The British are destroying history education

The British have managed to totally bollix up their history curriculum. This is really unbelievable.

Secondary schools will strip back the traditional curriculum in favour of lessons on debt management, the environment and healthy eating, ministers revealed.

Even Winston Churchill no longer merits a mention after a drastic slimming-down of the syllabus to create more space for "modern" issues.

Along with Hitler, Gandhi, Stalin and Martin Luther King, the former prime minister has been dropped from a list of key figures to be mentioned in history teaching.

This means pupils may no longer hear about his stirring speeches during the Second World War, when he told Parliament that defeating Hitler would be Britain's "finest hour".

The only individuals now named in guidance accompanying the curriculum are anti-slavery campaigners Olaudah Equiano and William Wilberforce.

The omission of Churchill added to a growing row over Labour reforms to secondary education - the most radical since the national curriculum was introduced in 1988.

How can you even imagine teaching British history to British students and strip Churchill from the curriculum? Is the goal of these educators to destroy any pride at all that children might develop in their country's history? I can see how teaching about Olaudah Equiano and William Wilberforce's fight against slavery can fit in with the "teach only the warts" approach to history teaching, but you would think that such an plan would want to include Gandhi also. And how do you teach World War II and not have Hitler in the curriculum. Is the whole curriculum going to be taught in the passive voice: wars were started; battles were fought; and wars were ended. Let's just not mention any individuals who might have been key in those events.

And even if they don't care about these particular individuals, they should care about getting kids interested in studying history. And Winston Churchill rightly fascinates kids. They love hearing stories about him and excerpts from his speeches. When I get to that period in history, I have about 40 Churchill quotes that I put up around the room, just to give them something to look at in the remote chance that they are bored in class. Every year, I get so many kids who get such a kick out of reading those quotes and memorizing some of the better ones. If American teens can get chills hearing about Churchill, just imagine what British kids would feel.

If some school system tried to do this here, I would hope that there would be such an outrage that they would have to change the curriculum. We'll see if British citizens will stand up to insist that the finest hour of their history gets its due in their schools.