I've been writing and discussing quite a bit this week about the use of sources in school history. I'm always reminded of Tony McAleavy's imperative to go back to the history and start from what historians actually do: 
So I had a go this evening, not with a book off the shelf, but by picking the first article from most recent edition of the English Historical Review. Quite an interesting piece on Cardinal Beaufort. It's packed full of fascinating analysis of the sources. Take this passage:
On the one hand, you can read this passage and see how the use of sources in (say) GCSE History echoes this. There's cross-referencing, comments on provenance, and an emphasis on the 'weight' that should be given to the evidence.
On the other hand, what shines through in this article is what makes this analysis possible. The author has an intimate knowledge of the individual sources and the archives from which they come. There's an in-depth knowledge of the context of the source's production.
Current approaches to sources tend to emphasise the former (comparison, provenance, weight) and play down the latter (content of whole source, specific context of production). The question is, can you do former without doing the latter in a historically meaningful way?
Invariably, school history must be a simplification of what happens in the discipline. But have we chosen to simply the right things? Was it a mistake to assume that we should simplify the context of production? Or to focus on a short extract rather than whole source?
It's also noteworthy how frequently analysis of the sources is tied to how other historians have used those sources. Consider this passage:
Again, on one level this looks remarkably like what we ask pupils to do: use some sources to evaluate the strength of a particular line of argument. But, again, what does this author (Mark Whelan) know that enables him to do this? The answer is: an awful lot.
This reminded me a little of Rachel Foster's work on the Goldhagen-Browning debate, where she focused pupils on how two historians interpreted the same source in radically different ways. We can get pupils to this stage, but it requires instruction on the specifics of the case.
I'm planning to write something soon on approaches to sources in history education. I, for one, think it's a vital component of history education. But I am not at all convinced that we've made the right choices in terms of how sources get used with pupils, particularly in exams.
