Now is the time for official heroes to come to the aid of the party

NICHOLAS TATE thinks that heroes should be brought back to English history. Pupils need them for a sense of their national past, he said last week. He accused teachers of neglecting Alfred the Great, Nelson, Livingstone and Florence Nightingale, in a conspiracy to stop "the transmission of an established account of the past" and substitute "our brave new world of relativism and deconstruction".

Now you might think that Dr Tate was some retired gent who expressed these views in a reader's letter to his local weekly rag in Hampshire. Far from it! Dr Tate is chief executive of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority. He is the field marshal of all the school inspectors of England. He was speaking to a Council of Europe meeting, so that some unbriefed Dane might assume that this was the general English view of history teaching.

How anyone with views quite so primitive came to hold Dr Tate's job is a mystery. One might expect to hear this sort of thing from the chief executive of the Serbian school curriculum: "Less seditious chatter about the peasant experience! More about how Kraljevic Marko slaughtered Turks and shared his wine with his war-horse!" England was supposed to be a bit better than that, especially after the epic battle of the 1980s over the history core curriculum.

Margaret Thatcher and Kenneth Baker, then Secretary of State for Education, recruited a working party and pressured it to evict "empathy" from history teaching and bring back kings, dates, battles and patriotic heroes instead. But the curriculum working party, to its eternal glory, refused to do so. It fell back a little under the storm of Mrs Thatcher's anger over its first draft, and made some concessions to traditional "facts". But its members insisted that the state had no business to enforce one particular version of history. To teach history was to help people to gain imaginative touch with the past, and then to make their own sense out of it.

Talking to Rab Butler about education, back in 1941, Churchill had said: "Tell the children that Wolfe won Quebec!". But then he added that patriotism must not be inserted into the curriculum "by order, but by suggestion".

This is the difficulty with Dr Tate's appeal for heroes. He seems to think that he can appoint them. The hero exists, in popular consciousness, and I am certainly not arguing that "democratic" education means that such figures have to be deconstructed away to nothing. The job of the history teacher is to accept the presence of hero-myths in that marvellous rubbish tip that constitutes the individual's knowledge of history, to point out as far as possible what is true about the myth and what is fictive, and to get a student interested in the hero's function - how was the cult developed, and for whom?

Seeking heroes, I went the other day to see the film Braveheart. As an account of the real William Wallace, or of late 13th-century Scotland, it is a joke. The list of cultural howlers and historical distortions rolls on for ever. As in the similar Rob Roy, the English feature as degenerate upper-class sadists (this stereotype derives from American caricatures of Lord North and George III, not from Scottish tradition - let alone from what we know of the mores of a Plantagenet court).

You go to scoff ... and yet there are moments when this shilling schlocker takes you unawares. One strong-minded, progressive friend found herself in tears. Another Scottish colleague reacted with a furious attack on the film for reducing his country's struggles to crude anti-English racism. Both went to the film certain that they were immune to its allure - but neither was. They saw a child give a flower to a boy standing at his murdered father's grave, and the flower was a thistle. They heard a man speak easily of his country's "freedom" without seeking a lesser word. Suddenly, they were undone. Wallace is a real hero, which means that he lives on in the shadows at the back of people's heads.

I remember going to a churchyard where men and women stood in the rain to honour William Wallace and sing a psalm for him. It was the 124th, the psalm that only small endangered nations (the children of Israel, the Scots, the Czechs) really understand:

If that the Lord had not our right

sustain'd,

When cruel men against us

furiously

Rose up in wrath to make of us

their prey ...

There are popular heroes and official heroes. But the official ones are often popular cults taken over by a state anxious to share the glamour. A hero seems to rise from nowhere at the moment when hope is lost. He or she (for Joan of Arc was France's Wallace) rebukes the defeatist nobles or kings and fills them with the faith of common people. And a miracle follows. Wallace became "Guardian of Scotland". Like Joan, he was caught and put to death in the end. But, improbably, his very small, poor country survived. The psalm goes on:

Ev'n as a bird out of the fowler's

snare

Escapes away, so is our soul set

free;

Broke are their nets, and thus

escaped we.

When these saving heroes brushed aside conventional leaderships, they did not do so in any revolutionary way. Instead, they seemed to provide a "loyal" transfusion of plebeian, national vitality into the veins of an enfeebled ruling group. Joan of Arc did not try to supplant the Dauphin, and in fact made his coronation possible. Wallace, son of a small landowner, remained uncritically loyal to the pretty worthless King John Balliol. Both raised a new kind of army suitable for a national independence struggle: a mixture of private feudal forces with mass levies conscripted directly from the population.

The hero, in other words, stands for a crude idea of government by consent. "Their" privilege is to rule, but it is only "our" muscle and vitality that keeps them ruling. This is why "the hero lives on in the hearts of his people" - why a 17th-century Scottish cottage was likely to contain not only a Bible but Blind Harry's "Wallace" or Barbour's "Brus" (Bruce), both long medieval poems which were often recited aloud. Significantly, Scottish aristocrats and intellectuals felt that they possessed their heroes less intensely than the common people.

And here we get back to Dr Tate. It seems to me that he muddles up three categories: hero, "great figure" and model. King Alfred, though clearly important, is not clasped to England's bosom as a hero. Nelson is a proper popular hero, not least because of turning a blind eye and because of Emma, but hardly a model. Nightingale may be a model to imitate, but - perhaps unfairly - is not heroic material. David Livingstone, in my view, is an ex-hero who is far more interesting for what he failed to do than for what he did. Nobody should try to be like him, and anyway he wasn't English.

Of course there are huge individuals in history, some of them embedded in heroic myth. They deserve respect, because they are respected. What is not respectable at all is the attempt to conscript those individuals - in Dr Tate's spirit - into party-political service.

For nearly 20 years, Tory governments have been trying to debase the teaching of history into a propaganda weapon, into a machine for manufacturing social unity. There is to be only one version of British history, a landscaped garden the patriotic per- spectives of which converge on the present, in which everything was for the best. In that nostalgic vista, England's heroes are condemned to be the garden gnomes.