Social History and Mass Education in the 1970s

Abstract

This chapter, and the final part of this book, explains the unmaking of the ‘history of everyday life’. It is about the teaching of social history in comprehensive schools during the 1970s, where mass secondary education up to the age of sixteen became the norm. We see first how the English comprehensive school utilized the ‘history of everyday life’ to teach its ordinary pupils, including ‘immigrant’ pupils and those taking the new ‘Certificate of Secondary Education’ (CSE) examination. However, these practices came to discredit the ‘history of everyday life’ as the decade drew on, especially when competing with new school subjects such as sociology and as part of the problematic project of ‘multicultural’ education. As Britain’s population became more ethnically diverse and female participation in post-16 education increased, young citizens demanded a social history that could accommodate the analysis of power. This shift ultimately evacuated the ‘history of everyday life’ from the spaces of mass education that it had once occupied.