Well it's only 9am and I'm already ranting...

... which is something of a record even at Chateau Angevin...

This morning's torrent of ire is directed against a report from the BBC website, which I shall quote in full (apologies to the Beeb, sue me if you like!.

....Britain's part in the slave trade will be studied by secondary school pupils in England and Wales from September. Should the history of the slave trade become part of the national curriculum?

The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) has said that children aged 11 to 14 will study the development of the slave trade and colonisation. The study of World War I, WWII and the Holocaust is already compulsory for history pupils.

Children's Minister Kevin Brennan said: "Although we may sometimes be ashamed to admit it, the slave trade is an integral part of British history....

...and from a related article...

...The curriculum has been developed with the assistance of the Understanding Slavery Initiative, which encourages teachers, educators and young people to examine the history and legacies of the transatlantic slave trade through museum artefacts.

The initiative's learning project manager, Ruth Fisher, said: "There's a lot of mis-education about slavery and it hasn't really been taught in schools at all.

"It's quite interesting in terms of today's history and what students need to know about the past to understand the present.

"You can't really talk about the history of the British empire without discussing this part of history."


Now, don't get me wrong. I love history, as even a casual perusal of my bookshelves will demonstrate, and it was touch and go whether I read music, history or politics at university. (Music won, for a whole variety of reasons which aren't germane to this post). I am a passionate advocate of teaching children history because I believe it 'grounds' them to know where they came from and how society got where it is today. And this is just my point - children are NOT taught history even approaching adequately today. Instead, as this latest exercise in lunacy demonstrates, they approach the subject in a topic-based manner in which 'themes' are plucked out and 'discussed' in almost total isolation from what went before and what else was going on at the time. Furthermore, it seems to me, children are only asked to consider what came after any particular 'topic' when the current pressure group of choice perceives an opportunity to make everybody feel guilty about something. A few years ago people were far more exercised about the Holocaust and thus we have this 'topic' appearing as a compulsoty subject; now it seems 'slavery' is taking over.

Again, don't misunderstand me - I think children SHOULD learn about both the Holocaust and the part slavery played in the development of the British Empire (and indeed plenty of other countries' colonial empires). However I don't think either of these issues can be really understood and put in context without learning a whole bunch of other things which came before, sometimes things which occurred many centuries before and which might, at first glance, seem totally unrelated. Personally, I can see nothing wrong with the deeply unfashionable 'linear' teaching of the subject I underwent - ie. we all mucked around making Viking shields, grubbed around in mud pretending to be Saxon and capered around a Maypole dressed in whatever our hapless parents could kid themselves 'looked Tudor' (I regret this latter usually involved tights and puffa jackets) during primary and junior school and then commenced at the events immediately prior to 1066 when we went to senior school, following the timeline sequentially through the Norman, medieval, Tudor and subsequent periods thereafter. Unimaginative it may have been, but at least it gave us all a sense of a continuous progression, a feeling that 'one thing led to another' which this plucking out of 'topics' most certainly does not.

Ruth Fisher is quite right when she says children need to understand the past to make sense of the present but the sad fact is they usually DON'T know enough about what went BEFORE Ms Fisher's particular field of concern to be able to consider it sensibly. Sally, a perfect example of what the modern system turns out in terms of historical understanding, admits herself she knows next to nothing about British or world history, despite being one of the most intelligent and articulate teenagers I've come across. She herself has said she's learnt more about the subject in the two months she's lived at Chateau Angevin than she did during the entire course of her schooling - which bearing in mind we live 'normal' lives and don't spend all day sitting around yapping philosophically about things, is really quite shocking. As a result of this huge hole in her knowledge, when anything kicks off in the world today she has no framework on which to hang it - and consequentially usually just ignores it. I can't believe she is the only one to react like this, which leads me to conclude there must be a whole load of teens out there who are wandering around in a vacuum of ignorance, unable even to begin to put world events in context: they are effectively intellectually anaesthetised. Given this, is it therefore very surprising society is in the mess it is and we hear so many bleats about the apathy of young people to all things political?

I believe humans have a basic need to feel themselves part of the 'humanity fabric' and I would suggest knowing where they come from and how this has made the world the way it is is an integral part of this. Cherry-picking fashionable topics doesn't teach them very much, despite Ms Fisher's well-intentioned intiatives. I would suggest learning about what went before - how societies developed the conditions in which slavery COULD flourish, or, for example, where lots of ordinary people viewed exterminating Jews as a desireable course of action - would.

Or is something more sinister going on here? - it the intention merely to make the young shoulder the responsibility for what went before so they, out of such artifically-induced guilt, hand over ring-fenced rights to whichever group feels itself hard-done-by today? If this is the case, it will backfire badly I suspect, because without any context in which to place anything, people are only going to see they are being expected to feel guilty for something they don't understand, don't feel they are responsible for, and which they don't perceive as having anything to do with them. Rather than feeling guilty, therefore, they are merely going to feel somebody is EXPECTING them to feel guilty and in fact are merely going to feel resentful - against the very people on whom the perceived historical injury was perpetrated. Thus, in this crazy approach, the likes of Ms Fisher are displaying not only their own prejudices (ie. they are portraying people as 'goodies' and 'baddies' where in real life things, as we all know, are a lot more complicated) but also their own appalling lack of historical knowledge - there are plenty of examples where societies so bitterly resented being 'made to pay' in some way for their past crimes against others that worse crimes were rendered possible (in a simplistic way WWII is a perfect example of this). All Ms Fisher and her cohorts are going to achieve is an increase in membership of the BNP.

So, Ms Fisher, kindly direct your well-meaning interfering towards a more sensible target - re-establishing the proper teaching of history in schools. I would argue this would be part of the means of establishing a notion of social responsibility in young people - ie. the things we do today affect generations coming after us - in a wider context that the endless eco-debate. Rather than getting your ego-trip 'apology for past wrongs' this alternative approach would surely have the knock on benefit of ensuring things like slavery don't happen in the future. Which, surely, could only be a good thing?