Thank you so much for this moment of freedom! It brought to mind my own memories of the Romanian anti-Communist revolution in 1989. Yes, you describe perfectly that feeling of exhilaration, and only someone who participated in such an event can understand that feeling. Isn't it incredible that so many years later we have to fight to restore freedom in the West?
After WWII, during the fifties and early sixties, school children were taught by teachers who had personally known of the exisential struggle against the Nazis. They grew up with an awareness that is now rare in school children, with a feeling of some connection to what their parents had gone through. Of course, history was taught differently in those days and popular culture, albeit it with cartoon heroes at times, celebrated the nation.
Similarly but to a lesser extent the struggle against the soviet union permeated school children in the seventies and eighties. There was some sense, at least, that freedom was something fought for and, crucially, worth fighting for. There was a still a direct connection to parents who understood recent history.
Today, there is no direct connection between children and a generation that understands the preciousness of freedom nor is the teaching of history anything like it once was. Modularisation of the history syllabus destroys narrative, 'our story', an awareness of how we got to here, an appreciation of the sacrifices generations before us made.
The history syllabus, so contentious these days, matters greatly which is why Labour's review is so worrying. School children today see WWII as ancient history, the fall of the Berlin wall as something to do with Germany devoid of wider implications, and life is focused on a degraded present disconnected from what went before.
An increasing number of people living in the UK are culturally connected to other countries and their different histories. The West is at risk as its history is forgotten or even traduced.
We do indeed need to counter all this at every opportunity.
Thank you so much for this moment of freedom! It brought to mind my own memories of the Romanian anti-Communist revolution in 1989. Yes, you describe perfectly that feeling of exhilaration, and only someone who participated in such an event can understand that feeling. Isn't it incredible that so many years later we have to fight to restore freedom in the West?
After WWII, during the fifties and early sixties, school children were taught by teachers who had personally known of the exisential struggle against the Nazis. They grew up with an awareness that is now rare in school children, with a feeling of some connection to what their parents had gone through. Of course, history was taught differently in those days and popular culture, albeit it with cartoon heroes at times, celebrated the nation.
Similarly but to a lesser extent the struggle against the soviet union permeated school children in the seventies and eighties. There was some sense, at least, that freedom was something fought for and, crucially, worth fighting for. There was a still a direct connection to parents who understood recent history.
Today, there is no direct connection between children and a generation that understands the preciousness of freedom nor is the teaching of history anything like it once was. Modularisation of the history syllabus destroys narrative, 'our story', an awareness of how we got to here, an appreciation of the sacrifices generations before us made.
The history syllabus, so contentious these days, matters greatly which is why Labour's review is so worrying. School children today see WWII as ancient history, the fall of the Berlin wall as something to do with Germany devoid of wider implications, and life is focused on a degraded present disconnected from what went before.
An increasing number of people living in the UK are culturally connected to other countries and their different histories. The West is at risk as its history is forgotten or even traduced.
We do indeed need to counter all this at every opportunity.