A historic opportunity

To understand the present and navigate the future, it is necessary to know about the past. In Scotland, we have never had a greater need to know how we got to this point in our evolving sense of nationhood. Scottish history is an increasingly popular subject of study in our universities and, as the sudden burst of new books illustrates, is of growing general fascination, but it has been declining at school level. Two years ago the absence of a specifically Scottish question in the late modern history section of the Higher history exam for the first time in the Higher Still curriculum sparked a discussion about whether there should be a guaranteed Scottish question. The dilemma was that without Scottish history being a bankable topic, fewer schools would teach it, but that a guarantee would narrow the curriculum, resulting in questions being too predictable.