple of articles by feminist columnists (Erica Jong and Polly Toynbee) inspired by the recent discussions of 1968, complaining about how their hopes for feminism had been dashed and how much better things were back then. Erica Jong, who focuses largely on the US, may be right to see a considerable backlash, but I find Toynbee’s attitude strange. The second-wave feminist movement may not have lived up to its own utopian hopes, but ironically, Toynbee is doing it a serious disservice. Britain has changed massively in the last forty years and most of the changes have been positive for women. In 1968 the Abortion Act had only just become law and the Sex Discrimination Act was seven years away. As for civil partnerships or rights for transsexuals or the criminalisation of marital rape or a female Prime Minister or Home Secretary, that would have seemed ridiculous. To give a bit of proportion, here are some statistics (unfortunately, as usual it’s hard to get consistent runs of exactly the same statistics):

British Social Attitudes database
Who should mainly look after children when they are sick?
Mainly woman: 50% (1984), 37% (1991)
Shared equally: 47% (1984), 60% (1991)

Who should make the evening meal?
Mainly woman: 58% (1984), 39% (1991)
Shared equally: 38% (1984), 57% ( 1991)

Should an abortion be allowed where a couple agree they do not wish to have the child?
Yes: 46% (1983), 64% (2004)
No: 45 % (1983), 25% (2004)

Is pre-marital sex wrong?
Always wrong: 16% (1983), 6% (2005)
Not at all wrong: 42% (1983), 63% (2005)

Support for sex-discrimination law
Support: 76% (1983), 82% (1994)
Oppose 22% (1983), 16% (1994)

Office for National Statistics

Further education
Percentage of men: 58% (1970/71), 43% (1997/98)

Higher education
Percentage of men: 67% (1970/71), 47% (1997/98)

UK Parliament website
Percentage of women MPs: 4% (1970), 20% (2005)

Women and Equality Unit
Mean gender pay gap: 21% (1998), 17% (2005)

Now some of these statistics may suggest slow progress, and feminism in Britain hasn’t advanced as far as many people have hoped, but there has never been a serious backlash, and there is still forward movement. And speaking as someone who was 3 in 1968 and who now has a 5-year old daughter, I’m glad for her sake she was born now and not then. Despite all the pink, her prospects are better.

I touched on one issue in my last post on public intellectuals that is a particular issue for historians. How come so many historians with theoretically decent academic credentials write such bad history? I have just read an article in May’s History Today magazine (not yet on their website). This is Anthony Pagden, ‘Perpetual enmity: the 2,500-year struggle between East and West’, History Today, 58 (5), 14-21. The article is exactly the stupid pile of junk that its title implies. Pagden argues for a millennia long clash between ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ (never defined) that goes from the Persian-Greek wars via Muhammad, the Ottoman Turks to Islamist terrorists, and includes such gems as: ‘For all their power, the peoples of Asia had never learned, as the scattered peoples of the West had, how to change.’ It’s as if Edward Said had never existed. If a first-year university student gave me an essay like that he or she would get a 2:2 equivalent grade for generalised and stereotyped argument unsupported by the evidence.

It would be easy to say: ‘Oh, History Today just had an off-day.’ But Anthony Pagden is apparently Distinguished Professor of Political Science and History at UCLA (which prompts me to wonder how bad an Undistinguished Professor of UCLA is). His book (on which this article is based): ‘Worlds at War: The 2,500 Struggle Between East and West’ has been published by OUP. In other words, a (presumably) respected professor is churning out this kind of tripe and being thought of as a serious intellect.

I don’t want to make this an issue about US academic standards, because there are some very good US academics and some British authors who do equally poor-quality stuff. And it also can’t just be blamed on post-modernism or ‘political correctness’: there are offenders from all historiographical and political backgrounds. I want to ask a more awkward question: is the historical profession (as it is currently constituted) capable of effective quality control? Or is it simply prepared to tolerate considerable amounts of shoddy history?

The problem isn’t just confined to political polemic disguised as history. Despite peer-review, it’s fairly common to read mainstream historical articles and books with basic methodological flaws. For example, some authors simply ignore evidence which doesn’t support their case. The author has a theory he or she is wedded to and isn’t going to let anything stand in the way of it, such as counter-examples. (I would make a distinction here between downplaying/discounting the evidence against your argument, which I think is legitimate, and simply not mentioning it). This silent evasion is one of the hardest things for a non-expert in the field to pick up (how do they know what’s not there?) but it invalidates an awful lot of arguments. And yet post-publication book reviewers rarely comment on such issues and articles which make glaring errors of this kind may never get corrected.

Historians will inevitably sometimes get it wrong or make hypotheses that don’t stand up on further scrutiny. The problem is that there isn’t much in the way of a self-regulating mechanism (in contrast to some academic disciplines). Every historian, if they’re honest, can point to some people in their field who have produced persistently poor quality work and yet received academic acclaim. Does this matter? If historians are just a closed group, then maybe it doesn’t. After all, everyone who knows about a field realises that Professor X’s work is internally self-consistent, but bears no relation to early medieval reality or that Dr Y’s main aim is to force evidence into a one-size fits all social model.

But if we want to appeal to a wider audience, whether of students or of the general public, it is a problem if there are a number of poor quality historians. How can we convincingly argue against pseudo-historians if some academics themselves think that historical argument means no more than cherry-picking data? If this kind of poor technique doesn’t matter, are we as historians doing any more than giving our own opinions with a few intellectual trappings? I don’t know an answer to this one, but it’s hard to argue that historians aren’t listened to enough when too many of them are not worth hearing.

The idea that some (if not all ) historians should aim to become ‘public intellectuals’ is one that is increasingly heard: sometimes as a lament for a Golden Age when such people were prominent, sometimes as a challenge that should be accepted by today’s historians. (At this point any serious discussion of the topic should include a brief outline of the history of the word ‘intellectual’ (and possibly ‘public’) and a sketch of culture and its audiences since the Enlightenment, in order to define what a public intellectual actually is. But to be honest I haven’t got the time and energy now, and if you’re interested, you’ll have read this bit before, so please just construct your narrative from a mixture of coffee-house society and the development of public space, Edward Gibbon, Left Bank cafes and A.J.P. Taylor as telly don as seems appropriate).

For the purpose of this post, I’m going to work from a far more informal definition: that a public intellectual is someone using their academic training to try and make clever observations to a wider (non-academic) audience. I know that sets myself up (and other medievalist bloggers) as at least would-be public intellectuals, but I think most of us probably are aiming for that some of the time. So: why do historians do this and is this a Good Thing?

The obvious answer is that the two opposites of the public intellectual are the private (=ivory tower) academic and the public ignoramus (=many prominent commentators in the media). We want to address a general audience both to justify our existence and because we think we can offer something to the public. But what is it we’re trying to offer and what are the implications of this?

Quite a lot of the time what we’re trying to do is broadly boost the study of history (by pointing out how interesting and life-enhancing it is). This is always prone to the charges of self-interest (that what we really want is someone to fund our research, buy our books or enrol on our courses), but otherwise it’s no different from what enthusiasts for lots of other things (from obscure musical groups to growing vegetables) do. The trickier area is the other thing we tend, implicitly to be doing. We’re trying to influence political opinion.

Now, when I say I’m trying to influence political influence, I mean that roughly in the sense that the Earth influences the movement of Jupiter; the effects are almost undetectable, but that doesn’t mean that the gravitational force doesn’t exist. One of my purposes in writing about history (among other things) is to make people think slightly differently about not only the past, but also the present, and maybe, just maybe, change their moral/political/social/religious views. Think of me (and other would-be public intellectuals) as medieval butterflies flapping their wings in the vague hope of somehow mysteriously causing a tornado in York or Paris or Los Angeles.

The big problem is, would a world where historians and historical thought were more politically prominent necessarily be a better world? If you want to see the problem of using historically-based arguments in politics, just consider all the leaders since 1945 described as being a ‘second Hitler’ (from Nasser to Saddam and Bush to Ahmadinejad and probably many more). The immediate answer to this is that the problem is just bad history, but it’s not clear that more ‘good history’ in the public domain will drive out ‘bad history’; nothing keeps the Templars properly dead and buried. In addition, there are all too many historians who while well-respected in their field, have shown themselves to be idiots, and sometime influentially dangerous idiots in their broader public comments. (I would mention Bernard Lewis, Victor David Hanson and Michael Ignatieff as just a few; there are probably left-wing historians equally as bad, but I don’t think they’ve been as politically influential recently).

But what about the right sort of historian? Surely if they were more influential, the country would be governed better? That’s the premise of a recent initiative by a distinguished group behind History and Policy. This organisation (so they announce):

* Demonstrates the relevance of history to contemporary policymaking
* Puts historians in touch with those discussing and deciding public policy today
* Increases the influence of historical research over current policy
* Advises historians wanting to engage more effectively with policymakers and media

Underlying all this (and much of the intended role of the historian as public intellectual) is the implication that historically evidence-based policy-making would be more effective.

There are two possible problems here. One is that I’m not at all convinced that historians have any more insight into the future than any other group. I don’t know of many historians, for example, who forecast the fall of the Berlin Wall, the key role of religion in the twentieth-first century or any of the many other unexpected events of the recent past. (If any reader knows of some, let me know). The second problem, specifically related to this, particularly for liberal historians, is that historically-based policy-making is always liable to be conservative. An emphasis on learning past lessons and avoiding past mistakes is prone to conclude that nothing new should ever be done (since most attempts at change are unsuccessful initially). An evidence-based policy-maker in say 1700 would probably have concluded that democracy was intrinsically unstable, high infant mortality was inevitable and that no country could expect to abolish slavery. One in the 1930s would probably have explained how Hinduism was intrinsically incompatible with democracy and India should remain under princely/colonial rule forever.

Many historians have rightly lamented that Tony Blair thought so little about the history of Iraq before supporting the invasion. But if he’d been well steeped in the political history of Northern Ireland, would he have had the same commitment to producing the Good Friday agreement? It would have been easier to assume that ancient hatreds made a peace deal impossible. To imagine Sinn Fein and the UUP collaborating is (historically speaking) ridiculous. Maybe there are times when a refusal to consider historical precedents is actually useful. I won’t stop trying (in my very minor way) to be a public intellectual. But we do need to remember occasionally that the world wouldn’t necessarily be a better place if historians ran it.

Choosing the education for your child is obviously a pedagogic matter and also sometimes an economic one. But it's also often a moral matter, as well, in the sense that it's an individual choice that affects wider society. If, as we do, you have an academic child (one who is both bright and amenable to learning in an academic context), then she is likely to be a benefit to whatever school or university she goes to. She will improve their official results, she will encourage her teachers and lecturers by her appreciation, she may possible inspire and even assist some of her fellow-students. What responsibilities, if any, does this impose on a parent acting morally?

There seems to be a common view that one’s only moral responsibility as a parent is to one's child; any action is justified if it is for your child’s benefit. That is obviously misguided if the parent has a distorted view of what benefits the child: a lot of poor discipline (both over-harsh and over-lax) is due to a parent's confusion about what benefits their child most in the long term. But suppose that a parent can make, in certain circumstances, a reasonable judgement of what will benefit their child. Should a benefit to their child always be held to outweigh that to a wider group?

I would argue not. For example, I have for many years made a relatively small monthly donation to a third world charity. At first this was used to educate a specific child: now it goes to help a whole community, but still particularly its education, in the broadest sense. If I wanted to, I could stop my support of that charity and spend the money on buying more books for L. I could afford to buy 3 or 4 books more for her a month: she would enjoy that and it might benefit her education. But the benefit would probably be marginal; she has a lot of books already, and she’s not short of things to read. In my view it is more moral to continue to support a community in Gambia, even at the marginal expense of my child.

The fact there are cases where it's justified in benefiting the wider community as against your own child establishes a principle, but it doesn't, of course, give any guidance as to when this should be done. Utilitarianism would say that if I had a choice of paying for life-saving treatment for my own child or for 100 children in the Third World, I should choose the latter, but I don't think any parent would agree. Making moral decisions about your child's education means balancing interests, but there isn't an easy calculus for this.

In the UK the education system is so closely linked to class, that the dilemma largely becomes a trade-off between exclusivity and academic performance. The 'best' schools, whether private or state, get good academic results largely because of a socially exclusive intake, which maximises the numbers of the white middle class and takes relatively few ethnic minorities or working class children. Any school, however good the teachers, which has a high proportion of children with English as a second language, with special needs or from an educationally less-advantaged background, is going to have poorer overall results. A bright child sent to the 'best' school will probably benefit academically to some extent, but will contribute less relatively to that school’s performance and will have less experience and knowledge of the whole of society. A bright child sent to a 'less good' school may lose out academically, but will benefit that school more and will have a broader experience of society. (There is also a separate issue of where the child would feel happiest, which is in many ways the most important, but can't be discussed in general terms).

My views on the trade-offs involved can't be separated from the educational experiences of myself and my husband, so a bit of background is necessary on that. We met at the Oxford college we were both studying at. Before that, I had been first at a small village primary school. The intake of this was largely working class, with a sprinkling of the middle class, but it had a head teacher who inspired me. I then went to a comprehensive (mixed-ability) school in a 'good' (= prosperous middle-class) town. My husband, meanwhile, went to a rural primary school (similar to mine, though larger) and then a grammar school which became an independent (fee-paying) school while he was there.

What I take from that is that different criteria apply at different stages. I don’t think moral responsibilities apply to the rest of the society by the time you get to choosing what university you/your child goes to. There is so much benefit achieved by going to the best university for your subject (which is not necessarily Oxbridge) and one student makes so little difference in a university community of thousands, that I think the choice here can be purely self-centred.

The opposite, however, seems to me to be true of primary schools. Given their small size, a handful of bright pupils can make a noticeable difference, and if a child’s academic needs aren't entirely met at school, they can be assisted at home by middle-class parents. Both my husband and I were successful at secondary school and later, even though we did not go to the 'best' primary schools. Instead, we went to what I would call 'good-enough' schools. Similarly, we chose to send L to a school in our catchment area that had good SAT results, but not the best. It seemed to offer other positive features however (a more multicultural background, nicer facilities, better atmosphere) than another more 'successful' school nearby. So far, this seems to have worked out well for L.

As for secondary school, I’m still not sure what is best. I think I would have got a slightly better academic education at a grammar school or private school (like my husband), but the difference wouldn't have been much (I got better 'A' level results than he did) and I was able to go from a comprehensive to Oxbridge. I would be reluctant to send my child to a 'sink' school in the state system, but there was an interesting recent study that suggested that middle-class children sent even to schools such as those could still prosper academically. I don't know what the right answer is yet at that level, but when the time does come to make a decision I want to be able to make one that does take into account wider moral issues as well as my child’s interests.