T.R.O.Y. wrote:Ok, if it’s a fair comment - which ‘bad parts’ of UK history are currently taught as part of the curriculum Sluffy?
I've no idea about these days but I certainly learnt about the slave trade in my school years as part of the history course I did at grammar school, which was taught as 'social and economic history' rather than dates and battles. Learned about the Poor Laws, the repeal of the Corn Laws, Speenhamland, The Peterloo Massacre, Treverthick, Boulton and Watt and the beginnings of the industrial revolution, the Luddites, the Reform Acts, the effect of the American Civil war on the British cotton industry, and female emancipation and the right to vote.
No doubt I forgotten loads of other stuff too.
Most if not all of what I've posted above would not be tolerated today - people had to fight for to be fed and feed their family's back then - there was no welfare state back then, no entitlement for a living wage, no social housing, no benefit system, compulsory education acts were introduced to ensure children under the age of ten didn't have to go out to work as was the case until Victorian times.
There wasn't even a right to vote for most men until 1918.
The world we lived in was a completely different place back then and what was deemed normal and acceptable, was normal and acceptable because before then life was so much harder in an agrarian society that existed before the birth of the industrial revolution and the move to the towns and factories.
I quite enjoyed history as no doubt you can tell from my post and recollections.
I always think it is important to know and understand where you have come from and why, in order to better see and understand the way forward.
To flippantly label all our country's history as something "to make sure every child is given a proper history of the British Empire its impacts and damage across the world." shows your ignorance and vast lack of knowledge of why it evolved in the way it did.
Of course that would not be allowed to happen as it did these days but that's because we've learned from the past - we now 'better see and understand the way forward' - if I may be allowed to quote myself.
I've no problem of anyone learning about our history 'warts and all' - I did - but history is about understanding where we've come from, learning from the mistakes and building on the things we got right. It's certainly not about beating us over the head for something that happened over 150 years ago when the world was a completely different place to how it is now.
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