Sarcastic Patriotic Veteran

In fact, what little they know of history will be all about Black and brown people fighting for equality against the white man, women fighting men for the vote, gay and trans people fighting for various rights. Our young people have been taught that history is simply one long story about various groups struggling under the oppressive dead white man.

— History is taught through an oppressor lens. The triangular slave trade, white men held the power. What about Britain ending the slave trade? More than a quick mention, if at all? Mm, no.

What of the Arab slave trade that lasted 3 times as long as the triangular slave trade? Mm, no.

Okay, so GCSE history in Britain is often taught as migration through time, so the idea that Britain has always been a land of immigrants is embedded in our children’s heads. Most schools would prefer to concentrate learning about the tiny number of Black people who existed in Tudor England over a thorough analysis of England’s break from Rome.

— Not to mention weeks on King Mansa Musa of Mali because he was a Black Muslim. His bearing on British institutions, laws, and faith is nonexistent. And the fact that he is said to have been the richest man in history, thanks in part to his massive slave-owning society, is a detail somehow that teachers rarely ever teach.

But it isn’t just our schools. It’s our general culture too. Take your kids to a museum or an art gallery in any Western country, and you’ll find the same narrative.

As an example, when learning about aviation in London’s Science Museum and the extraordinary feat that is man making massive machines move in the sky, a write-up on the wall explains that women and Black people were historically barred from aviation schools and the military. Similarly, James Watt, the man who invented the steam engine and is considered the founder of the Industrial Revolution, has a write-up on the wall explaining that his early career involved slave trafficking, with a bonus analysis of the whole of Britain’s complicity in the slave trade.

They flatten the entire human story and all of its complexities into the narrative of oppressor and oppressed, leaving young people unable to see the world in any other terms.”

We have to end the mass indoctrination