Teaching the “non-examinable” Estella Lewis’s contribution to post-war history education in the UK

Abstract

ABSTRACT Estella Lewis’s handbook for teachers, Teaching History in Secondary Schools, published in 1960, is examined to reflect upon the teaching of history in the UK during the postwar period, a text that addresses the “problem” of teaching history to “non-academic” children attending secondary modern schools. Lewis’s ideas, attitudes, and values towards this question are explored fully in order to show her contesting history education aims, content, and methods. Her work as a history educator, alongside other authors, is significant in the way it sheds light on the largely unexamined discourse on how history teaching in postwar secondary modern schools was conceptualised. Generally presented as deserted and unchanging, the landscape of postwar history education that appears in Lewis’s text is a social practice bustling with activity.