Clive Aslett rightly bemoans our attitude to the past and the poor state of history teaching in schools.
But this raises a question. Do we really want young people to get a clear-eyed picture of Britain's past? Do we want them to suspect that we haven't had a legitimate monarch since 1485? Or to know that our capitalist prosperity is founded upon a brutal process of "primitive accumulation" that entailed the theft of monastic and common land; the repression of those market forces that would have helped working people; the criminalization of the unemployed; and the exploitation of the weak?
What sort of political views would this lead to?
We were taught a lot of that at school. Conclusion: the English are right bastards. (That's mostly a joke; not entirely, however.)
I believe (but can't prove) that history teaching throughout history has been poor by the standards you set. If the Bible is a history book then it is a partisan one with colossal omissions. The kind of history satirised in '1066 and All That' is risibly threadbare. You don't have to be a Marxist to want to look for mechanisms. Good history is hard because it necessitates reading very widely.
Posted by: Backword Dave | August 24, 2006 at 12:52 PM
"We were taught a lot of that at school." Yes Dave - and do our rulers really want more people like you?
Posted by: chris | August 24, 2006 at 01:25 PM
The time of reckoning is due. My surname would seem to suggest that I am - at whatever distance - decended from slaves. So where are my reparations?
Posted by: Tom Freeman | August 24, 2006 at 02:17 PM
A clear-eyed view of the past would certainly be inconsistent with that drivelling website about Parliamentary Enclosures. What a feat: it doesn't even explain what common land was, who the commoners were, who owned cultivated land, who owned common land, and how each sort of land was managed. Looks to be in the lamentable tradition of the Hammonds, I'd say.
Posted by: dearieme | August 24, 2006 at 04:13 PM
The real drivel was in the piece on enclosures at that "Grade Nine" site from Alberta:
"These reforms were needed so that England could become the world's first industrial nation."
Posted by: Kevin Carson | August 25, 2006 at 07:15 AM