Brits wont teach Churchill?!?

Question

I heard Winston wont be part of the national curricula.... Global warming will be. How pollitically correct! Al gore will be proud. Well, hope we still teach about Truman and churchill here in the states. What do you think?

sourece: associated foreign press

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070712/wl_uk_afp/britaineducation

Answer 1

Forget it... you are the victim of tabloid journalism, dredging up false and sensationalist stories that usually rely on a certain extremely twisted and not-based-in-reality interpretation.

These stories crop up every few years on slow news days, or to distract you from the real evil in society. Funnily enough, they always have a certain conservative, talk-back radio flavour.

Come back in two years and if Churchill is NOT being taught in British scholls I'll give you a hundred bucks.

Now, perhaps the kids could learn that Churchill championed the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, allowed the foolish militarily ignorant Lord Beaverbrook to control British war production, sent equipment to Russia to be wasted or lost en route while starving Singapore of much-needed equipment, with disastrous results, blamed the excellent General Auchinlek of 'losing' the North African campaign after he won the important and decisive First battle of Alamein, promoted the mediocre and self-promoting General Montgomery way beyond his ability, and all the time re-wrote history as he went along to make himself look good.

And as if any Americans know about Churchill- you have the most limited and limiting appreciation of world history of anyone. You are in fact famous for your ignorance of other countries. Nothing personal, but...

Answer 2

Yet another news story designed for alarmists like you.

They're eliminating recommendations for studying most individuals, so you immediately compare it to an event and pretend they're the same thing. The article even says most individuals are eliminated.

Notice the article doesn't claim they got rid of WWII, they just aren't teaching the great man of history method. Global warming vs. hero worship.

And no we don't teach much about Churchill in middle school, other than he ran Britain during WWII. Hero worship went out of style in teaching history quite sometime ago.

Answer 3

I cannot believe this and think you must have misunderstood. Perhaps in some curriculum Churchill wouldn't be appropriate, like one that includes global warming, but I think in any history class in Britain, dealing with Britain, Churchill will be included. Unfortunately, probably in the same way we include our national "heroes" varnished and missing some truth.

Answer 4

You bring up an interesting point.

Recent history has it that Al Gore invented the internet.

It follows that a lot of history is being invented on the fly as well

The end result for me, is that the invented story has at the very least some original plot as the recent tales of angst has a very shallow ring to them
.

Answer 5

i cant see that being correct, the Brits love discussing Chruchill - he recently came top of the list in both greatest briton (churchill during the war) and worst briton (churchill after the war)

Answer 6

I'll let William Manchester speak for me and for anyone who values history and Sir Winston:




" THE French had collapsed. The Dutch had been overwhelmed. The Belgians had surrendered. The British army, trapped, fought free and fell back toward the Channel ports, converging on a fishing town whose name was then spelled Dunkerque.

Behind them lay the sea.

It was England’s greatest crisis since the Norman conquest, vaster than those precipitated by Philip II’s Spanish Armada, Louis XIV’s triumphant armies, or Napoleon’s invasion barges massed at Boulogne. This time Britain stood alone...t
......Now the 220,000 Tommies at Dunkirk, Britain’s only hope, seemed doomed. On the Flanders beaches they stood around in angular, existential attitudes, like dim purgatorial souls awaiting disposition. There appeared to be no way to bring more than a handful of them home. The Royal Navy’s vessels were inadequate. King George VI has been told that they would be lucky to save 17,000. The House of Commons was warned to prepare for “hard and heavy tidings.”

Then, from the streams and estuaries of Kent and Dover, a strange fleet appeared: trawlers and tugs, scows and fishing sloops, lifeboats and pleasure craft, smacks and coasters; the island ferry Grade Fields; Tom Sopwith’s America’s Cup challenger Endeavour; even the London fire brigade’s fire-float Massey Shaw — all of them manned by civilian volunteers:

English fathers, sailing to rescue England’s exhausted, bleeding sons.

Even today what followed seems miraculous. Not only were Britain’s soldiers delivered; so were French support troops: a total of 338,682 men. But wars are not won by fleeing from the enemy. And British morale was still unequal to the imminent challenge.

These were the same people who, less than a year earlier, had rejoiced in the fake peace bought by the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich. Most of their leaders and most of the press remained craven.

It had been over a thousand years since Alfred the Great had made himself and his countrymen one and sent them into battle transformed. Now in this new exigency, confronted by the mightiest conqueror Europe had ever known, England looked for another Alfred, a figure cast in a mold which, by the time of the Dunkirk deliverance, seemed to have been forever lost.

England’s new leader, were he to prevail, would have to stand for everything England’s decent, civilized Establishment had rejected. They viewed Adolf Hitler as the product of complex social and historical forces. Their successor would have to be a passionate Manichaean who saw the world as a medieval struggle to the death between the powers of good and the powers of evil, who held that individuals are responsible for their actions and that the German dictator was therefore wicked.

A believer in martial glory was required, one who saw splendor in the ancient parades of victorious legions through Persepolis and could rally the nation to brave the coming German fury. An embodiment of fading Victorian standards was wanted: a tribune for honor, loyalty, duty, and the supreme virtue of action; one who would never compromise with iniquity, who could create a sublime mood and thus give men heroic visions of what they were and might become.

Like Adolf Hitler he would have to be a leader of intuitive genius, a born demagogue in the original sense of the word, a believer in the supremacy of his race and his national destiny, an artist who knew how to gather the blazing light of history into his prism and then distort it to his ends, an embodiment of inflexible resolution who could impose his will and his imagination on his people — a great tragedian who understood the appeal of martyrdom and could tell his followers the worst, hurling it to them like great hunks of bleeding meat, persuading them that the year of Dunkirk would be one in which it was “equally good to live or to die” — who could if necessary be Just as cruel, just as cunning, and just as ruthless as Hitler but who could win victories without enslaving populations, or preaching supernaturalism, or foisting off myths of his infallibility, or destroying, or even warping, the libertarian institutions he had sworn to preserve. Such a man, if he existed, would be England’s last chance.

In London there was such a man."