Condemned To Forget The Past
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. - George Santayana
This news from Britain indicates that the current crop of "education" bureaucrats there have willfully decided to condemn students to ignorance of the past entirely. They have eliminated Winston Churchill and even Adolph Hitler from the history curriculum. In order to make room for lessons about trendy fads and poorly defined "life skills".
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.
The lights of Western civilization are flickering and dimming all across Europe. But never more so than in Britain. They are purposely taking the past away from their people. It is both horribly sad and horribly frightening. Students may never hear the words of a true hero of Britain. The man who made stirring speeches and warned - repeatedly - of the coming darkness. His words are even more prophetic now than they were when he spoke them:
Last time I saw it all coming and I cried aloud to my own fellow countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention. Up till the year 1933 or even 1935, Germany might have been saved from the awful fate which has overtaken her and we might all have been spared the miseries Hitler let loose upon mankind.
There never was a war in history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe. It could have been prevented, in my belief, without the firing of a single shot, and Germany might be powerful, prosperous and honored today; but no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool.
Those words from Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech of 1946 could as easily have been spoken about the crisis that is bearing down on the West right now. But the lights are going out. No one is paying attention.
Civilization, History | Gaius Friday, 13 July , 2007
Other Links to this Post
-
Maggie's Farm — Saturday, 14 July , 2007 @ 4:19 am
By feeblemind, Friday, 13 July , 2007 @ 3:01 pm
I can understand the evil, warmongering, conservative, imperialistic Winston Churchill being dumped, but congenial old Uncle Joe? Surely not. What about Mao? Sigh……….
By TimF, Saturday, 14 July , 2007 @ 12:57 am
All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Britain recedes into the darkness…
By daveinboca, Saturday, 14 July , 2007 @ 6:16 am
I wonder if the Labour Party has kept either of the two World Wars of the last century in their curriculum for the precociously enlightended schoolkids? The illuminati at the top of the UK education establishment must be taking their cues from the BBC, which studiously ignores news that does not fit into its ideological Iron Maiden.