Conscription of the past
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1504051,00.html
Don't try to turn history teaching into a simple-minded morality play
Tristram Hunt
Saturday June 11, 2005
The Guardian
Before his political decapitation at the general election, shadow
education secretary Tim Collins set out to devise a new history
curriculum. "The survival of the British nation," he told an audience
of headteachers, depended on an understanding of "our shared heritage
and the nature of the struggles, foreign and domestic, which have
secured our freedoms."
Mr Collins revealed that he had asked the historian Andrew Roberts to
draw up a list of key facts about British history that all children
would have to learn by the time they left school. There were too many
"yawning gaps" in teenagers' basic historical knowledge, he warned. The
Daily Telegraph concurred and was quick to offer its readers a guide to
the British past, complete with headings such as "The Anglo-Saxons: The
Germans become English" and "The Globe Goes Pink - The Victorians".
Tristram Hunt
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/a3fbcc1c428dee93
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