Don’t look at me, look Michael Gove’s way and all the stuff coming out about making room for more history in the crowded school curriculum.

I’ve a deep suspicion that it’s just a political marketing exercise based on notions that nostalgia for Churchill will put a halo-effect around Cameron, as Conservative leader, as well as raking over how badly the appeasement of Hitler turned out.

Eden invoked his personal opposition to appeasement in the 1930s to justify the Suez invasion in 1956 and Blair invoked the downside of appeasement to justify the Iraq invasion in 2003.

Which tell us that Historicism is alive and flourishing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicism

i’d have thought he’d be more interesting as a study in how people and society change.

The Opium Wars and Britain’s acquisition of Hong Kong do tend to get skipped, perhaps surprisingly so given Milton Friedman’s personal admiration for the colony’s market economy.
http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3532186.html

A more bizarre personal experience relates to my widely praised local reference library – which comes under the same council “directorate” as schools.

For the German federal elections in 2005, I wanted to research some of the finer points of the German electoral system so I went to my central reference library and sought the assistance of a librarian to access the computer based catalogue.

It turned out that the library had several dozen books about the Third Reich but only one text on modern German politics, in the event, a thoroughly respectable academic text.

It later occurred to me to try a similar exercise for France. Sure enough, a dozen or so texts on the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were in the library catalogue but only one text on modern French politics.

A week or so back, I was renewing my library books at the DIY computer terminal when I noticed a rack with a bundle of leaflets on Black History. I’ve certainly no objection to that but I wondered whether the library might helpfully have anything similar relating to suggested readings on the current financial crisis and economic turbulence.

An inquiry at the desk elicited the response that the library had no such leaflet but the librarian helpfully offered to interrogate the computer catalogue. It came up with three suggestions. Two were obscure and the other was Krugman: Return of Depression Economics (P/B) – which was out on loan and which I own and have read.

Neil Robertson’s point was that Churchill is in the national curriculum, so what the fuck is Gove on about? In response, Unity @7 seems to be claiming that doing World War 2 is only an option within the curriculum. Unity: do you mean they may not be forced to do an in-depth project on it, or are you saying that some kids could come out of school not having done WW2 at all at any point?

His argument for democracy – “the worst possible form of government, apart from all the others” – is a strictly pragmatic one, not a principled one derived from (subversive?) ideas about human rights as, say, expressed by Thomas Jefferson in US The Declaration of Independence (1776):

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/freedom/doi/text.html

I suspect Churchill’s real personal quarrel with Nazi Germany, before the outbreak of war, was that he regarded the looming conflict as a contest between an existing imperial power and a much larger European country with frustrated imperial ambitions. In 1940, Britain’s population in the British Isles was about half that of the combined populations of Germany and Austria. This perception of rivalry was hardly novel, hence the arms race between Britain and Germany prior to WW1 and the street celebrations in London at the outbreak of WW1.

Neville Chamblain’s perception of a looming conflict was completely different. With personal experience of trench warfare during WW1, he wanted to avoid, almost at any cost, the possibility of another European war which he realised would probably escalate quickly in Europe regardless of anything that Britain was capable of doing with or without the alliance with France. Britain’s rearmament budgets in the lead up to the war were increasingly skewed towards the RAF and air defences. At the start of the war, the RAF had no heavy bombers of significance.

Much is made by some of Chamberlain’s failure to contract an anti-fascist alliance with the Soviet Union but those who press that claim have no regard for the colossal loss of life during the Ukraine famine of 1932/3 or international perceptions of the Moscow show trials of 1936/7 when many dedicated Communist Party members were convicted of ridiculous crimes, on the basis of evidently coerced confessions, and shot.

With that background, the Soviet regime was regarded as untrustworthy, an assessment soon reinforced with the Germany-Soviet Non-aggression pact of August 1939 and the Friendship Treaty a month later, when Britain and France were already at war with Germany.

It is not widely appreciated that Chamberlain was a sick man – he died of cancer in November 1940.

I’m not quite sure of your point. Are you seriously suggesting that comment should be construed as racist? (BTW, I’m sure Churchill was a racist, though not a particularly bad one by the standards of his era eg Hitler.)

I feel surely that there are many who will greatly enjoy being repeatedly reminded of Churchill’s description of Gandhi as a half-naked fakir:

“It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious middle temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the king-emperor.”

- Winston Churchill, 1930

http://www.kamat.com/mmgandhi/churchill.htm

On consideration, this should stimulate many entertaining discussions in classrooms around Britain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haldane_principle

(Reform have explicitly come out against it, by the way, but I suspect that’s because, being a typical bunch of thinktankateers, they don’t even know it exists. David Willetts does, though, and agrees with it.)

Why can’t we have something similar for educators? It’s what everyone wants – and needs.

This Act provided a constitutional framework for limited internal self-government in India:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_India_Act_1935

Churchill saw the legislation as heralding the breakup of the British Empire and evidently believed that India should continue to be governed from Whitehall. Of course, in a way, his prescience was eventually vindicated but he was untroubled by any doubts about the preferences of the citizens of India or notions of democracy. Compare Disraeli’s perceptive private view of Empire, expressed in a letter to Lord Malmesbury in 1852: “Those wretched colonies will all be independent too, in a few years, and are a millstone round our neck.”

Churchill was regarded as an irritant by the Conservative governments of the 1930s and this factor became an important consideration why he was not offered ministerial posts before the outbreak of WW2. Btw “The fact is that the rearmament programme was seriously begun under Baldwin, pushed along more slowly than Churchill wanted, but more quickly than the opposition advocated. Defence spending, pegged at about 2.5 per cent of GNP until 1935, increased to 3.8 per cent by 1937.”
Peter Clarke: Hope and Glory: Britain 1900-2000 (Penguin Books, 2004) p.186.

“In a major reversal of rearmament policy Britain today announced new expansion plans for its army, navy and air force. The plans, in a defence white paper [of March 1935], are to demonstrate that Britain does not take lightly Germany’s continuing rearmament. . . ”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,,1225204,00.html

FWIW my clear impression is that those who press loudly for more history in the curriculum of schools tend to be very selective about the history they want included. When tackled on this they press concerns about making space in a crowded curriculum for general science, vocational subjects, sports and RE.

Which is why the government should gets its claws out of the education system. I don’t trust Labour or the Tories not to attempt brainwashing.

So, what this is all about is Gove saying to the Tory rank and file that its going to be our turn to play politics with the National Curriculum.

What is this, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’?

Gove is a total tool. It is useful that bloggers are around to highlight the most blatant lies and misinformation; however, I think that in the current Tory-friendly media environment, the mainstream is unlikely to pick up on this.

As for the proposed educational reforms, I think that having taken several small but significant steps backwards under Nu-Labour, we are about to be sledgehammered back into the 1700s (metaphorically) and simultaneously forwards (chronologically) into a frankly horrific, nightmare version of ‘education’ under the Tories.

It will somehow ‘succeed’ in synthesising the worst aspects of our current system and the worst aspects of the (existing) American system – with a heavy dose of authoritarianism and bureaucracy thrown in.

Who would be a teacher?
Who would want to be a student?

I’m fucking delighted that I’m out of it all.

I do look forward to Gove’s reforms though (In terms of vouchers and the like) and support Tony Blair as the EU Council President.

Still, who needs factual recall.