It seems Basil Fawlty has nothing on our country’s classrooms when it comes to avoiding hurting the feelings of supposedly vulnerable groups.
In a soon-to-be-published report on and entitled ‘Teaching emotive and controversial History 3-19’, commissioned by the Department for Education, the Historical Association found that many schools have quietly dropped teaching about the Crusades and the Holocaust -- despite the latter supposedly being a mandatory part of the National Curriculum -- for fear of offending certain groups of pupils.
To quote the report's conclusion, as disclosed in yesterday’s Sunday Mail, the Historical Association found that: ‘In particular settings, teachers of history are unwilling to challenge highly contentious or charged versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship.’
While having no wish to see either the Holocaust or the Crusades, or the both of them, exhaust the entire history curriculum, to teach neither for fear doing so might upset some pupils is not exactly the right way to go about wideneing their mental horizons or to create a cohesive community.
No school subject is better equipped than is history to fashion a common cohesive identity. Whoever controls the past controls the future, as I think it was George Orwell who first observed. Whoever did, the remark holds true.
There is no easy or painless solution to the manufacture of a cohesive society from such multifarious groups as Britain has now come to contain. Pussy-footing around contentious areas of history in school is a recipe for politicising the curriculum and thereby to turn it into a political football whereby appeasement to those willing to complain the loudest becomes the price of gaining some momentary social peace and quiet inside and outside the classroom.
To allow the feelings of pupils, or of their parents, to determine what version of the past is taught in a nation's schools is for it to relinquish control of its future to those groups in it willing to shout the loudest -- or kick the hardest.
As Basil Fawlty's long-suffering Spanish waiter Manuel would have been able to testify with authority, that is not a good way to run a business, including any nation that wishes to preserve itself as one.
Comments (1)
Unless this attitude is challenged it will legitimise the efforts of those with extremist agendas to indoctrinate impressionable minds with pseudo-history. Almost every culture has unpalatable aspects to its history; it is a sign of how mature and well-developed that culture is if it can acknowledge them for what they are.
Posted by MJW![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.civitas.org.uk/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
|
April 11, 2007 2:08 PM
Posted on April 11, 2007 14:08