Spartacus Blog

Spartacus needs your help in continuing to provide free educational materials

Monday, 4th September, 2017

Twenty-years ago this month, all history departments in the United Kingdom received an unusual gift. It was a Spartacus Educational mouse-mat giving details of a new free website.

I first started teaching in 1977 and three years later was a member of a small group of teachers who established Tressell Publications. In 1984, along with my wife, I started Spartacus Educational. It was such a great success that I gave up full-time teaching in 1987 and concentrated on publishing educational books and software.

Business was good until Rupert Murdoch entered educational publishing by buying William Collins (later HarperCollins). By the early 1990s the company was publishing full-colour history books for the classroom that were cheaper than I could get my own books printed in England. Murdoch achieved this by having the books produced in Third World countries. He also had the capital to order large print-runs to keep the costs low. The game was up and like the other sixteen small independent educational publishers, we stopped producing books. In 1995 I returned to the classroom and left my wife to sell-off the stock.

I was teaching at Sackville Comprehensive School when I discovered the internet in 1996. At the time there were very few websites available. For example, only one newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, had a website. It was looking at the Nine Planets, a multimedia website that contained encyclopedic information about the Solar System, when I realised the potential the medium had for education.

At the time I was producing local history booklets for my students. This included a study of the women's suffrage movement in East Grinstead, including the biographies of Marie Corbett, Margery Ashby and Cicely Fisher. I thought that if I could find a way of putting this material on the web, it could be used by other local teachers with the internet. I bought a copy of Coral Webmaster and began constructing a website. A local internet provider agreed to sponsor the venture by paying the online costs of the website. As well as local women I also produced biographies of others involved in the struggle. By the summer of 1997 I had enough material to launch the Emancipation of Women section of the Spartacus Educational website.

With the last of our savings we sent out the mouse-mat to schools in September 1997. At the time there was no way you could make money from a website. That is why other educational publishers did not follow our example. I wrote the new material in my spare-time. I also uploaded material that had previously been published in book form by Spartacus Educational. It was all for free. Now it was impossible for Rupert Murdoch to undercut us.

To encourage other teachers to provide free materials I helped establish the Association of Teacher Websites. I was also a member of the European Virtual School and the European History E-Learning Project (E-Help), a project to encourage and improve use of ICT and the internet in classrooms across the continent.

Five members of the People's Will being executed on 3rd April, 1881

Over the next few years other companies launched websites: Google (September, 1998), The Guardian (January, 1999), Wikipedia (January, 2001), Facebook (February, 2004) and Twitter (March, 2006). I remained in the classroom until the launch of Google AdSense in March 2003. It was now possible to work full-time on the website. By August, 2017, the Spartacus Website contained 20,158,647 words and 32,065 sources.

After we lost our sponsorship, Spartacus Educational was able to pay for the website from advertising. This is no longer the case. Like other free websites we are struggling to recover our production costs. At the same time, Google has introduced domain-rankings that gives preference to major corporations.

Spartacus Educational is committed to producing free content, especially to those countries that find it difficult to purchase books, but we need your help. There are several things you could do for us. (1) Do not use ad-blocker. (2) Share our pages via Twitter, Facebook, etc. (3) Make a small donation or a small monthly subscription. For more details, see our Support Us page.

John Simkin