Thursday, July 12, 2007




Churchill dropped from England's history syllabus

Britain's World War II prime minister Winston Churchill has been cut from a list of key historical figures recommended for teaching in English secondary schools, a government agency says.

The radical overhaul of the school curriculum for 11- to 14-year-olds is designed to bring secondary education up to date and allow teachers more flexibility in the subjects they teach, the Government said.

But although Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi, Joseph Stalin and Martin Luther King have also been dropped from the detailed guidance accompanying the curriculum, Mr Churchill's exclusion is likely to leave traditionalists aghast.


British kids won't have Churchill as part of their curriculum?
That would be the equivalent of taking FDR out of ours. I don't get this as all.

But I guess since they took Hitler out, Churchill doesn't make much sense without him.

3 Comments:

At 10:06 PM, Blogger Paddy said...

Bah, kids these days.

 
At 10:15 PM, Blogger Ashen Shard said...

I think it has to do with moving the focus from well known individuals to the common person. History is nothing without the ordinary individual, and these figures would have been nothing without their support.

As an example, I haven't read any of these works, but I heard there have been those who have studied a single American town during the Revolution and found that the war had absolutely no impact on the town. The war happened, governments changed, but life went on without interruption.

 
At 5:25 PM, Blogger Kyle said...

Ashen Shard. Perhaps you can say that about the American Revolution. The mechanized warfare and increased media of WW2 make that impossible. Especially in England, which was right on the border of the whole thing, when it wasn't in the middle of it. To compare the two wars effect on the common populace of England and America is simply foolish.

 

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